The shell servers:

     scientific.eskimo.com
     debian.eskimo.com
     pclinux.eskimo.com

are restored to service.

The physical host which hosts these machines is down.  We are working to restore it to service as soon as possible.  A technician has been dispatched to reboot.

Maintenance activity for this morning is completed with the exception of some compression and dump jobs which are eating a lot of CPU cycles and so may slow some things slightly until they complete.

I’ve replaced the HiStats counter on our home page with some PHP code that tracks visits in a local database.

I did this because the HiStats counter didn’t work when called from a secure page, was implemented in JavaScript and thus didn’t work with browsers that didn’t have JavaScript enabled, and was often slow or unresponsive delaying the loading of our page.

The new counter is implemented in PHP, all the work is done on the server side and so it is completely transparent to the end user and just looks like ordinary HTML code.

It should provide more reliable statistics.

Our telephones are back up.

Our business telephones are down at present.  We get our telephone service from Comcast and Comcast is broken at the moment and can’t schedule anyone until tomorrow afternoon.

If you can’t get through on our phones, please e-mail support@eskimo.com instead.  Fortunately, I have a T1 to our co-location facility so I do have another way of getting to e-mail and our hosts.

I will be rebooting and taking machines out of service for imaging early Saturday morning on June 7th, 2014.

There will be an initial outage that affects all services when the main file server is rebooted, lasting about 15 minutes, and then after that individual machines will be taken down, imaged, and rebooted.

This is a maintenance outage for the company we use to provide DSL back haul for DSL Customers on CenturyLink circuits. This outage will affect the greater Seattle area.

Date: 6/2/2014
Start time: 10:59 pm PDT
End time: 12:00 am PDT
Affected: Internet Transit in Seattle

Detail:

Maintenance is being performed make adjustments to the core router in Seattle. This requires a reboot of the core router and customers should expect around 15 minutes of downtime.

Those of you who have NetFlix, I’d like to recommend a film there called “Terms and Conditions May Apply“.  It’s a very excellent documentary regarding privacy and the lack thereof.

I am experimenting with RoundCube as a possible replacement for SquirrelMail.  The reason for considering an alternative is primarily the need to provide a mail client that is responsive, that is that adapts to the display and device that it’s being used with.  SquirrelMail is good for desktops but not so good for tablets and smartphones.