CentOS has been absorbed by RedHat.

Just to be clear, what follows is my opinion, for whatever it’s worth:

Although they make out like this is a good thing, I am unconvinced.  I think it’s mainly a good thing for a bunch of CentOS developers that got jobs with RedHat, but a bad thing for users of CentOS.

I’ve tried Fedora several times and it hasn’t worked well for me, bloated, ugly, generally dysfunctional.  I am concerned CentOS will now become like Fedora.

I believe this is by design.  RedHat presently is compiled from the same source RPMs as RedHat Enterprise Linux, with minor modifications mainly involving the changing of branding.  I think CentOS was competing too successfully with RedHat Enterprise Linux and so they absorbed it, basically bought the developers of CentOS in order to change it into something that will have less impact on their revenue stream.

What this means for Eskimo:

In the short-term it means there will probably be major upheavals at CentOS and the kind of problems we encountered in the upgrade from 6.4 to 6.5 will probably become more common.

In the long-term it means I am probably going to migrate towards Scientific Linux which is very similar to what CentOS has been, a Linux Distribution compiled from RHEL source RPMs.

Those of you who may have thoughts about how I can make Eskimo North better, please take a few moments to fill out a brief survey at: http://www.eskimo.com/advise/

I will be taking the web server down for about 20 minutes tomorrow (Friday 1/17/2014) to image the machine.  During this time web service and ftp service will be unavailable.

We do not use cookies to track your activities on the Internet but we do use them for session management for things like maintaining your identity from page to page in web mail.

We do have Google Ads on some of our pages and they track all sorts of things.  If you do not wish to be tracked by them but wish session management to work properly here, most browsers have a way of accepting cookies from the visited site but not third parties.

In Firefox, go into Preferences, Select the Privacy Tab, then where it says, “Firefox will: Remember History”, that is a pull-down bar.  Select Use Custom Settings for History.

Then under History, leave accept cookies from sites checked, but change accept third party cookies to “Never”.

That setting will allow sessions to work properly here and still prevent your activities on the Internet from being tracked by cookies.

Our little Rand-o-Dex script that outputs a random users web page is broken.  I’m not fluent in Perl and am having problems figuring out why it can’t access the list file.  Permissions appear to all be in order.

If someone fluent in Perl would be willing to lend me a hand troubleshooting and reviving this, it would be much appreciated.

Please e-mail nanook@eskimo.com.

I got the machine reloaded but didn’t last to the mail maintenance.  So I will be doing that tonight around 11pm-11:20pm.  The client mail server will be down during that interval.

Incoming mail will continue to be processed and will be accessible during that interval via shell mailers like pine, mutt, elm, mailx, etc.  Web mail and client mail programs like Thunderbird, Outlook, etc will not be operational during that interval.

I will be taking the client mail server down just after midnight to image the machine so that if it is necessary to restore it will have all the recent updates in the image. This will take approximately 20 minutes.

During this time, web mail will be unavailable, it will not be possible to access mail via IMAP or POP3 mail clients, and you will not be able to send mail.

You will be able to read mail via shell mailers such as pine, elm, mutt, mush, and mailx during this time frame.  Outgoing mail sent via shell mailers should queue and be sent when the client mail server is returned to service.

I will be in and out this late afternoon and evening, first to attend a Shoreline Community Meeting that concerns possibly turning the street I use to get to my home into a one-way which would make getting in and out a nightmare, and then second to reload CentOS onto a new server I’m trying to get operational at the co-location facility.

We changed the motherboard and the new motherboard has a different Ethernet chip and we’ve already tried to rebuild the initramfs manually and it didn’t fly.  So I’m just going to reload this machine as it has nothing important on it yet.  This machine will be used to provide virtual machines to customers.

If you call, PLEASE leave voice mail, I will be out around 5:15PM, back in briefly around 7:45PM, and out again by around 8:30PM.  Please also leave how late it will be okay to call you back.

Because things didn’t go entirely well this morning, I’m going to have to take shellx down for approximately 25 minutes to image it again tonight just after midnight.

Please do not give your files and directories public write permissions.  People do bad things with them.

I suggest setting your umask at least to 022, this will automatically take away public and group write permissions for any files and directories you create.

Today, I had to clean up several dozen user web pages which were publicly writable and had been vandalized to include malicious JavaScript code.  These modifications were made possible by users setting permissions on their files allowing public write.