The ubuntu.eskimo.com shell server is back alive and all desktops are working however there is not much software installed yet.

     Some software I am installing is breaking networking and I have not determined which yet.

     Reboots of all the servers are completed.

     All the critical infrastructure is up, all NFS servers, all NIS servers, all mail servers, all DNS servers, and the main web server (social needs work).

     It will be another couple of hours until I can finish checking all the shell servers for correct mounting and NIS binding.

Ubuntu networking died.  It will talk to local machines on LAN but will not talk outside.  It was working then it just quit.  ArrrrggghhH!

For some reason logout / quit is not working in Gnome or KDE, otherwise all the desktops are operational.  With Gnome, alt right-click is not working to add widgets, I do not know why.

     In the process of trying to restore some missing software Ubuntu crashed and now it seems it doesn’t want to boot up all the way.  I’m trying to diagnose and fix but if it ends up being too bad I may do a fresh install rather than restore from backups because it has had numerous problems since the last OS upgrade and I fear something did not go well.

     Other machines with Ubuntu like operating systems that you can use in the meantime are:

• mxlinux.eskimo.com
• zorin.eskimo.com
• debian.eskimo.com
• mint.eskimo.com

     Golang is currently broken on Ubuntu because some dependency issues required that I uninstall large portions of it to unsnarl a dependency issue that prevented installations or updates.  I am working on re-installing now.

     This weekend starting early Saturday morning on August 11th, 2018, (shortly after Midnight) I will be rebooting most of the servers for kernel updates.  The 4.15.0 kernel seems to be particularly problematic although for us it’s not been problematic in ways that cause crashes, just occasional data delay when the Ethernet driver barfs.

     And then depending upon how long that takes, I will also be taking machines down to image them that morning and if I don’t finish all of them also on Sunday morning.

     First, I want to apologize for not getting back to you all regarding various ideas and suggestions.  Some of them are actionable and some not right away but I am working through them and will get back to you so please be patient.

     I had more than one person ask about docker so I will address this publicly here.  There are three different options.  On the Docker Store site there is the Community Edition which has a license that basically forbids it’s use in an environment like ours, and there is their commercial version which is $70/node per month which is insane and cost prohibitive so we can’t do that.  The remaining option is virtually every Linux distribution has some incarnation of it with varying degrees of being complete and up to date.  Since this is the only cost effective option it is the one I am going with.

Dear Eskimo North Customer,

This August, we have relatively few high dollar accounts up for
renewal, and this means I will likely encounter a revenue shortage unless
I can find ways to sell more service.

In the past I’ve come up with various ideas but they’ve largely
flopped. I had quite a few people ask about private virtual servers, so I
put in place the resources to provide them but so far have only sold six.

Our web server is one of relatively few capable of serving both
http1.1 and http2. Although modern debian claimed Linuxes included an
Apache module for this, the version of openssl included doesn’t have the
required capabilities. I’ve compiled a newer verison of openssl to make
this possible. This provides a speed advantage over other providers.

Google, when they index your pages, all other things being equal
pages that have both https and http2 are given higher priority, after that
speed counts.

Anyway, I am asking for ideas, either for new things you’d like that
we aren’t presently providing but could, or ways to sell more of our
existing services.

Please tell me what would incentivize you or people you know to
purchase additional services from us. Right now I have a surplus of host
CPU, memory, and disk that I’d like to find a use for.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Robert John Dinse
Nanook@Eskimo.com