The web server outage was caused by myself entering an incorrect DELETE statement into mysql and accidentally screwing up the grant tables.  I was unable to correct so restored from backups made last night.

Issues with the PHP and Apache installation of our web server have
been resolved. In addition a new capability has been added.

In the past we had one version of PHP and often upgrades broke
existing applications that were not compliant with the most recent
version.

It is now possible to set PHP versions by directory or file extension
in an .htaccess file. For details please see:

https://www.eskimo.com/support/override-php-version/

There will be a brief outage of the web server tonight around
midnight to save the changes I made last night in a system image of that
machine.

CHD Holds Press Conference with Legal Team and Plaintiff in Lawsuit Against Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Three of Facebook’s So-Called “Fact-Checkers”

I want my customers to be aware of censorship that is happening on the Internet today.  Personally, I find this a very disturbing trend.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, pretty much all the major social media are heavily censoring non-mainstream views and I feel this is a very unhealthy thing for a Democratic society.  Censorship invariably leads towards tyranny.

Here are some alternative social media sites which promote a greater degree (not absolute but more so) of free speech:

https://freenet.space/

https://pocketnet.app/

https://minds.org

Also another problem is with search engines.  Google is heavily censoring search results and sites which do not favor their view points tend to be ranked very low if represented at all in their search results.  Start page and duckduckgo are not improvements in this area because they use Google’s database.

One good search engine for getting around Google’s censorship is https://swisscows.ch/

     I apologize for the web server outage this afternoon.

     An update to ubuntu installed their apache2 server over mine.  My version of Apache is very different from the Ubuntu version.  It does not look for the config files in the same place and it has some customizations for performance and security.

     I have de-installed the Ubuntu version and re-installed mine and added a apt-mark hold for all the relevant packages to prevent a future occurrence.

     This evening’s server maintenance has been completed.

     Well about an hour and a half into it, iglulik puked out an NFS related kernel oops, four of the eight knsfd’s locked up and the machine ground to a halt.  I had to go to the co-lo to reboot and bring it back to a 5.4 kernel along with the other NFS servers.  As a client 5.8 seems to work fine so I left it on those machines which aren’t NFS servers so we still are getting a substantial performance boost.

     I will file yet another bug report with bugzilla but the kernel oops gives it a better chance of getting fixed since it tells them exactly where it was and what it was doing when it barfed, and what it barfed on is a spinlock problem, a spinlock is a kind of lock used to protect critical kernel code that is not thread-safe.

      Starting at 11pm, I will be rebooting all of our Intel based servers.  I expect this to be completed by midnight.  I am doing this to install Linux 5.8, testing has shown it to be a huge performance win.  I hope that the NFS stability issues of 5.7 are totally resolved, so far no problems have shown up in testing but it is difficult to generate the diversity of traffic present in the live servers.

     I will be taking the mail server down for imaging for approximately 20 minutes.  Imaging is making a backup of the virtual machine which must be quiescent during the operation.

     This morning’s maintenance has been completed.

     All servers (except the old eskimo.com server) will be rebooted tonight shortly after midnight.  This is necessary because security updates were installed that require a reboot to be effective.  This should be completed within about half an hour.