Ubuntu is down because an upgrade went terribly wrong requiring a restoration from a backup image which is in progress.

    I apologize for the web outage.  Files got copied but with the wrong ownership.  It’s a problem with old idmapd on CentOS 6.x not properly talking to new idmapd on Ubuntu.  I’ve temporarily worked around it by mounting files with nfsv3, but the ultimate fix will be getting rid of all the old kernels on the servers so that modern idmapd is present on all the nfs servers, then can go back to version 4.  Working on that.

     I am planning on taking the mail system down for approximately 15 minutes tomorrow evening and the web server about an hour in the time frame between 10pm-2am.

     I need to take the mail system down to move the spool to a new server and the web server down to move the virtual machine.

     We will be moving various machines over to a new Host machine as well as some file systems in order to reconfigure existing hosts to address both old operating systems and thermal issues.

     The operating system is Centos 6 presently, going to move to Ubuntu 15.04 and 15.10 when it gets out of beta and proves itself stable (I’ve learned that when Ubuntu is in Beta it is REALLY beta).  Ubuntu stays current where CentOS does not.  Even Centos7 is still on a 3.10 kernel when 4.2 is current.

     The other thing about Ubuntu is they provide a means to upgrade to the next major release in place rather than requiring a re-install as CentOS does so moving to this will allow us to stay current in the future with less disruption.

     Also moving major file systems like mail spool and home directories to RAID10 arrays for speed and redundancy.

     I will announce specific downtimes for specific servers and services as I prepare to move them.  I will do my best to minimize downtimes, particularly during high traffic times.

     The thermal issues are that the CPUs are getting too hot under load resulting in throttling of their speed.  The stock Intel coolers they came with are inadequate.

     The fix for this is to relocate the components into a larger case that will accommodate a more massive evo 212 cooler.  I’ve used one of these in the construction of our new i7-6700k platform that will be used for private virtual servers and stress tested it at 4.5Ghz with cpuburn and mprime (the Linux equivalent of prime95) and it is able to carry away the heat of the CPU running at that speed for hours.

     Running a technologically based business, I understand that things break.  What frustrates me most about Comcast is that you can’t REACH anyone when things break to find out what is going on.

     Comcast is back up.  I don’t know for how long but presently phones and Internet are working again.  I never was able to reach a body to actually report the outage or get any idea of the scope or what was going on.

     Our Comcast telephone lines and Internet is down.  I still have access to our servers via a T1 line.  If you call us you will just get voice mail which I can not access at present.  Comcast is estimating service restoration at 12:54 today, apparently they don’t see isolating businesses for half a day as a problem.

     So during this interval for faster response please e-mail support@eskimo.com or use our ticket system https://www.eskimo.com/support/osTicket or from our main site at https://www.eskimo.com/ pull down the support tab and click on tickets.

     I’ve been a big fan of Asus in the past because their motherboards are close to indestructible.  However, the BIOS in this new Z170 board has me a bit torqued.

     Very complex and difficult to setup.  Well I should qualify that, it’s EASY to setup if you don’t care about optimizing performance, but to really squeeze the last ounce of performance there is a LOT of setup involved.  I update the BIOS, wham, it’s ALL gone, got to start from scratch.  Some piss-poor programming went into that.

     Received the remaining memory so we’re on target for this Friday for a turn-up of virtual private servers or Saturday at the latest.

     I’m presently running memory tests to make sure the new memory is good.  Then I’ll run cpuburn to make sure that the machine is still stable with the full compliment of memory.  Sometimes if a machine is marginal, adding additional memory will put additional load on the bus and cause it to become unstable so I need to make sure that isn’t the case.  But so far no errors.

     This is going to be a screamer.

     The reason you’re not seeing the likes on our home page and why it hangs trying to load them or if you’re using Eskimo North for access and can’t get to Facebook, it is because Facebook is currently not responding.