At around 11pm this evening, I will be rebooting some machines, some virtual private servers and some shell servers, to enable shared memory in all of them.

     What this does is that a kernel routine scans the machines, and if it finds two identical pages of memory, it maps them both into one physical page, then anytime something tries to update one of those pages it uses a copy-on-write operation to create a separate modified copy.

     This allows identical pages to share one physical page freeing up more memory for things like disk buffering and caching resulting in better overall efficiency.  There are a lot of daemons that sit and run in the background from start-up to shutdown that share 99% of their memory information in common.  By allowing them to physically share them, overall memory usage is lowered.

The web app was working when I went to bed but broken when I got up, so I’m trying to figure out what went wrong over night.

You can now reach a shell server terminal or remote desktop from our website without having to go through the guacamole login.  Just use Web-Appls->Terminal or Desktop, it will display a selection of all the shell servers Terminal or Desktop, click on one and login.  With some servers there are multiple desktops available, not all are able to work with this interface.  The Mate desktop does work on ALL servers.  Sound is not yet working on all servers, I’m still working on configuring it.

     I will be performing kernel upgrades tonight upgrading from 6.1.37 to 6.1.41.  This will affect all of Eskimo North’s services, free and paid including e-mail, shells, web hosting, and virtual private servers.  It will also affect https://friendica.eskimo.com/, https://hubzilla.eskimo.com/, https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and https://yacy.eskimo.com/.

     The downtime for most services will be less than ten minutes.  Yacy has to rebuild an in-memory index after every reboot.  On the old hardware that tool about 45 minutes, the new hardware is faster but more disk space is assigned to yacy thus a larger database.  So tonight we’ll find out.

     If you have not tried yacy yet, give it a try.  It is a federated search engine, similar to how federated social media sites work, each site maintains it’s own crawl space but when you search for something on one node, it queries all of the  networked nodes and the combined response is sent back to you.  Unlike Google and Bing, it has no algorithms designed to limit your access to information they don’t want you to have AND it has no sponsored links. https://yacy.eskimo.com/

I have graphical environments via x2go, vnc, or web now working on all machines EXCEPT Fedora.  I haven’t got rpd working everywhere yet.  But since rdp relies on Xvnc, it made since to focus on VNC first.  And I haven’t setup sound on all yet.

With Fedora I have a problem, I need an inetd or xinetd daemon to fire off Xvnc when someone connects to port 5900, unfortunately no form of xinetd or inetd was provided with Fedora since around F31.

So I grabbed xinetd source from and attempted to compile.

Compiling xinetd on Fedora 39

I am trying to compile xinetd under Fedora 39 and having some difficulty.

Fedora has not bothered to include either inetd or xinetd in their distribution since around Fedora 31, and I have an application that requires inetd and I prefer xinetd. Since there is neither a source nor binary package after F31, I grabbed the source from github.

First issue I ran into, no rpc-devel libs under F39, but I found rpc.h in lib tirpc.

Now I’m running into undefined functions pmap_set and pmap_unset. These are normally defined in rpc/rpc.h but in Fedora, no such include, only tirpc/rpc.h and it does not define these functions.

Any idea where these are or IF they are defined, and if not, work-arounds?

Zorin is back up with a graphical environment working again.

     I am re-installing Zorin because the set of installed software has too many conflicts to easily resolve.  So it will be down temporarily while this is performed.  I am trying to fix the graphical environment on all servers, most work but some don’t and Zorin was one of those that didn’t.  Having multiple greeters, multiple window managers, seems to be a source of the problems.  Also not all greeters work properly with vnc, rdp or x2go.

     I took Debian down for about 5 minutes starting at 2:52 PM Pacific in order to increase the size of the root partition which was running out of space.  I recently compiled gcc 13.1 and new kernels and source for both ate up a lot of space.

     I had to re-install Dovecot over the weekend because something went wrong internally that I was unable to identify.

     I installed with mostly default settings, changing on a few things I knew were necessary for our installation.

     This morning it reached some of the internal limits set.  I’ve addressed those issues today.  Things like the total number of clients that can be active at once.  I would have thought 1000, which is the default sufficient, but many people have half a dozen devices polling so it was not.  I bumped that to 5000.  Also fixed some configuration issues with locking, indexes, added some client bug workarounds to work around bugs in Thunderbird and Outlook, Outlook chokes and NULLS, and Thunderbird adds an extra ‘/’ to mail paths.  A few other minor tweaks but seems to be working okay now.

      The only thing I could find in the logs is that the guest tried to use a VT-x feature not supported by the host CPU, but the host CPU DOES support VT-x and the guest is configured to copy the host CPU configuration so it should not use anything not supported by the host as it’s configured to use the same CPU.

     This is the first time I’ve seen this particular error and this configuration has been operating for ten years, so I’ve got to assume a random CPU or memory error.