Chat, Smoke, Tia1, Eskinews

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     Earlier today, the machine Chat formerly ran on emitted a large cloud of
very smelly smoke and shutdown.  I took it apart and couldn't find anything
obviously smoked, but I wasn't able to find anything.  I powered it back up and
it ran again like nothing had happened, except that it smells bad. 

     I didn't feel comfortable trusting this machine, smoke now flames later I
fear.  So I retired it.  Initially, I was going to replace it with an LX, but
of the two spares I had, one got pressed into service as commerce and the one
that remains it turns out the power supply died. 

     The load on tia1 has become very low as people move to 56k service which
is real PPP, or request non-dedicated SLIP/PPP; so what I have done is move the
slirp/tia functionality back onto eskimo, and then used that machine to replace
chat. 

     This had a number of unanticipated side-effects, breaking other machines
that had been configured to use it as a ypserver.  Also, the Annex-3 comms
servers didn't want to connect to the virtual adddress, so I ended up editing
the menu so if you select 4) tia1, it still connects to eskimo. 

     For you folks, the main significance of this is that some of you had
204.122.16.40, for a name server even though this was not recommened.  This
machine is no longer up and serving as a name server, so it is now essential
that you use the correct name servers:

	ns1.eskimo.com	204.122.16.8
	ns2.eskimo.com	204.122.16.9

     If you find yourself having problems accessing web sites with an error
message that says there is no DNS entry, and you know it's a current valid site
(sites come and go all the time and often this error is because the site no
longer exists), then check your name servers to be sure the above to are what
you are using.