The client mail server is currently down for imaging.  Estimated downtime is another 15 minutes.  The web/ftp server has been completed.  At midnight I will be rebooting the main host servers one at a time, everything will go down for about 20 minutes but not all at the same time depending upon which physical host a given virtual machine is on.

     Opensuse hasn’t been able to use rwho and ruptime or show up in the rwho and ruptime reports of other hosts because it lacked the necessary rwhod daemon. This daemon was not part of the OpenSuse distribution and thus not available to install via Yast.

     I found a version that worked on rpm.pbone.net and installed it, created the necessary firewall, user, and systemd entries, and it is now operational.

     Obleka’s return was prompted impart by a comment from one of our customers noting the lack of a mascot on our new website.  Digging through the images directory, trying to determine what was still in use and what should be removed, I came across her photo and added it back onto the main page.

     This skewed the text on the main page, so today I hacked her image into the WordPress theme so that she is present on all the WordPress based pages on the top bar where she is present but won’t skew the page contents.

     The real reason though is that I felt her presence gives the website more of a human feeling.  It just felt a bit too sterile.  And yea I know there are folks who think that any site that uses more than one color is unprofessional but I don’t share the belief that if it’s not dead and bland, it’s unprofessional.

     There has been a recent surge in spam.

     There are two causes.  One is that there have been an increased number of Windows machines compromised and being used in botnets to send spam.

     The other is that more is getting through the spam filters because the spammers have devised a way around Bayesian filtering.  They have developed software that uses an electronic thesaurus to substitute various synonyms in the spam they send so there are many different varieties of the same spam.  Thus the spam you flag doesn’t prevent it from getting through the filters to others because it’s been changed just enough to evade the filters.

     I don’t have a solution for this yet.  I’m sure it’s being worked upon and as soon as a defence becomes available I’ll look for a way to integrate it into our system.

     If you install Ubuntu 15.04 and find yourself running out of memory, login as root, fire up bum (Boot Up Manager) and untick all the garbage you aren’t going to use.  There is just way too much junk installed and enabled by default.

     On my workstation machine, I got the RAM used when logged in with my normal array of half a dozen terminals and Firefox down from 3GB to about 700MB.  It also made start-up and login a lot faster.

     Owing to a recent kernel upgrade pushed out by Redhat, Fridays maintenance will be more extensive, involving reboots of most of the Redhat based machines, including the physical host machines so everything will be interrupted for a period.  Most of the heavily used machines will be done after midnight and the less used or duplicated machines before.

     Based upon some feedback I’ve received from customers, I’ve increased the primary font size from 10pt to 12pt, the subheading font-size from 12pt to 14pt, and the main heading to 20pt to make it easier to read.  Old news posts will remain in whatever font they were posted in since there is no common place to change the fonts for all of them.

     Because some browsers don’t properly handle the CSS scroll directive, in particular Windows phone browsers, On the four pages that had fly-outs, I’ve also added internal links, for the four pages affected, so you can access that material.

     I am still working on tables so they’ll behave better when they exceed the squish limit on devices with very small screens.

     Friday, the 17th, I will be taking the web server down around 10pm for approximately 20 minutes (if all goes well) to make another backup image.  This is necessary to make sure all the database changes that have been made are not lost.

     Just in case something BAD happens…

     Isomedia is where we have our equipment co-located. They will be performing maintenance on early Thursday morning that has the potential to cause an outage.

ISOMEDIA will be performing maintenance on our core network Thursday morning, July 16th, between 00:01AM and 02:00AM Pacific Time. This maintenance isn’t expected to be service affecting. However, there may be outages lasting 5-15 minutes.

All times are estimates based on expected outcomes of the work being performed and previous experience performing the same or similar work. There is always the possibility of some unforeseen bug, or problem, that could extend the maintenance time or cause a disruption in connectivity. Administrators will make every effort to correct the problem, or implement the back out plan quickly, if something does occur.

     I did find a cache plugin that works well with the twenty eleven theme I use here (the theme is somewhat modified), and that is WP Fastest Cache in combination with Memcached is your friend.  The combination work well where content is mostly static, and when it is not you can tell it not to cache specific pages.