Dislikes

— dislikes —
I don’t do as much Unix as I used to so I’m not keeping up and it isn’t as easy to
remember stuff I used to do.

— dislikes —
can’t think of anything.

— dislikes —
Sometimes I have trouble understanding the technical aspects of a server

— dislikes —
Nothing

— dislikes —
My high speed access is via Skynetbb microwave link to a terminal on a neighbor’s
hangar thence a (radio, again) LAN. So if neighbor loses power or Skynetbb is
nuked for any reason, I’m out of touch. (Not a big deal, I have a dog who loves
attention and books.)

— dislikes —
nothing, your doing a great job

— dislikes —
I develope/maintain on Debian. I had considered second versions on centOS after
Eskimo shellx became available. Now it seems Eskimo may be forced to Scientific. I
will stay with supporting one version on debian.


Debian is at debian.eskimo.com, graphical access is via x2go only, no NX or VNC. Scientific Linux is available at scientific.eskimo.com, x2go, NX, and VNC all available.  It is almost identical to the existing CentOS.

— dislikes —
I have discovered that some emails would not get through to me. It’s been difficult
to resolve which end was at fault, and most troubling would be the emails that I
wasn’t aware of that might never have been received.


If mail doesn’t get through, Look in your spam box.  We only reject mail if it contains a virus, in which case we tell the sending side which virus their e-mail is infected with. Mail scored as spam is accepted but placed in your spam folder.


— dislikes —
occasional downtime with no news


This happened in my absence.  The old unreliable infrastructure has been replaced with modern Intel based systems running the most current Centos and Scientific Linux releases. The only downtime regularly experienced now are maintenance periods early Saturday mornings from around midnight-2am, and when these occur they are posted in advance in Eskimo News.  We have also had a couple of updates go bad that have interrupted specific services briefly and one that affected all the machines for a couple of hours.  In cases where our web server is down, we post to Yahoo Groups, Facebook, and Twitter.


— dislikes —
No real complaints.

— dislikes —
There are simply many features that I don’t use — games and such. For me, the
biggest annoyance is the TINY SIZE of the login interface for webmail/squirrel mail.
I access this page from many devices including pad devices and it is so hard not to
fatfinger when I am logging in. If you simply made the boxes bigger that would be a
huge improvement. There are annoyances about the layout of the web mail interface
(the location of the delete button makes no sense at all, for example) but these
issues are so minor in comparison with my having problems logging in that it’s not
worth talking about.

— dislikes —
Not a strong dislike at all. Sometimes when I am troubleshooting I can’t find stuff
on your website. I lost my harddrive and had to reset up my email info but found it
hard to locate the instructions that would help me.

— dislikes —
I can’t think of anything that I dislike about Eskimo.

— dislikes —
You need to be a somewhat technical minded end-user to understand certain informal
updates. The fact that the main website looks a little bit “old school” may be a
little bit scary for new customers as businesses these days have those clean and
fancy websites with models with a big smile and a nice suit. Ex. godaddy.com

Another thing with Eskimo is that if you want a service, you have to order, pay and
wait for services to be set up manually, thus most providers these days the whole
process is automated.

I think that if Eskimo wants to move from us “good old schoolers” to the “new type
of customer” these days that don’t have much knowledge, there needs to be some sort
of Control Panel integrated to the web services, say Cpanel or similar so end-user
can get access other than the shell.


The reason I haven’t done Cpanel is that it is an indirect security risk. The way it requires the web server to be configured to work would be less secure than the way we have It. Long term project I’m working on is my own interpretation would would provide that instant gratification without the security and performance limitations of doing things the way Cpanel requires.  But this is a very large long term project.

If you make a CGI on most of these sites you’ll find all of them execute with the same UID, that of the web server, and in most cases they all operate on the same IP address as well, which means https can’t work properly except in the very newest browers.  Here, every users executable code executes with their own UID and each site has it’s own IP address so that https can be fully and properly supported.

The problem with executing code with the same UID is a flaw in one customers PHP or CGI code can jeopardize every site. The way we do it, a flaw in a customers code can only harm their site. And the need for https, anybody that’s been following the information Edward Snowden made available should understand the desirability of that.

And, I realize you are not a current customer, but generally most things, virtual domains, requests for WordPress, Drupal, Concrete5, and other similar apps, are setup within 15 minutes.


Also I think that some of the writing style on the website should be changed from
“me” to “us” as in an example: “Thank you for contacting us” or “We here at Eskimo
appreciate…” and so forth.

