Mail is back up however there is something wrong with either opendkim, opendmarc, or both, so for now these features are temporarily disabled.
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Our mail server, mail.eskimo.com, is temporarily out of service owing to a failed upgrade. I am working on reverting back to the previous software. Estimated restoral time approximately 3AM Pacific Standard Time.
Iglulik Spontaneous Boot
The machine which holds the home directories and web server spontaneously booted this morning about 9:45 AM.
After it booted, the NFS mounts on the web server did not mount properly requiring it to be rebooted.
As far as I know all services are restored.
Web Server Interruption / Speed
I apologize for the slowdown and short interruption of the web server this afternoon. Normal traffic during the day is around 6 hits/second, but this afternoon it peaked at just under double that and the load crept up pretty high.
I took a look at resources and noticed it was running low on RAM so allocated another 8GB and then it settled down and ran okay but it required a reboot to make that change effective.
5.6 Tickless Kernels
Kernel Updates
Over the next week or two, I will be updating system kernels to 5.6 kernels. This provides some additional performance enhancements verses 5.5. It allows server-to-server copies in NFS and it allows peripheral-to-peripheral DMA on the hardware side which should improve the efficiencies of things like disk to disk copies by not requiring the CPU to intervene other than to setup the DMA transfer. On my workstation it has also been somewhat more stable although I have not seen stability issues with 5.5 on the servers.
Web Server Updated
Our web server is now running Apache 2.4.43 and openssl 1.1.1f. This mainly fixes minor security issues in both packages.
Pop Before SMTP Support Discontinued
We recently implemented DMARC, DKIM, and SPF on all of our mail servers to prevent forgeries, reduce spam, and improve mail delivery reliability.
DMARC is incompatible with pop-before-smtp therefore we can no longer support this. It is necessary to authenticate on outbound SMTP connections as well as inbound pop-3 and imap-4 connections.
Pop Before SMTP No Longer Supported
We recently implemented DMARC, DKIM, and SPF on all of our mail servers to prevent forgeries, reduce spam, and improve mail delivery reliability.
DMARC is incompatible with pop-before-smtp therefore we can no longer support this. It is necessary to authenticate on outbound SMTP connections as well as inbound pop-3 and imap-4 connections.
Mail List / Procmail / DMarc
I made an error in opendmarc configuration in which I neglected to add localhost, 127.0.0.1, to the list of servers to ignore. This broke mail lists and procmail recipes that remailed incoming mail back out. It also could potentially break .vacation forwarding.
This has been corrected.