I apologize for the unannounced kernel upgrade this morning but it was done rapidly because a security flaw was discovered in 5.8 and earlier kernels that I wanted to eliminate as rapidly as possible.  We are now running 5.9 kernels.

     This took two rounds last night because my first build of 5.9 was not correctly configured for our servers so I had to rebuild, re-install, and reboot again.

     5.9 has a minor bug in the NFS code that is printing some warnings.  It involves a race condition when a client attempts to open a file it doesn’t have permissions to open.  Since the open would have failed anyway on the basis of permissions I do not believe this bug has any significant operational consequences other than making noise in the kernel logs.

     I checked bugzilla and there is already a bug report filed though given the relatively low severity I doubt it will get rapid attention, but I’m added to the notification list so we will update again once fixed.

     Sorry for the downtime between 2-4:30AM.  Something got corrupted and I was unable to login with x2go, and I had gotten friendica working since the last backup so I did not want to just restore from backups and lose all the work I had done.

     I had to delete and reinstall about half the operating system, recompile Apache and some of the libraries it depended upon because something caused the system to install Apache and some libs and overwrite my custom compiled version which is much newer than the distros and has some capabilities the distros does not.

     When I finally got everything working again, I made a backup so all that work is saved.

     I am happy to report that at least one phishing scam I’ve received after installing the anti-phishing scam plugin was successfully diverted to my spam box so it is at least catching some.

     I’ve also added a botnet plugin that looks for IP’s of known botnet’s and deflects those spams to your spambox.

     Lastly, I’ve modified the spamtrap function so when you forward spam to spamtrap@eskimo.com, in addition to being applied to local Bayesian filters, it is also sent to several centralized spam blocking sites that use the information to construct RBL’s and other anti-spam measures.

     So if you receive a spam, Bounce or Forward, (Bounce is preferable if your mailer has that capability as it preserves all the original headers) to spamtrap@eskimo.com.

     I am sure that you, like myself, are getting tired of being inundated by phishing scams.

     I have added a new plugin to spamassassin which is designed to catch phishing scams.  It works by looking for the URL’s of known phishing websites in incoming e-mails.  It remains to be seen how effective this is but any reduction in the onslaught is good.

     Positives will be sent to your ‘spam’ folder rather than INBOX.

     Maintenance is complete.  All servers are restored to service.

     Mint. Scientific7, and Zorin are restored to service.

     vps7.eskimo.net, manjaro, and uucp going down for maintenance.  I expect the outages of these to last 15-30 minutes each.

     Fedora has been restored to service.

     Scientific7 is being taken down for maintenance.  Estimated downtime approximately 1/2 hour.

     Mint will be going down for maintenance.  Expected duration approximately one hour.

     Fedora and Zorin are presently down for maintenance.  Expected duration approximately 1/2 hour.

     There were problems with the pop/imap/smtp service this morning after the reboots.  At some point between this reboot and the previous, a Ubuntu update overwrote my systemd configuration file for dovecot, the imap/pop3 server.  My changes to this file were designed to cause dovecot startup to wait until after the /misc file system, where I have the encryption certificates for the domain, mounted.

     Because those were gone, the encryption certificates were unavailable so dovecot failed to start.  Because dovecot SASL is used for authentication in postfix, postfix also failed to function on the client mail server.  This was corrected around 7:30AM Pacific time.