The work on centos7.eskimo.com has been completed.  It is back up and available for use.

     I will be taking Centos7 down for a while later this afternoon to grow the virtual disk to accommodate more application software.

     This could take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour depending upon how ugly it gets.  Usually gparted does the right thing the first time but not always so sometimes it’s necessary to restore from backup and try again.

     I upgraded MySQL to version 5.6.26 today.  Hopefully it won’t break things but if it does please let me know, either use Support->Ticket or e-mail support@eskimo.com.

     I’m going to let it soak for a week or two and if nothing breaks, upgrade further to 5.7.x.  The upgrade was necessary to get some newer web applications running.

     When I replaced our router recently, I missed two servers in transcribing firewall rules, scientific7 and ubuntu.  So if you have been unable to connect with either of these, this should be resolved now.

     I accidentally poisoned our dog by feeding her a bran muffin with raisins, forgot the raisins where in there.  But my wife mentioned it (right after she ate it) and so we induced vomiting right away and took her to the emergency pet clinic.

     There we learned that the amount she ingested was about 1/10th the lowest amount ever known to cause a fatality and since most of that was vomited back her chances are very good.

     But because of this I won’t be getting to bed until 1AM and haven’t been feeling well and sleeping good under the best of circumstances.  So I will be in the office a little later than usual this Thursday morning.

     Ubuntu.eskimo.com has been restored from backups and is now functioning normally.  I do not know what was wrong because I was unable to login even as root.  I suspect some software I installed may have changed the pam setup to kerberos but am unable to confirm that.

     Ubuntu is currently down.  Something got hurt to the point where I can’t even login from the virtual domain console interface so I am restoring it from a backup image.

     Our servers are in a facility with UPS and diesel backup so they are not directly affected by the storm.  But my home office has two ways of getting to the Internet, a T1 to the co-location facility and a Comcast Cable modem.

     The T1 is down hard, and the Comcast service has been down more than it’s been up. Our telephone service is also Comcast.  Consequently if you can’t get through please leave voice mail with your name, telephone number, login, and the nature of your issue.

     As an alternative, use the ticket system.  In either case, I will get to your issue as soon as I am able.  Our connectivity to my office today has been highly Intermittent, but the servers at the co-location facility have been solid.

     In addition to wired services being out, our T-mobile cellular service has also been mostly inoperative today.  So please be patient.

     Our web server stopped functioning around 12:20PM today (August 28th 2015).

     I was unable to login to the machine to assess what was happening.  Whatever it was saturated disk I/O and ftp which is on the same machine continued to function but ssh and vnc did not.

     The logs did not provide any useful details to isolate the cause.  I have not seen this behavior in this machine previously.

     There were a number of recent updates.  Also I added two more gigabytes of RAM for a total of ten instead of eight.

     The shell server mint.eskimo.com was recently reloaded with Mint-Mate 17.2 to bring it up to date.  I am still in the process of loading applications and this will take a while to complete.

     If there are specific applications you use, please e-mail support@eskimo.com and I will expedite the loading of those applications.

     As always, if there are any applications that you would find useful not present on our servers, please make a request to support@eskimo.com.