During the Christmas season, the post office tends to be a little backed up and slower to deliver than normal.

If you are mailing a payment, please allow a little extra time for it to arrive.

If you install Drupal here, one module you will want to install is the Memcache module.

Just as with the Tribe Object Cache plugin for WordPress, this module uses Memcached to cache rendered pages and other objects and can speed up page loading by as much as 100 times.  It won’t speed up every page but if a page has already been visited and is using the same data, it can speed it up several hundred times.  It can also speed up pages where common content is on multiple pages.

I apologize for the downtime Saturday December 14th evening.

A new server failed earlier in the day. It wasn’t in use yet except
as a backup but because file systems were NFS mounted from it, anytime a
customer used something that referenced those file systems such as ‘df’ or
‘quota’, the process hung waiting for it to respond eventually cluttering
up memory on shellx.

To stop this, I had to unmount the file systems from that machine but
I needed to reboot the file server which has users home directories on it
in order to do that. I should have used the force option because
otherwise the reboot also is going to wait for the machine that is dead to
respond and I forgot to do that.

The whole mess necessitated a trip to the co-location facility to
restore, and while I was there I fixed some start-up script errors and
applied some updates which required a few more reboots to apply and test.

On another note, if anyone is considering content management systems
like Drupal, Concrete5, Joomla, or WordPress, they will all run fine on
our platform. If you need help getting them running please e-mail support
and I’ll be glad to help you get them setup.

The same is true for Coppermine, Gallery, MyBB, phpBB, or other PHP
applications.

Thank you for your patience and I apologize for the interruption.

Looks like I’ll be able to keep the antique going for a while.

I went over to Vetco today and they had a few 9GB SCSI drives of the type I can use on the old server for 99¢ each.  So for a couple of bucks I’ve got replacement drives for that machine.  I have a spare chassis, CPU, memory, and power supply but the drives were the hard to obtain item.

So that old machine should be maintainable now for a while longer.

If you are looking for a CMS for your website, Drupal, Concrete5, Joomla, and WordPress all work fine here.  I’ve installed all of them just to test and get familiar with them, except for WordPress which we use for our News blog and I’m also using it for some personal blogs.

If you need help setting one of these up, send e-mail to support@eskimo.com and I’ll be happy to help set it up.  In all cases, it’s just a case of copying the files to the location you want the site to show up at, public_html if it’s going to be your entire website, and then going there with a web browser and filling in the database information.

This is the WordPress ChristmasPress theme slightly modified.

If you’d like a WordPress website setup either as your website, or as part of your website, it is free to asking for any Eskimo North customer.  Just e-mail support, let us know your login, where you want the WordPress site setup, if you have an existing MySQL database here we will need the password, if not give us a password to use to set one up.

I will set it up for you totally free of charge.

If you’re not an Eskimo North customer, with the purchase of any shell or web hosting package, I’ll be glad to do this for you.

E-mail: support@eskimo.com.

Shellx is restored and I’m going to leave it alone until early Saturday morning so as not to cause further unintentional outages.

There are a number of errors in the start-up scripts which I need to correct but I need to reboot multiple times to test in order to do so.

In the process of trying to clean up some start-up issues on Shellx, I’ve broken it in ways that I can’t recover from except to go to a backup.  It will be down for about 20 minutes to recover from a backup image.

I apologize for the interruptions in web, mail, and shellx service today.  This was necessary because the upgrade to CentOS 6.5 broke the NFSv4 clients badly.

NFS is networked file system, it’s how common files like your home directory and mail spool are available on multiple machines.

NFSv4 doesn’t pass numerical user ID’s over the wire like previous version of NFS did.  Instead, it passes names which are mapped by idmapd, which up until recently worked.

Unfortunately, the NFS version 4 client in CentOS 6.5 is sometimes passing a numerical UID over the wire instead of a name and then when idmapd tries to look it up, it fails, resulting in the file ownership being mapped to nobody.

Reading the CentOS and RedHat forums, it’s clear that we’re not the only people having this problem, it’s also clear the developers don’t yet have a clue what is causing it, so a fix may be awhile.

I apologize for the somewhat slower response this is going to cause in the meantime but random user ID mapping is not a workable situation.

That portion of our system maintenance which is service affecting has been completed.

Mammoth Networks, which provides DSL back haul for our DSL customers using CenturyLink circuits, will still be rebooting equipment at 2AM PST which will cause an interruption of approximately 15 minutes duration in DSL connectivity.