I will become a user again in not a long time I guess and I like Eskimo North a lot,
but again overall I think the services are a bit too complex and difficult for the
average Internet user to understand.

Average Internet users these days don’t really know a lot about Shells, DNS, IMAP,
FTP etc.

— dislikes —
the occasional service outage is inconvenient, but I know stuff happens & this is
rare enough it’s really not a bother.

— dislikes —
There are some tasks that, from my perspective, still need knowledge about Unix or
shell environments that I wish were offered in low-tech form. See my comment below
on “How to Improve Eskimo”.

I checked “Eskimo is just right” in the complexity box, but response #4 (“better
documented”) is also true.

— dislikes —
Nothing. In fact, I like everything about it. From the dial days to now!

— dislikes —
Can be out of commission for many hours. Annoying, but not disruptive.

— dislikes —
Not much

— dislikes —
I do not like 2abuse someone

— dislikes —
I have never gotten into the complexities.
I started a web page, but time hasn’t gotten me back to it.
I greatly appreciate you being there and don’t want to change.

My biggest dislike is not with Eskimo North, but the in between company for which we
gave up our hard wire phone. Now, when power is out, the phone is out and my Eskimo
North and 911 are no longer there. We are working on that.

— dislikes —
Nothing i dislike about eskimo

— dislikes —
No notice of disconnect when account is due. I routinely get disconnected and have
to call to make a credit card payment. I have thousands of things to keep track of
in my life. Sending me a bill a month before my account is due (for an annually
paid account) would be helpful in avoiding a surprise disconnection. Even an
automatic payment would be better.

Updates sometimes break things with no warning. I still don’t have my RPG game
files recompiled from the switch to the new equipment/OS version. I’ll find time
someday, but meanwhile I’ve lost what few players I had after the “long darkness”.

— dislikes —
Been a happy satisfied customer for almost 20 years.

— dislikes —
Interruptions with my email periodically. I’m not sure if it’s me or Eskimo but my
outgoing mail doesn’t work on occasion, like now. I sometimes can change the port
and then it will work again. Not this time though. I’ll just wait a day or so and
it will fix itself I hope.

— dislikes —
Nothing really. I’ve been around for years.

— dislikes —
I dislike the eskimo web when there is no network,nothing else!

— dislikes —
Info and documentation is missing or hard to find.

Recent Posts

Outage Difficulties

First some background..

     Our old web server was over burdened, particularly when it came to RAM.  Also it booted off a rotary disk and only the mariadb was on nvme memory thus it was slow to boot.  Linux likes having a lot more RAM than it needs because it uses any not required by something else as I/O cache and this speeds up average disk latency considerably because frequently required items will always be in memory.  Cache was configured as write-back so system never slowed waiting on writes.  The disks themselves had 512MB buffers so even if it waited on the drive it would not have to wait for physical write to media.

     So I decided to build a new server, and for this new server I had several things on the wish list.  One, it would address more RAM, and for this reason primarily I went with an i9-10900x CPU.  This CPU could address 256GB of RAM and it had four memory channels instead of two.  It also had ten cores and twenty threads, a step up from six cores and twelve threads.  The primary limit to this CPU’s performance is cooling. It’s rated a TDP of 165 watts but this is at stock 3.6Ghz clock.  One does not buy a binned ‘X’ CPU to run at stock speed.

     Some testing revealed this was electrically stable up to about 4.7Ghz but at 4.7Ghz busy it drew 360 watts of power.  I used a Noctua 15D cooler, but rather than use the stock quiet fans, I used some noisy after market fans that produced about twice the CFM and about 10x the noise level but if you’ve ever been in a data center, noise is not a big concern.  With these fans testing revealed that it could keep the CPU at or below 90C at 4.6Ghz and at that speed it drew 320 watts.

     I wanted to avoid a water based cooler because at home you get a leak and you ruin a few thousand worth of equipment.  In a data center you get a leak, it goes into the under the floor power and you burn down a building and go out of business.

     So I only had to give up about 2-1/2% of the performance of this CPU to avoid water cooling, not bad.  Then I wanted everything on RAID and I wanted all the time sensitive data on nvram so it would go fast.  I tried to find a hardware nvme RAID controller but if they make such a beast I was unable to find one.  I could only find “fake raid” devices, these work with Whenblows but but not Linux.

     So I ended up going with software RAID.  The one thing I could not RAID was the EFI system partition because this is read by the machines UEFI and it does not know about Linux software RAID.  So while that was un-raided, I had duplicated the EFI system disk on each nvme drive so if one drive failed the system would still be bootable and all I had to do to keep them in sync was modify the scripts that installed a kernel to do a grub-install to both devices.

