The old SunOS 4.1.4 eskimo.com shell server is down.  I started writing backups and it froze.  I’ve been up 22 hours and am not up to the drive to the co-location facility tonight so it is going to have to stay down until tomorrow afternoon.

     Debian also is taking a long time to write an image.  It may or may not be down all night.  The other machines, Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse, and Scientific7 likewise are going to be rescheduled for maintenance tomorrow, either during the day if nobody is logged in and active, or tomorrow evening if they get busy.

     Both shellx and scientific shell servers are completed and available for use.

     Maintenance is completed on the physical hosts iglulik and virtual, so there will not be any further global interruptions.

     Maintenance is completed on ftp, www, mail, and uucp, so there will not be any further interruption to those services.

     Maintenance is completed on Centos7 and Ubuntu, so those shell servers will not experience further interruption.

     Maintenance is still in progress on Scientific, Shellx, OpenSuse, Mint, Debian, and Fedora.  These servers will still have 20-25 minute downtimes to be imaged.

     There are multiple compression jobs in progress on both physical hosts, this will cause them to be somewhat slower than normal for the next 24 hours or so.

     Shellx had some problems that will require an additional boot to correct and then a downtime of approximately 25 minutes to image the fixed machine.

     The client mail server is currently down for imaging.  Estimated downtime is another 15 minutes.  The web/ftp server has been completed.  At midnight I will be rebooting the main host servers one at a time, everything will go down for about 20 minutes but not all at the same time depending upon which physical host a given virtual machine is on.

     Opensuse hasn’t been able to use rwho and ruptime or show up in the rwho and ruptime reports of other hosts because it lacked the necessary rwhod daemon. This daemon was not part of the OpenSuse distribution and thus not available to install via Yast.

     I found a version that worked on rpm.pbone.net and installed it, created the necessary firewall, user, and systemd entries, and it is now operational.

     Obleka’s return was prompted impart by a comment from one of our customers noting the lack of a mascot on our new website.  Digging through the images directory, trying to determine what was still in use and what should be removed, I came across her photo and added it back onto the main page.

     This skewed the text on the main page, so today I hacked her image into the WordPress theme so that she is present on all the WordPress based pages on the top bar where she is present but won’t skew the page contents.

     The real reason though is that I felt her presence gives the website more of a human feeling.  It just felt a bit too sterile.  And yea I know there are folks who think that any site that uses more than one color is unprofessional but I don’t share the belief that if it’s not dead and bland, it’s unprofessional.

     There has been a recent surge in spam.

     There are two causes.  One is that there have been an increased number of Windows machines compromised and being used in botnets to send spam.

     The other is that more is getting through the spam filters because the spammers have devised a way around Bayesian filtering.  They have developed software that uses an electronic thesaurus to substitute various synonyms in the spam they send so there are many different varieties of the same spam.  Thus the spam you flag doesn’t prevent it from getting through the filters to others because it’s been changed just enough to evade the filters.

     I don’t have a solution for this yet.  I’m sure it’s being worked upon and as soon as a defence becomes available I’ll look for a way to integrate it into our system.

     If you install Ubuntu 15.04 and find yourself running out of memory, login as root, fire up bum (Boot Up Manager) and untick all the garbage you aren’t going to use.  There is just way too much junk installed and enabled by default.

     On my workstation machine, I got the RAM used when logged in with my normal array of half a dozen terminals and Firefox down from 3GB to about 700MB.  It also made start-up and login a lot faster.

     Owing to a recent kernel upgrade pushed out by Redhat, Fridays maintenance will be more extensive, involving reboots of most of the Redhat based machines, including the physical host machines so everything will be interrupted for a period.  Most of the heavily used machines will be done after midnight and the less used or duplicated machines before.