I posted a message earlier asking for help with a perl script that was used for Rand-o-Dex (displays a random customers page).

Well, I chased the problem down to a missing script that the perl script called, and that script has been gone so long there was no hope of retrieving from backups.  So I wrote a script from scratch just using shell and got things working again.  So now, the user directory and Rand-o-Dex work once more.

However, there is a problem relating to caching in the browser.  Even if I add a Pragma NoCache meta tag and an expire meta tag, and tell Apache to expire in one second, Firefox and Aurora cache it anyway, so to get a different users page it is necessary to hold shift down while you do a reload.

If anyone knows of any fool-proof way to make Firefox NOT cache the page, please let me know.

I am happy to announce the addition of a very nice web editor to shellx called Aptana Studio 3.  It requires a visual connection of some sort, NX, OpenNX, x2go, or VNC, or alternately, if you have X-windows on your machine and are connected via ssh, you can launch from the command line.

If you have a visual desktop up, you can go to Applications->Programming->Aptana Studio 3, or alternately from the shell launch as “aptana”.

Either way, this is a graphical application so either you need to launch from a graphical desktop or redirect the DISPLAY to an X-server on your machine via ssh X tunneling.

It colorizes matching elements and makes editing very easy.

I neglected to adjust the firewall to allow connections to this new machine from the Internet.  That has been corrected.

For those who would like to have a look at what Scientific Linux looks like, we’ve got a new shell server up and running on it at scientific.eskimo.com.  You can ssh to it or get to
it with x2go.  I’ll have the key in place on the website for access with NX shortly.

I’ve been trying to turn up a new server for oh, about six months.  Actually, had it working at one point, then it started crashing.

We replaced the motherboard, Carl did the physical install, and found the Ethernet not working.  Went through a process that was supposed to fix that but it didn’t so ended up reloading CentOS again.

Had a hard time getting virtual machines working, thought it was missing packages, ended up screwing up libraries so bad I had to reload the operating system, again.  But, in the process I discovered virtualization was disabled in the BIOS, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Then doing virtual servers on Linux requires setting up a network bridge by hand because the GUI tools don’t know bridges.  And I futzed that up and isolated the machine from the net in the process, so I have to go down again tonight but, my wife is at band and has the car so that will have to wait.

I am convinced this machine is possessed by evil spirits.

Well, I’m around for a couple of hours kind of stranded, so if anyone has something you need help with or some money you just have to unload, ..  yea wishful thinking I know, well, I’m here!

SMTP on both the incoming network servers, mx1 and mx2, and the client mail server, mail.eskimo.com, was down from approximately 13:20-13:25 PST on January 20th, 2014.

The outage resulted from an update to clamav-milter which overwrote a start-up script removing some necessary local customizations and causing the start of the newly updated clamav-milter to fail.

I checked the logs immediately after installing the updates so this was discovered and corrected within about five minutes.  I apologize for the brief interruption.

The main portion of the website color is changed in support of the Seahawks.

I am not a big football fan but did thoroughly enjoy today’s game.

I’m going to be out of the office between 3pm and about 7pm watching the Huskies game and chomping home-made pizza.

During that time I will have phones forwarded and will have access should there be something that needs addressing but the phone will probably be answered with “Hello”, so please ask for Eskimo North if you need to speak to me.

Spam/spam and Trash/trash mail folders are now automatically purged of any mail older than 30 days.