I have had customers who have issues with ‘eskimo’ in our domain name because some people consider it to be a racial slur which is based primarily on a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word.  It is often believed the word was originated by Siberian Eskimos who were enemies of the Inuit to mean Eaters of Raw Meat.

     In fact the word was originated by Greenlandic Eskimos and means one who uses snow shoes.

     In any case, prior to Western civilizations influence on Eskimo communities, eaters of raw meat would not have been inaccurate since fuel sources are rather scarce above the arctic circle and while cooking still aids in digestion, it was not required for sanitary reasons because bacteria do not grow and ruin meat when temperatures were consistently below freezing.

     Many people feel that Inuit is the correct term but Inuit is to Eskimo as Japanese is to Asian.  Eskimo refers to all people living above the Arctic Circle, Inuit refers to only a subset living along the northern Alaska, Canada, and Greenlandic Northern coastal areas,  It excludes inland Eskimos and Siberian Eskimos among others.  Another commonly recommended alternative, Aleut, refers only to those living in the Aleutian Islands, other Islands in the Bearing Sea, and the Northwest coastal areas of Alaska.

     Unlike the more politically correct Asian verses the less politically correct Oriental, there is no politically more correct term for Eskimos equating to all peoples living above the Arctic circle and the degree to which it is politically incorrect is the result of a false myth with regards to the origin of the word.

     With all that said and with the realization that I’m not going to educate the world or even a small part of it, and the realization that sadly much Eskimo language has been lost (there were at one time more than 200 languages, some much closer to each other than others) and that the Eskimos prior to their interfacing with Western civilization had no written language, everything was passed down by oral tradition, much of which has been lost, so crazy mythology is bound to screw things up further, acknowledging all these things, I have enabled mail on one of our game domains so that those of you who have a problem with it have an alternative.

     I have enabled e-mail on ybbored.com domain so if you send e-mail to user@ybbored.com, it will be delivered to your INBOX the same as eskimo.com.

    For further reading I highly recommend, The Book Of The Eskimos by Peter Freuchen.  It will not only open your eyes about the nature of the Eskimo, a people surviving in the harshest inhabited portion of our planet, but also of their thoughts, spirituality, and even some eye openers on the nature of reality itself.  Peter Freuchen is one of the most direct, honest, and lucid writers I’ve ever read and the book is a very captivating read.

     And if you’ve read the book then you will hopefully understand my use of the term and interest in the people and their lives, particular historic prior to Western Influence, is one of great respect, nothing I would ever want to slander or slur.  These people not only survived in a harsh environment, the lived life to the fullest an they did so in a sustainable manner.

     As of today, our mail server, mail.eskimo.com, has been delisted from all mail RBL lists including SORBS.  We also do not have things backed up in queue. 

     Mail should be processing normally provided there aren’t issues on the receiving side.

     Because some sites ignore TTL in DNS responses and cache information longer, even though our server has been cleared from all lists, some sights working from old RBL information may block mail from our server until their DNS cache expires the DNS record used by the RBL to indicate status.

     smtp1.wholefoods.com is immediately dropping connections with no explanation and since they use a privacy service for their domain registration, I can not call their admin to let them know.  I apologize to those who this inconveniences but I have no control over their server.

     Around May 22nd, I became aware that our server was sending out spams via Comcast automatic notification and MX-Toolbox notifications but was unable to determine the sending account owing to the fact that I had not received a single complaint from an end user receiving said spam nor hard either of these automated tools given me enough information to determine it.  Comcast in their extremely finite wisdom expunges this information from the headers to protect the privacy of their customers.  How the hell they expect us to identify the sender without this information is beyond me.

     At any rate on the 28th, I finally saw our outgoing mail server had been clogged by one customer, and further examining some of the queued mail found that it was a phishing scam.  This particular customer is a long time customer that I know would not do something like this so it was evident his account had been compromised.  I changed the password, contacted the customer with the location of the phishing scam on his website, and applied for delisting of the three RBLs we were on a result.

     Two of those three removed us from the RBL but SORBS still has not.  I’m still going back and forth with them trying to get this taken care of.  I’ve purged all the spam queued on our mail servers and all the bounces attempting to return from spammed addresses.

     The mail server is now caught up.  The only location I am aware of that is still blocking us is Starbucks.  Earlier Yahoo and others were throttling incoming mail from our server resulting in legitimate mail being bounced.  But mailq is now clear save for starbucks.

     Upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS seems to have broken mail delivery from the web server, ftp.eskimo.com.  This does not affect webmail programs because they are all configured to talk directly to mail.eskimo.com rather than relaying, but it does affect scripts that you may have on your website to send mail to you.

     Postfix broke in a way that some mail just disappeared into a black hole.  Until I can figure out precisely how it broke (not easy as it is not logging any errors or bouncing the messages) I’ve installed null mailer, a very simple relay only mail server.  However, even it is introducing random delays in delivery.

     Just wanted you all to be aware of this and I am working towards a solution.

     I have tested all machines and all are operational.

     The reboots have been completed.  I will be checking all servers to make sure NFS properly mounted and NIS properly bound, this will take several hours, but things should be operational now.

     To load new kernels that correct some issues with the previous kernel, we will be rebooting all our host machines and most of the guest machines starting at 3AM approximately.

     The expected downtime is about five minutes per machine, most things should be complete in 15 minutes, however, occasional NFS problems arise after a reboot and it will take several hours to check all machines for these but most services should be back up by 3:15AM.

     Just found out today that one of our customers, Wayne Moddison, passed away in November of last year.

     I did not talk to him frequently but he was one of the most pleasant people you could ever want to know and I’m very saddened to hear of his passing.

     Taking centos6.eskimo.com down for about 45 minutes to image the virtual machine.

     CentOS6 is up and operational on i7-6700k hardware.  It is no longer vulnerable to spectre or meltdown exploits and it was the last machine that was vulnerable so all of our systems are now protected from these exploits.

     I will be taking CentOS6 down for about 45 minutes tonight, around 1:30AM, to image the machine on the new hardware.