Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ubuntu

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     Ubuntu is currently down because it is in the process of being moved to new faster hardware.  It should be back up about 12:30AM Dec 11th.

Mail Server

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The mail server is taking longer to copy than I anticipated.  This is because the RAID array is still synchronizing disk and so competing with the copy for disk I/O.

Client Mail Server

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     The client mail server, mail.eskimo.com, is in the process of being moved from the Igloo server to the Ice server.  This is being done because the new Ice has 2-1/2 times as many CPU cores as the old machine and 4x the amount of RAM and mail needs more RAM to handle list serve deliveries better.

     During this time, login to shell servers will hang because they are waiting on the mail server spool mounted via NFS which isn’t responding because it is down while being moved.  i expect this to be completed around 3:30AM.

Ubuntu Is Down

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     The reason mail did not work on Ubuntu is that I accidentally left a development repository on during the upgrade.  This resulted in a mixture of different package versions including a broken libglib2 library which there was no way of fixing save re-installing.

     I am in the process of re-installing all the packages now.

 

Ubuntu – Upgrade in Progress

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Ubuntu is currently unresponsive because of an update in progress from 22.04 Jammy to 24.04 noble.  This is taking longer than expected largely owing to the huge number of packages installed and automatic backups of the host server taking place simultaneously.

In the meantime, please consider using debian, mint, mxlinux, popos, or zorin as alternatives.  All of these are derived from the same base and will operate similarly.

New Social Media Service

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     In an attempt to further the freedom of speech, I have added a new Misskey social media site to Eskimo North.  It can be reached through our Web-Apps menu on the main website https://www.eskimo.com/ or directly at https://misskey.eskimo.com/.

     It is a minimal setup at present so not super pretty but I’ll fill it out as time permits.

     This joins our other social media sites, https://friendica.eskimo.com/, https://hubzilla.eskimo.com/, https://mastodon.eskimo.com/, https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/ and our federated search engine https://yacy.eskimo.com/.

Ice / Redundancy Setup

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Just a heads up on how things are going with Ice and general redundancy measures.  I’ve got cron jobs in place to distribute SSL certs across all of the physical machines so any one physical machine being alive will be adequate to get access to SSL certs.

I’ve got a 5th name server running as a virtual machine on my machine at home so even if the co-lo is down entirely incoming e-mail will not be lost.

I’ve got a cron job copying /home and mail spool to another machine so either machine being down, I will still have a way of making these things accessible.

I’m still working on ice.  It turned out both Asus memory boards I have had dead memory channels, one because pins are missing from the CPU socket but the other is a mystery.  I can not see any missing or bent pins, yet, the BIOS sees all the DIMMS even though the CPU does not so this still points to a socket problem, perhaps a bad solder connection or open trace.

So I ordered another board, but did not pay adequate attention to the description, it was a parts board so not usable.  The seller agreed to take it back if I paid shipping even though he had said no returns up front.  Thank God some decent people still exist.

Then I ordered another board, this one supposedly working, well it arrived and had a minor problem.  Someone broke a screw off for the nvme drive in one of the mounts.  I was unable to get it out of the mount so ordered a kit for $6 off of amazon that contains mounts and mounting screws and I will just replace it.  A pain as I have to take the board out again as I can not get to it from the back.

But still moving forward…