There will be a brief interruption, later this evening, (lasting approximately three minutes) in MySQL service as I take the database offline to restore the NextCloud database.

     Nextcloud is currently borked.

     In order to fix a problem with a php module core dumping in rainloop, I attempted to upgrade to php7.3.  Everything worked except nextcloud (and possibly owncloud, did not test).  I attempted to update nextcloud to 14.04 beta.  Still borked.   Went back to php7.2, nextcloud 14.04 does not work under either version and downgrading is not supported so not sure exactly how I’m going to restore.  May have to copy old files off of backup but leave everything else current.  At any rate it’s broken at the moment.

     For those of you who are fans of the old BSD games or simply want to spend a bit of time on nostalgia, these are installed on ubuntu in /usr/games.  You will need to add /usr/games to your path.  Something like this in your .bashrc or equivalent start up script:

export $PATH=$PATH:/usr/games

     I am going to take Ubuntu down at 4:50 PM today (August 15th 2018) to image the machine after installing a lot of software before I continue.  This should take approximately ½ hour.

     I have added a plugin to spamassassin called “fuzzyocr“.

     What this plugin does is perform optical character recognition on any attached images to further aid in detecting spam.  Don’t know how much it will help but every little bit.

     We’ve had two incidents recently that can result in some mail problems.

     First, one of our customers had a very simple dictionary word password and it was guessed and used to send spam.  If you receive spam in your INBOX and it has ‘mail.eskimo.com’ in the header, then it bypassed spam filtering because it was an authenticated customer that sent it.  The password on this account has been changed to something less guessable.

     I have also increased the ban time on fail2ban for multiple offenses to a year.  The upside of this is it won’t allow botnets to come back a week later and try again.  The downside is if you get your password wrong too many times you will need to contact us to reset the ban on your IP.

     Second, mx2, one of the incoming servers failed to remount /home after a reboot and this caused some soft bounces.  With a properly functioning MTA on the sending side, they would first try the other MX server, and if it also rejected mail, requeue and try later.  At least one server did neither and hard bounced the message when it should not have.

     The /home file system has been manually mounted but the last kernel upgrade seems to have made this flakey so this is likely to be problematic until the next kernel which as things have been going has been about once per week.

     I had just recently re-installed Ubuntu and a customer noticed that the from address was incorrect.  Research lead me to a missing /etc/pine.conf.

     Checking our other shell servers, it was missing on approximately half.  I also found configuration issues with postfix on several.

     These are all corrected and I have tested sending with mailx and alpine with incomplete to addresses (just the local username) on all of these machines and they are all now working properly.

And lastly I installed Elm on Zorin which only had ncurses but it’s ncurses worked.

     Ubuntu is restored to service.

     Elm core dumping is fixed.  I was able to chase this down to a broken curses library.  By using termlib instead it is happy.

     I’ve installed all shells and all Window systems that are supported by x2go.  The default configuration of both Gnome and KDE does not include a logout icon, but you can add one in either desktops.  If you have an existing KDE or Gnome configuration, you should be fine.  Also working are Mate, XFCE, LXDE, and LXQt Window Managers.

     You will notice the long delays at login are gone.

     You may also notice some software you are accustomed to using is missing.  If this is the case please contact me (nanook@eskimo.com or support@eskimo.com) and let me know what you are missing.

     People often ask why I don’t set up control panels like other hosting providers do rather than doing setup manually.  This is why.  It’s also why I use most current Ubuntu 18.04 in our hosting platform instead of Centos 5, also why every customers website runs with it’s own USER ID instead of the Apache user ID like most others.

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