In the News section, you’ll notice a new menu item, “Reviews“.

Click on that link and you’ll find a list of sites that have a listing of Eskimo North with reviews or at least a place for people to write a review.

I really appreciate all of you who have taken the time to take the survey and provide us with some feedback.

I’d like to ask you, if you feel so inclined, click on one or more sites on the Reviews page and take a few moments to write a review of Eskimo North and tell others about us.

Thank you!

Scientific and Debian are back online with much more reasonable core temperatures (they were running 200+ degress). The main issue was CPU voltage. “Auto” on Asus defaulted to 1.38v which was way too high. CPU is stable at 1.05v and MUCH cooler.

Physical id 0:  +95.0°F  (high = +176.0°F, crit = +208.4°F)
Core 0:         +95.0°F  (high = +176.0°F, crit = +208.4°F)
Core 1:         +89.6°F  (high = +176.0°F, crit = +208.4°F)
Core 2:         +86.0°F  (high = +176.0°F, crit = +208.4°F)
Core 3:         +87.8°F  (high = +176.0°F, crit = +208.4°F)

I set the CPU voltage too low for the machine to post so it is dead until I can get help to lift it out of the rack, open it up, and reset the BIOS to defaults.  As a consequence, scientific and debian are down for the day.  Please use shellx or eskimo in the meantime.

My wife and I are going back down this afternoon to try to get this thing working so if you call and nobody answers, please leave a message and if we survive this I’ll call you back when we return.

I am going to take the host for these two servers down for a short period to further attempt to resolve CPU overheating issues.  These should be reasonably brief outages as I am going to attempt to adjust the CPU voltage in bios and then reboot, it may take multiple shots at this to find the lowest stable voltage.

I apologize for the lengthy interruption of service tonight.  We worked on one machine that is running hot, and then installed an additional 4TB drive in Iglulik to provide more generation of backups of users home directories and mail as well as guest machine images.

We re-arranged everything in the rack to make future maintenance easier and accommodate growth.

The work on virtual which has the scientific and debian machines has been rescheduled for tomorrow (Saturday evening) into Sunday morning.

I am going to add an additional hard drive to Iglulik to provide more space for backup and to allow for expansion of the mail spool.

Late this evening (probably around 11pm), I will be taking virtual.eskimo.com, which hosts scientific.eskimo.com and debian.eskimo.com shell servers, down for maintenance.

I need to do this to troubleshoot CPU overheating issues on this machine.  It is nearly identical to Iglulik in terms of hardware, but the CPU on Iglulik is barely above room temperature where the CPU on this box is barely below the boiling point of water.  They are both i7-2600 CPUs.

I will suspend the guests before shutting down so that anything running on shutdown will be running again on start-up.

I neglected to adjust firewall rules to accommodate the new IP address so ssh / nx was broken.  That has been corrected.

Shellx is now restored to service and available for use.  The IP address has changed, you may need to flush your DNS cache.

If you use ssh (or anything that tunnels through ssh such as nx or vnc) to connect, you may also need to remove the line from .ssh/known_hosts as the IP is different.

It turns out that shellx was the target of the attack that affected the Bellevue Co-Location facility at Isomedia.  They have black-holed the IP address of shellx to protect the rest of their customers and as a result it was necessary to change the IP to bring shellx back into service.

In the process of doing so, I discovered some missing software and configuration issues that are potentially security affecting and so am working to correct those.  After that is done I will need to take the machine down for 25 minutes or so to image it.