I hope someone got good images because I forgot to turn the image stabilizer off and if you use it on a tripod it induces shake instead of eliminating it.  So crud, a once in a gazillion opportunity shot to hell.

    I am going to go attempt to photograph what I can of tonights super-moon blood eclipse.  It’s probably not going to be dark enough to get a decent photo near totality but I’m going to get whatever I can.  It’s supposed to be in totality at 6:47 pm pacific time and the eclipse is supposed to last 74 minutes.

     As a result I will be out of the office for a couple of hours this evening.

     I am in the process of server upgrades.  Going from i7-2600 platforms to i7-6700k platforms with RAID 10 arrays for home directories and mail spool.

     The host operating system is being switched from Centos 6 to Ubuntu 15.04.  The primary motivation being RedHat is terrible with keeping things current, even with CentOS 7, and there are some substantial capabilities and performance improvements to be realized with modern software.

     Ubuntu also provides a means of upgrading major releases in place rather than requiring a full re-install as is the case with Centos and this will make it easier to stay current.

     Lastly, Ubuntu features a very good software installation / upgrade package (synaptic) while CentOS is going from bad to worse with their yum based package installer.  Given the direction Fedora has gone (dnf) I want to bail before that becomes part of CentOS.

     This will require some downtime of various hosts as they are moved from one machine to another but it should be minimal and will be done during low traffic hours.

     Virtual Private Servers coming soon.  My target date is October 2nd but that is depending upon some necessary memory modules arriving.

     The old News section had a subscribe function so that you could automatically receive an e-mail of posts I posted.  When I restructured the website there was no way to carry that subscription list over because the Subscribe2 plugin has no export function.

     If you would like to automatically receive posts, enter your e-mail address on the right side bar and push the subscribe button.

     The latest Firefox introduced a bug where text fields on forms will sometimes not fill-in or only partially fill-in.  If you find webmail, WordPress, or other web applications not working properly here or elsewhere, please use another browser such as Chrome, Opera, or Safari, until such time as they get this corrected.

     If you haven’t upgraded Firefox yet and your version is working, I would recommend not upgrading until this issue is resolved.

     I’m going to be out between about 10:45 or so and about 1:30 to make a trip to Fry’s to scope out a new case, power supply, and possibly other components to put together a new server.

     I will be out from about 5:15pm until whenever the Seahawks game ends because I’m going to go over to my oldest son’s house to watch it (I have only Netflix here, no cable or satellite at present).

     So best time to reach me today will be between 1:30pm – 5:15pm or after the game ends in the evening.

     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.