Isomedia will be doing network maintenance work on August 7th between midnight and 4am that will impact our services briefly as our equipment is co-located at an Isomedia co-location facility.

ISOMEDIA will be performing maintenance on network core infrastructure
Thursday, August 7th, between 12AM and 4AM Pacific Time. This work will
cause 2-3 brief disruptions in connectivity lasting up to 30 seconds each in
duration while work is completed. You are being notified of this work as it
will affect your service connectivity. As a precaution, please ensure that
your Internet equipment is performing no critical updates, backups, or other
activities over your connection during this time frame.

We will endeavor to keep all interruption as brief as possible. All times
are estimates based on expected outcomes of the work being performed and
previous experience performing the same or similar work. There is always the
possibility of some unforeseen bug, or problem, that could extend the
maintenance time. Administrators will make every effort to correct the
problem, or implement the back out plan quickly, if something does occur.
All times are estimates based on expected outcomes of the work being
performed and previous experience performing the same or similar work.

We will be performing maintenance just after midnight tonight that will involve downtime for various servers ranging from about 10-25 minutes per server.

This is necessary to boot new kernels and to image machines to incorporate recent updates.

The Go programming language has been added to shellx.

To use it set your path to include /usr/local/go/bin

ksh example:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin

For redundancies sake, I have one radius server at the co-location facility and one at my home.  The one at my home is connected to the Internet via a T1.

The T1 circuit connecting the radius server at my home failed, and the radius server at the co-location facility was also unresponsive.  This caused about an hour long authentication failure for dial-up and DSL subscribers. Existing connections would not be affected.

I have restored the backup server to service.  The machine was up and running but for reasons unknown both radius and MySQL daemons had died.  Both restarted without incident and the backup server is now processing authentication requests.  A ticket has been generated with Isomedia to restore the T1 to service.

I plan to start up the Eskimo North monthly user meetings starting April of 2015.

Since the first place we held the meetings at (Godfathers Pizza) went out of business, and the second Pizza place (I can’t remember the name anymore, on 15th NE and about 147th) burned to the ground, we’ve got to decide on a new location.

I’d like to find a place that is amiable to our presence, large enough and not too crowded that we can congregate without disturbing other business and quiet enough that we can converse without being overwhelmed by noise and disturbances.

It should be a place that has good public transportation services so people without vehicles can get there easily.  I am in Shoreline but would be willing to commute to a more centrally located place so it is not so inconvenient to Southenders as our last location.

If we choose another food establishment it should be something that most will enjoy and can afford.

I’d like your input.  You can comment here, I’ve also created a new forum for discussion.

Mammoth will be moving their SE400 Redback from the Startouch Facility to the Colocenters Facility. This will affect ATM customers on the below circuits that terminate into Mammoth’s Seattle Redback. Estimated downtime will be two hours.

We contract with Mammoth to provide DSL back haul for CenturyLink circuits.  This maintenance will affect our Western Washington customers on CenturyLink circuits between 11pm on 7/23/2014 until 1am on 7/24/2014.  It will not affect customers in Frontier or Verizon territory.

Last night during routine log rotation, when xinetd was restarted on the ftp server, it failed to start properly. As a result ftp was inaccessible from midnight,when log rotation happens, until about 10:30AM this morning when someone brought it to my attention.

I recently replaced the SSL/TLS certificates because the old ones expired today, however, I did not realize that dovecot (the pop-3/imap server) cached the certificates and so it was serving the old expired certificate rather than the current one.  It has been restarted and things should be operating properly again.

If you have a need for SSL but don’t want to spend for a certificate for your domain, a new option is available with a domain under eskimo.com like stuff.eskimo.com for example, where stuff can be served via https.   You won’t need to buy a cert for this as I have purchased a wildcard cert for *.eskimo.com so we can provide https on anything under eskimo.com.

If you would like an eskimo.com subdomain, it is available for $24/year in addition to your normal account charges.  It can be mapped to your public_html, adult_html, or any subdirectory of those two.  It can be mapped elsewhere but cgi’s will not work elsewhere.

I just read today that Burstnet is discontinuing all services except for co-location by July 25th.  I’m not sure how to communicate this but if you’re looking for a new hosting home that is stable, we’ve been around as long as the Internet has existed, and current, we have the very latest Apache 2.4.9 based servers, consider us to host your site.  We’ve got lots of spare hosting capacity at present.