Fedora and Zorin are presently down for maintenance.  Expected duration approximately 1/2 hour.

     There were problems with the pop/imap/smtp service this morning after the reboots.  At some point between this reboot and the previous, a Ubuntu update overwrote my systemd configuration file for dovecot, the imap/pop3 server.  My changes to this file were designed to cause dovecot startup to wait until after the /misc file system, where I have the encryption certificates for the domain, mounted.

     Because those were gone, the encryption certificates were unavailable so dovecot failed to start.  Because dovecot SASL is used for authentication in postfix, postfix also failed to function on the client mail server.  This was corrected around 7:30AM Pacific time.

     All systems have been rebooted.  All Debian derived systems are now running kernel version 5.8.9, no longer patched as NFS fixes have been incorporated into the base code.

     All systems have been tested for NFS/NIS mounts and binding.

     I’ll be rebooting all servers around 3AM for a kernel upgrade.  Downtime for any given service will be around ten minutes.  The total process should take about 1/2 hour.

     Much of the webserver refused to run PHP code randomly today after I compiled in mod_authnz_external.  It should not have done this, should not in theory conflict with any of the other apache mods but obviously it did.  I will be doing further experimentation to try to nail down the cause.  I have had multi-core compiles of Apache blow up before so I may attempt a single core compile and see if that works.

     The web server outage was caused by myself entering an incorrect DELETE statement into mysql and accidentally screwing up the grant tables.  I was unable to correct so restored from backups made last night.

Issues with the PHP and Apache installation of our web server have
been resolved. In addition a new capability has been added.

In the past we had one version of PHP and often upgrades broke
existing applications that were not compliant with the most recent
version.

It is now possible to set PHP versions by directory or file extension
in an .htaccess file. For details please see:

https://www.eskimo.com/support/override-php-version/

There will be a brief outage of the web server tonight around
midnight to save the changes I made last night in a system image of that
machine.

CHD Holds Press Conference with Legal Team and Plaintiff in Lawsuit Against Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Three of Facebook’s So-Called “Fact-Checkers”

I want my customers to be aware of censorship that is happening on the Internet today.  Personally, I find this a very disturbing trend.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, pretty much all the major social media are heavily censoring non-mainstream views and I feel this is a very unhealthy thing for a Democratic society.  Censorship invariably leads towards tyranny.

Here are some alternative social media sites which promote a greater degree (not absolute but more so) of free speech:

https://freenet.space/

https://pocketnet.app/

https://minds.org

Also another problem is with search engines.  Google is heavily censoring search results and sites which do not favor their view points tend to be ranked very low if represented at all in their search results.  Start page and duckduckgo are not improvements in this area because they use Google’s database.

One good search engine for getting around Google’s censorship is https://swisscows.ch/

     I apologize for the web server outage this afternoon.

     An update to ubuntu installed their apache2 server over mine.  My version of Apache is very different from the Ubuntu version.  It does not look for the config files in the same place and it has some customizations for performance and security.

     I have de-installed the Ubuntu version and re-installed mine and added a apt-mark hold for all the relevant packages to prevent a future occurrence.

     This evening’s server maintenance has been completed.