The shell server opensuse.eskimo.com is being upgraded from OpenSuse 13.2 to OpenSuse Leap 42.2.  Although it is usable during the upgrade, programs may be randomly killed so it is not advised that you use it for anything serious until the upgrade completes which will probably be another two hours or so.

     The shell server “fedora.eskimo.com” is now Fedora 25 and available for use.

     The shell server fedora.eskimo.com is presently unavailable.  It is in the process of being upgraded from Fedora 24 to Fedora 25.  Once the update completes it will again be available.

     For some time WordPress image upload was failing here. I do not know when this started today yesterday was the first time I received a complaint about this problem.

     The graphicsmagick image manipulation library which is a fork of the imagemagick image manipulation library is just completely broken under Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS and core dumps.  This broke PHP code that was manipulating images such as generating the resized image and thumbnails after you uploaded an image.

     I removed the graphicsmagick libraries and replaced them with the older and functional imagemagick libraries and now I am able to upload images properly.

     This was an operator error.  In an attempt to tighten security and stop the potential for someone to obtain encrypted passwords via the NIS database, I firewalled the NIS servers off from everything.  Unfortunately, this included the local NIS clients so no server was able to talk to the NIS servers to obtain authentication information.  This has been fixed.

     After updates, our server hosting the /home directories failed to boot.  It was a combination of updates gone bad and operator error.  The operator error involved a typo in the /etc/fstab file and then when it would not remount the root partition / read-write, even though it was clean on an fsck and I could mount it manually, I assumed it was an issue with systemd (and there have been many).  So in desperation I switched to upstart, but it deleted a large number of necessary software packages in the process and I ended up with a machine I could not even boot into single user mode.

     So I brought the machine back home, made myself a server rescue disk, booted from that, got things cleaned up enough to boot, spent another eight hours or so installing missing software and finally got it working again.

     Total downtime was from about 12:30AM – 4:15PM on November 20th.

     We are going to be rebooting our physical host machines tonight to install a new kernel that addresses a copy-on-write exploit in the existing kernels.  The exploit can not be taken advantage of currently because nobody has access to the physical machines and we do not use KSM which consolidates memory pages because we have enough memory that it is not necessary.  At some point in the future however it may be so I want to address this issue and get it taken care of.

     Various services will be out of service for approximately 1/2 hour, not all at the same time.  If all goes well (sometimes it does not) we should be finished around 1:30AM.

     I have installed Komodo Edit 10, a really nice editor for HTML, CSS, PHP, and a variety of computer language source files on Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint.

     This is a really nice way to edit your website online here.  It is a graphical application so you should use x2go to access the machines in question.

     Under the Mate Desktop, Komodo Edit 10 can be found under Applications → Programming → Komodo Edit.

     The Ubuntu upgrade from 16.04.1 LTS to 16.10 has been completed.  The machine is now ubuntu 16.10.