I will be taking down all of the CentOS 6 and SL 6 based servers to make an image and reboot to incorporate a kernel and about 500 other updates this evening.  This will affect everything for about 20 minutes when the physical hosts are rebooted and it will also effect scientific, shellx, mail, ftp, mx1, and mx2, which at present are all CentOS 6 based.

Scheduled Maintenance

      I will be out of the office from about 3:30pm until around 6-6:30pm Pacific Time.  I need to make a grocery and bank run now as I will be doing maintenance work late into the night tonight, which means I will be here until well after midnight.

     If you need help with something please leave a message, e-mail support, or generate a trouble ticket and I will return your call or attend to your issue upon my return.

     Ubuntu is returned to service.

     Ubuntu is down for imaging.  This will take approximately 45 minutes.  Mint and Debian are available if you need a Debian based server during this maintenance interval.

     We were hit with some kind of denial of service attack this morning that tied up router CPU with very little traffic.  It ended before we could determine it’s exact nature.

     Because only one person is logged in and they’ve been idle for a week, I am taking Debian down for maintenance, specifically to make an image.  This will take approximately 45 minutes.  If you need a Debian based server in the meantime, Ubuntu and Mint are up and available.

We experienced a brief denial of service attack starting at 1pm, peaking at 1:05pm, and falling below service affecting levels by 1:10pm on Thursday July 30th, 2015.

     The phpMyAdmin application will now require that you first authenticate with your normal system login and password before you will be permitted to enter the application and provide your MySQL username and password.

     This was done to add an extra layer of security after some malicious use of this utility.

     I’m upgrading the fail2ban on our servers from version 0.8.14 to the so called “gamma” version, 0.9.2, because I installed it on the web server and it proved to be more capable and stable than the so called “stable” version.

     In particular, on the web server, I had a problem where a jail was matching, regex returned matches, but it did not perform the specified action.  Upgrading to 0.9.2 solved this problem.  It also took the start up time from around 1-1/2 minutes to 8 seconds for it to re-read the logs.

     This should not be service impacting other than it will result in slightly less load on the servers and more reliable security.

     The tables on our website are now mobile friendly.  They will reformat when they are squished to the point where they can’t squish any more.

     I’m having more problem with the new web mail I’m trying to get to work, round square.  For some reason it does not want to connect to the MYSQL server but I haven’t been able to determine why yet.