I made some configuration changes last weekend to address some security concerns.  I made an error in the process that broke anonymous FTP.  That has been corrected.

I’m attempting to tie this blog into some social networks, Twitter and Facebook in particular, to help keep people there informed as to what we’re doing here at Eskimo.

Sorry for the long string of messages, Twitter in particular seems difficult to interface to, I think in part owing to a recent change in their API and plugins not being well maintained.

Maybe I’m not enough of a twit to tweet.

I am changing the format of Apache logs to “combined” so that they will work with awstats and some other web log analyzing packages.

I’ve also finally got logrotate setup on weblogs, so no longer will they grow infinitely.  The logs will be rotated at midnight and seven days worth kept.

The most common misconfiguration problem I see with pop or imap accounts is that people put login@eskimo.com instead of just login for their username.

Recently, a customer with an AT&T phone, model unknown at this time, was unable to change it because the phone did so automatically.

I’ve made a change the Dovecot configuration that strips off the ‘@eskimo.com’, for authentication purposes, so if you have had this problem for similar reasons, your phone should now work with our mail service.

The fax machine has been replaced and now it’s in my office so I’ll actually notice when something arrives.

We’ve got a new way to connect graphically now, called x2go.

Go to http://www.x2go.org/

Go to the downloads section and download the client for your operating system, Windows, Mac, or various incarnations of Linux.  If you’re running CentOS or Scientific Linux, use the Fedora client, it works fine.

X2Go supports Sound in addition to display so now you can connect to shellx and get a remote desktop where sound works!

(I had sound working and now I broke it, but not sure if I just broke it for my account or everybody.  Also, the Mac client doesn’t work right, at least under Linux, the keyboard is scrambled.)

And, it’s EASY to setup.  All you need to do is create a new profile, put in the hostname, “shellx.eskimo.com”, select Gnome and full screen mode preferably (though you’re welcome to try the other display managers, I haven’t yet), and click on the profile.

Type in your password and go!

There is a problem with the Mac client, at least on Lion it won’t accept input at the password prompt.  I’d love to here from other Mac users with respect to this.

Okay there’s some bugs but this is new and it’s being actively developed so they’ll be worked out.

Friday, the 8th, I applied some updates and in the process PHP sessions stopped working.  This broke all the web applications online.

I was not able to quickly determine what was wrong, so I restored the machine from an image made a couple of weeks prior.

I forgot that I had changed all of the web addresses and ftp addresses so when I reverted to the previously imaged machine, none of the addresses the web server was configured to listen to matched the domains it was hosting.

I had to manually edit all the addresses in the conf file.  This took a little over two hours and as a result, service to all of the virtual domains was restored shortly after 1pm.  The FTP service was restored by about 3pm.

I have re-applied the updates that failed to work properly the first time, this time successfully, and imaged the machine with the updated addresses so if another restore is necessary in the future it won’t require recreating the httpd configuration by hand.

The maintenance that was scheduled to happen early this morning will instead happen just after midnight tonight.

I will need to reboot and image various servers because CentOS has released updates to libraries which require a reboot to activate.

No one machine should be down for more than about 15 minutes, but the entire process is expected to take around an hour to complete.

This will start about five minutes after midnight early Saturday morning and is expected to be completed by around 1AM.