Something in shellx has gotten corrupted breaking the local mail relay.  A complete re-install of postfix did not fix it.  The logs are giving me a rather non-helpful “unknown mail transport error” diagnostic.

     I am restoring the machine from a backup image.  This will take approximately 1/2 hour.  In the meantime all other shell servers are available for your use.

     I will not respond nor post status to the Yahoo Groups Eskimo North page.  This is why:

Hello,

Your message to the EskimoNorthUsers group was not approved.
The owner of the group controls the content posted to it and has the
right to approve or reject messages accordingly.

In this case, your message was automatically rejected because the
moderator didn’t approve it within 14 days. We do this to provide a
high quality of service for our users.

A complete copy of your message has been attached for your
convenience.

Thank you for choosing Yahoo Group

     If you want real information come to our website here, go to our Facebook or Twitter pages: https://www.facebook.com/EskimoNorth or https://twitter.com/EskimoNorth.

     If Eskimo North’s page is down whether it be for scheduled maintenance or an unplanned outage, information will be provided at the Facebook and Twitter pages.

     The Yahoo Group is not something I created, nor is it a place to seek remedies.  It’s just a group apparently created to bitch.

     I’ll be out of the office from 3pm until some time in the late afternoon or more probably evening.  I have to stop by my accountants office and then bring a server to the co-location facility.

     At the co-location facility I need to re-arrange the data cabinet a bit to accommodate another machine and this will involve moving a shelf that the old eskimo.com shell server the radius servers are on.  So between about 4:30 and possibly 5:30pm there will be a point where dial-up and DSL accounts can not authenticate and the old eskimo.com shell server will be unavailable.

     Existing dial-up and DSL sessions will remain up but new ones will not be able to be established during this time frame.  All sessions on eskimo.com will be torn down as the machine will need to be powered down and removed temporarily.

     The issue with quota -v command is fixed.  The problem is that the version of rpc.rquotad that ships with Ubuntu 15.04 is broken.  I removed it and installed the version from 14.10 and it worked, except that 14.10 isn’t systemd based and so the start-up scripts didn’t work.  But I saved the binary from that package, removed the package, re-installed the 15.04 package, and then substituted the rpc.rquotad program from the 14.10 package but using the start-up scripts from 15.04 and now it’s all working again.

     Sorry these upgrades have been so disruptive.  This was not my intent but it is a learning curve going from Centos 6 to Ubuntu 15.04.  It’s worth the effort I think in terms of performance and capabilities but a pain in the rear.

     Around 3:30pm, our new file server decided to unexport one of the necessary file systems (/misc) and refused to export it when the command exportfs -a was given.  A reboot was necessary to restore service.

     I had been running the latest 4.2.3 kernel rather than the Ubuntu 3.19.0-31 kernel, but opted at that point to revert back to the officially supported kernel.

     Still can’t get rpc.rquotad to function but at least now I know it’s not kernel related.

     Debian is re-installed as Jessie 8.2.  Things that didn’t work after upgrade like things executing out of /etc/rc.local now work.

     I could have restored it from backups but then we’d be stuck with the old version and the whole problem of upgrading again so might as well get it done.

     I am still reinstalling applications and tweaking various things but it is available.

     One thing that doesn’t work and will gradually be unavailable on all of our servers is NX protocol.  You will need to install and use X2Go instead.  The reason for this is that the freenx-server software has been removed from all of the repositories by the developers.

     This is a pain since X2Go does not support any version of Linux that is past the supported date.  Hence if you’re running an older version of Linux there isn’t anyway to use X2Go and now NX.

     Seems like the Microsoft mentality of forced updates has come to the Linux community in an unfriendly manner.  Well at least Linux updates actually fix things.

     I’m in the process of rebooting virtual.  This is one of the physical hosts that hosts a number of virtual servers, mostly shell servers. The servers affected will pause, but if you are patient they will return to life where they left off in a few minutes.

     This is necessary because something went ape shit during the re-installation of Debian.  All seemed to go well until the reboot to bring it online, then the Virtual Manager stopped responding.  In addition, I couldn’t even bring up a terminal although I could still login via ssh.

     At this point I don’t know what went wrong and I’m just trying to restore basic functionality.

     Even though Debian Jessie is to the point where it is not complaining about dependencies, things are not working properly.  Start-up scripts are not functioning properly or randomly exploding.  The NetworkManager doesn’t start, virtual interfaces aren’t getting initialized.  If I run the same commands by hand after it boots everything works, so something is wrong with the startup.

     In addition the graphical greeter just gives me “Oops something went terribly wrong”.  I’m used to seeing this if I have gdm3 badly configured but I can’t find anything obviously wrong, and even removing and reinstalling gdm3, Xorg, Mate, anything I can think that is related, doesn’t fix it.

     I ran into this problem trying to upgrade Mint as well, and the eventual fix was just to do a fresh install.

     I am initiating a fresh install on Debian now as well.  Odd, I’ve upgraded Ubuntu in place successfully on three different boxes, but it seems to be the only Debian based distribution where this really works properly.

     After much gnashing of teeth, the upgrade of Debian to Jessie has been completed.

     I’m basically running in cycles of:

        apt-get update (get the latest available in repositories)

        apt-get upgrade -f (try to install it, attempt to install any dependencies, stuff blows up)

        dpkg –configure -a (try to finish installation of as much stuff that blew up as possible)

        apt-get autoremove (remove as much of the old stuff that is in the way as possible)

     … rinse and repeat.

     Each cycle more stuff gets installed and the number of broken dependencies decreases, but it is a slow painful process.