I am going to upgrade the router firmware shortly after 5pm tonight.  This will result in a brief interruption of Internet connectivity, usually lasting 1-2 minutes.  Usually this is brief enough that ssh sessions will not be knocked down but no guarantees.

     The reason that there have been no kernel upgrades for the last two weeks or this week is that 5.12.x has reached the point where it has been stable on our platform and I’ve been monitoring the progress and have not seen any changes that fix bugs that impact us, provide security improvements, or provide performance improvements.

     I do not anticipate going to 5.13 kernels because they don’t offer anything new that is of any benefit here.  5.14 when it reaches stable, we will try because they are replacing the E1000 Ethernet driver with a new copyless driver that will provide more efficient network I/O and hopefully also address the hardware offloading bug with this chip.  I do not expect this until sometime in August.

     VNC on Mint is fixed.

     VNC is currently broken on mint, it will produce only a small fixed-size screen.  I am working to resolve.

     In the meantime, either use a different shell server, or a different protocol such as web based, or x2go, or rdp.

     Mail issue has been resolved.  An update altered the permission on the mail spool directory in a way that, while more secure, (using a mail group rather than setuid mail programs) breaks it’s compatibility with many applications which are not setgid.  Permissions have been reset.

     An update today seems to have broken dovecot resulting in webmail and external imap and pop-3 mail clients failing.  Shell mail clients that read the mail spool directly will still work.  I am working to resolve this issue.