     And it worked for a while.  Then we lost our forth router there (fried) and at that point I decided to spring for a Juniper router.  The reason I went with this brand is that when we first moved our equipment to the co-lo at ELI, they used Junipers and we never once had a data outage there and they were not at all easy to packet flood which is what made it possible for us to run IRC servers there.  After Citizens bought them, they sold the Junipers and replaced them with Ciscos and packet flooding then took the whole co-lo center which basically left us in a situation where either we got rid of the IRC server or they got rid of us.  So having had such a good experience with the routers there I decided to go that route.  But it’s a command syntax I’m not entirely familiar with and I’m still learning (it is similar to Cisco’s but not the same).

     Meanwhile I decided to use one of the Linux boxes as a router and I used the newest server only because at the time it was the only machine with multiple interfaces.  But it was not stable routing and I did not understand why but after a bit I moved it to another machine that I just put a 1G Intel ethernet into it.  It ran for a bit then ate it’s interface card and became unstable.  I had some spare cards but they all had realtek chipsets.  What I didn’t know about Realtek is that the Linux drivers for them are absolute crap.  They work ok at 100mb/s but a 1Gb/s they randomly loose carrier or cycle up and down.  So I put one of these cards in a machine and set it up to act as a router, that lasted about two days before it crashed.  I went over and found no carrier lights, but after playing with it for a while I thought ok, this is just a bad card and so went to replace it thinking it was a 20 minute job.

     Three cards later and now 10AM the next day it still wasn’t working so I drove from the co-location facility down to Re-PC and picked up an Intel based industrial model 4-port card, these are much more robust requiring multiple PCIe lanes so  you need to use a big slot but that’s ok as I only had a wimpy graphics card that only required one.  That solved the networking issue for now.  The Juniper still will be a better solution but I could completely saturate the 1G interface so we’re not losing any speed with this arrangement.

     But the fun and games were still not over.  I got all of the machines up and running except the new web server.  For some reason it would not automatically assemble the RAID arrays and come up online.  It would go into emergency mode.  There I could type mdadm –assemble –scan and it would assemble the RAID partitions and I could mount them and bring the machine up, but if it crashed while I wasn’t there it would not come up on it’s own.  I spent until 6pm trying to troubleshoot and fix, in the past when this has happened it has always either been an issue with the EFI system partition, and I had already re-installed grub 32 times to no avail, or it was a problem with the initramfs, solved by re-creating it, but neither of those things were the cause and I wasn’t successful at locating the error causing it in the logs.

     So finally at 6pm I just re-installed Linux and resolved myself to recovering everything from backups.  So I re-installed Linux, went home, and by then 8pm, I had been working on this for about 33 hours without sleep (I had started working on it at home before deciding to go down and swap out the Network Interface cards).  So went to sleep.

     This morning I proceeded to work on installing software and restoring things from backups and getting the machine configured again and part of that process required a reboot, from which it did not recover.  So I drove to the co-lo thinking I just forgot to configure the proper boot partition in the UEFI bios or something like that and instead found it in the same condition it was in before I installed Linux.

     But this time after a number of attempts I caught an error message it through that was only on the screen for I would guess less than a tenth of a second and what I noticed was that it started with initrd, suggesting an issue with the initramfs, it took about ten more reboots to make out that the message was: initrd: duplicate entry in mdadm.conf file.

     So I checked and sure enough the system had added an entry to those I had entered by hand, identical.  So I took the extra entry out, did a chattr +i file to mark the file immutable so the operating system didn’t modify it for me again, and went home, hoping I could finish restoring it to service, but when I got home it was again dead.

     I drove back to the co-location center (and it is 25 miles each way) it was on but did not have power.  So I power cycled the power supply and it came back up, but by the time I got home it was dead again..  If I move the cord around it goes on and off so I am assuming there is a bad connection from the pin on the end side, maybe a cold solder joint or something.  At any rate, I ordered a new supply which should get here between 2pm-6pm tomorrow and will go back and replace it when it arrives.  Right now I also have one customer on this new machine, MartinMusic.com, so before I replace it I will try to grab the data for his website just in case it is something else so that I can put it on the old server until this one is solid.

     So hopefully I can get this stable and then go back to learning the Juniper syntax and get that installed.  Then I’m going to work on upgrading the old web server for other work.  The motherboard has one bad USB port on it now so not really sure how long it is going to last.

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