If the weather holds today, I am going to go to the co-location facility and reboot the host machines tonight at approximately 10pm, which will reboot and interrupt everything.  This is necessary to load new kernels.  This will interrupt service for approximately 15-20 minutes.  Not all machines will be rebooted simultaneously.

     I want to take this moment to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

     For those of other faiths may your holidays also be filled with love and joy.

 

If you receive the following:

Dear Web-mail User

Your Mail quota has reached limit, You might not be able to send or get
updates until you re-validate your mailbox.

To re-validate your mailbox reply to this mail and fill your.

{user-name :
{Password :
{Confirm Password

… know that this was NOT sent by us. It is a scam attempting to get your account information.

     The old ‘eskimo.com’ SunOS server is the NIS (Network Information Services) master where passwords are kept and distributed.

     It is so because Linux is backwards compatible but passwords generated on Linux would be unusable on that machine.

     However this arrangement presents some problems.  Chief among them is that there is no means to enforce strong passwords and passwords are limited in terms of significant characters to half of what Linux allows.

     A secondary problem is that because of incompatibilities, in order to change a password, it is necessary to login to the old machine and change it.

     A near term fix for this will be setting up a Linux based NIS master and maintaining an independent database on the old machine, probably. There are some replacement password systems for these old machines which I am investigating for compatibility with Linux.  If one can’t be found then access will be via special request rather than available automatically.

     In the longer term I hope to move away from NIS altogether and switch over to LDAP.  I have not had success in getting LDAP to compile under SunOS thus far.

     I need to ask you folks please choose more complex passwords. A word, or a word with a number after it, is NOT secure.  Dictionary attacks will find these in about five nanoseconds.

     It is advisable to choose a rich character set in your password, preferably UPPER and lower case, numbers, and punctuation.  Your password should be at least eight characters long and preferably longer.  It is best that the letter portion not be dictionary words, choose say the 2nd letter from each word in a sentence or something else you can remember but won’t be in a dictionary.

     When an account is compromised and used to send spam, it results in remote sites with crappy spam handling, blocking all e-mail from our site.  Yahoo is most problematic in this regard.  For this reason it is important that you secure your account with a strong password.

     I want to thank everybody who honored and blessed me with your presence at Today’s Meeting.  There was about 20 people or so.  I would have reserved the banquet room if I knew the turn-out was going to be this big but I had received 3 or 4 e-mails from people who said they would show and about a dozen who said they’d be traveling to spend Christmas with relatives.

     We will have the next meeting on January 16th at 2pm, but may or may not be at the same location.

     Your input with respect to this is requested.  Please join our forums if you haven’t already.

     I rebooted the ftp and web server at 7:45 to load a new kernel.  Downtime was approximately 30 seconds.

Eskimo North Users Meeting
Saturday December 19th 2pm
Spiro’s on 185th North and Aurora Shoreline

Look For This Sign on a Table

     I am done with tonight’s maintenance.  The host machines are now up and running on the current kernel.

     Dear Eskimo North Customer,

     This is a reminder that the first Eskimo North users meeting will be
held this Saturday starting at 2PM and ending whenever it does at Spiro’s
Pizza in the Fred Meyer parking lot on Aurora Ave N just south of 185th:

        https://www.eskimo.com/eskimo-north-user-meeting/

     My eldest Son, Carl, will be probably be there for the first hour,
between 2pm-3pm, after that he has a wedding party to attend, so if you’d
like to meet the person who held down the fort in my absence that is the
time frame he will be there.

     So far only 31 people have signed up for the new forums and only
three have left introductions.

     I really want Eskimo North to meet your needs and to that end I
really need your input. For that input to be useful, it’s best in a
public setting as it allows ideas to build upon ideas and for some
congruence to emerge.

     Two ways to get to forums:

        https://www.eskimo.com/forums/

     Or go to the main website:

        https://www.eskimo.com

     Web Apps -> Forums

     Thank you and have a Merry Christmas!

        https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+150

     nanook@eskimo.com

     Sometime after 10PM tonight I will be rebooting the host machines to load new kernels and libraries. This will interrupt all services for a 10-15 minute period.

     I am going to go down to the co-location facility as there are presently bugs in the systemd scripts that can cause the server to hang during shutdown.  This way I can monitor it in person and if it hangs immediately force a reboot so there won’t be a prolonged interruption.

     Even if the shutdown goes smoothly, it will still be 10-15 minutes because of the time it takes to save the guests before the reboot and restore them after.