Ubuntu is upgraded to 24.04 Noble but outgoing e-mail is presently broken. Please use another shell server to send or reply to e-mail. I am still working on it.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Ubuntu – Upgrade in Progress
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.
Friendica.Eskimo.Com – Down for a couple of Hours
I was not where I thought I was and did an rm -rf removing the friendica directory in the process. So it’s being restored from compressed backups. Because the partition that is backed up is 13TB partition, this is going to take a little while.
New Social Media Service
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
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…
Anki
At the request of one of our customers, “anki” has been installed on all of our shell servers. The version installed is the qt6 version from the ankiweb website with the exception of Mint.
On the Mint server, the distribution version is installed because system security would not permit some of the actions required by the install script.
For servers available see: https://www.eskimo.com/services/shells/servers/
Presently quacamole and vnc access is broken on manjaro and rocky8.
SSH, rdp, and x2go works on all of the servers.
For those without an account, free trials: https://www.eskimo.com/services/free-trial/
Alma Linux
A new shell server based upon the Alma Linux distribution is now available. The server name is “alma.eskimo.com”. It is available via ssh, vnc, rdp, and guacamole.
To access via guacamole (web) go to https://www.eskimo.com/
Then hover over web apps and select Terminal or Desktop. At the login prompt type “public” in both the login and password fields. Then select Alma Terminal or Alma Desktop, as you prefer, from the menu. Then type your login and password when prompted.
I believe it is reasonably complete, but if there is software not present that you would like, please send email to support@eskimo.com.
If you do not have an account with us, sign up for a free trial: https://www.eskimo.com/services/free-trial/
Some Cable Providers Blocking Port 22
If you are having issues connecting to a shell server using port 22, we have found at least one cable company is blocking connections to port 22. On most of our shell servers, we also listen to port 443. If ssh times out, try “ssh -p 443 server.eskimo.com”. Substitute “server” with the desired host, i.e., ubuntu, debian, rocky8, etc.
Inuvik
Our Inuvik server which hosts manjaro, friendica, hubzilla, mastodon, and yacy, proved to be unstable under 6.11.4 as it was on 6.11.3, so I am headed over to the co-lo facility to reboot back onto 6.11.2 which is stable. Estimated return to service time 01:15 Pacific Daylight Time.
Maintenance Work Is Complete
Inuvik now has a brand new Seasonic 1200 watt supply, it also has the good thermal paste now which lowered CPU max temps by about 10C, and I wire tied the fans to the heat sink because the fan clips kept slipping off.
It took me longer than expected because I forgot two of the drives required a power adapter because they had a feature for remote power control that utilized one of the power pins and without said adapter they would not power up. In addition, I accidentally hit the bios erase button instead of the power button and had to reset all the settings, but it is done and operational.
All of the services it is supporting, roundcube, yacy, friendica, hubzilla, and mastodon, are now all operational.