Debian Bullet – X-fowarding Borked

     Since upgrading debian to bullet, X-fowarding does not work.  One thing that changed in Bullet was a switch from Xorg being the default to Xwayland.  However, the Bullet faq claims x-forwarding still works but that hasn’t been my experience.  I have X-11 Forwarding enabled in sshd_config and I have xauth installed, but still no good.

     I have searched for solutions but so far nothing has worked.  If anyone knows the solution but please me know.  E-mail support@eskimo.com.  Thank you.

Phishing Scams – Please Read

     A “Phishing Scam” is a scam designed to get your credentials for things like access to your mail here, or your bank account information, or your Amazon account, etc.  Here is an example:

 —–

ID:nanook@eskimo.com Your  nanook@eskimo.com  Password expired today at 9/29/2021 11:25:07 a.m.

Use this button to continue with the same password as before.

 —–

     If you receive something like this bounce or forward it to spamtrap@eskimo.com.  Do NOT click on any link provided in the e-mail.  It most likely will just ask for your authentication info here which would give a hacker access to your account and might also infect your computer with Malware, particularly if you are using Windows.

     We do not use password aging or expiration here.  My belief is that it only encourages the choice of bad passwords so that they can be easily remembered and guessed.  So you will NEVER get a legitimate message like this from us.

Phone Service

     My apologies to those who called and tried to let me know about the web outage.  My Comcast telephone service was apparently also out because I was home and in the office at the time and the phone did not ring.  I did not get notifications of your recorded messages until today.  I’ve tested the phones today, they are working again.  When it rains…

Web Service

     Sorry for the downtime in web service today.  It appears suexec which is used to set the web server permissions for a given users files lost it’s setuid attribute yesterday.  Not sure how but the update time on the file coincided with when I did system updates and the Apache Makefile for 2.4.49 now installs it without this necessary bit set so I suspect it relates to an update and a rebuild that was necessary to accommodate library changes.  At any rate, I rebuilt it just to be sure someone hadn’t modified it hoping I would then set the bit again and I set the immutable bit which should prevent Ubuntu’s package manage from messing with it again.

Manjaro Unusable

     The morons at Manjaro have broken ypbind by making it and the libraries it depends upon incompatible versions.  I thought perhaps something just went wrong with updates so I restored from an old backup and then updated again and it brought it right back to an unusable state.

     So until the folks at Manjaro fix their repository to have a compatible version of ypbind and the libraries it depends upon, Manjaro will be unavailable.

Web Server Outage 16:35-16:45 Sept 25th

     A Linux upgrade changed openssl in such a way that the new libraries were incompatible with the existing compilation of apache2.  I had to recompile apache2 to get it to listen to the SSL port again.  Sorry, Ubuntu does not bother to notify us when they make crushing changes to system libraries.

     This briefly affected all of Eskimo North’s SSL and HTTP/2 web services including webmail, friendica, hubzilla, and nextcloud.

Kernel Upgrade and Payment Option

     Tonight’s Kernel Upgrade will be brief, starting at 11PM and should be concluded by 11:15PM as the big server with home directories, Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, and the Web Server are all done because all got sick under the previous kernel and were upgraded Tuesday.

     So Web service and those three shell servers will not be interrupted.  Mail service, the other shell servers, and private virtual servers will be interrupted but it should be less than 15 minutes downtime in all.

     We have a new (old) payment option.  In addition to mail-in payments and credit and debit cards, we can now process electronic checks.

gcc 11.2 available on Ubuntu

     For those who would like to learn / experiment with the bleeding edge features of C and C++, gcc 11.2 is now available on the Ubuntu shell server.  To use it make sure that /usr/local/bin is first in your path before /usr/bin.