I’ve been trying to turn up a new server for oh, about six months.  Actually, had it working at one point, then it started crashing.

We replaced the motherboard, Carl did the physical install, and found the Ethernet not working.  Went through a process that was supposed to fix that but it didn’t so ended up reloading CentOS again.

Had a hard time getting virtual machines working, thought it was missing packages, ended up screwing up libraries so bad I had to reload the operating system, again.  But, in the process I discovered virtualization was disabled in the BIOS, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Then doing virtual servers on Linux requires setting up a network bridge by hand because the GUI tools don’t know bridges.  And I futzed that up and isolated the machine from the net in the process, so I have to go down again tonight but, my wife is at band and has the car so that will have to wait.

I am convinced this machine is possessed by evil spirits.

Well, I’m around for a couple of hours kind of stranded, so if anyone has something you need help with or some money you just have to unload, ..  yea wishful thinking I know, well, I’m here!

SMTP on both the incoming network servers, mx1 and mx2, and the client mail server, mail.eskimo.com, was down from approximately 13:20-13:25 PST on January 20th, 2014.

The outage resulted from an update to clamav-milter which overwrote a start-up script removing some necessary local customizations and causing the start of the newly updated clamav-milter to fail.

I checked the logs immediately after installing the updates so this was discovered and corrected within about five minutes.  I apologize for the brief interruption.

The main portion of the website color is changed in support of the Seahawks.

I am not a big football fan but did thoroughly enjoy today’s game.

I’m going to be out of the office between 3pm and about 7pm watching the Huskies game and chomping home-made pizza.

During that time I will have phones forwarded and will have access should there be something that needs addressing but the phone will probably be answered with “Hello”, so please ask for Eskimo North if you need to speak to me.

Spam/spam and Trash/trash mail folders are now automatically purged of any mail older than 30 days.

CentOS has been absorbed by RedHat.

Just to be clear, what follows is my opinion, for whatever it’s worth:

Although they make out like this is a good thing, I am unconvinced.  I think it’s mainly a good thing for a bunch of CentOS developers that got jobs with RedHat, but a bad thing for users of CentOS.

I’ve tried Fedora several times and it hasn’t worked well for me, bloated, ugly, generally dysfunctional.  I am concerned CentOS will now become like Fedora.

I believe this is by design.  RedHat presently is compiled from the same source RPMs as RedHat Enterprise Linux, with minor modifications mainly involving the changing of branding.  I think CentOS was competing too successfully with RedHat Enterprise Linux and so they absorbed it, basically bought the developers of CentOS in order to change it into something that will have less impact on their revenue stream.

What this means for Eskimo:

In the short-term it means there will probably be major upheavals at CentOS and the kind of problems we encountered in the upgrade from 6.4 to 6.5 will probably become more common.

In the long-term it means I am probably going to migrate towards Scientific Linux which is very similar to what CentOS has been, a Linux Distribution compiled from RHEL source RPMs.

Those of you who may have thoughts about how I can make Eskimo North better, please take a few moments to fill out a brief survey at: http://www.eskimo.com/advise/

I will be taking the web server down for about 20 minutes tomorrow (Friday 1/17/2014) to image the machine.  During this time web service and ftp service will be unavailable.

We do not use cookies to track your activities on the Internet but we do use them for session management for things like maintaining your identity from page to page in web mail.

We do have Google Ads on some of our pages and they track all sorts of things.  If you do not wish to be tracked by them but wish session management to work properly here, most browsers have a way of accepting cookies from the visited site but not third parties.

In Firefox, go into Preferences, Select the Privacy Tab, then where it says, “Firefox will: Remember History”, that is a pull-down bar.  Select Use Custom Settings for History.

Then under History, leave accept cookies from sites checked, but change accept third party cookies to “Never”.

That setting will allow sessions to work properly here and still prevent your activities on the Internet from being tracked by cookies.

Our little Rand-o-Dex script that outputs a random users web page is broken.  I’m not fluent in Perl and am having problems figuring out why it can’t access the list file.  Permissions appear to all be in order.

If someone fluent in Perl would be willing to lend me a hand troubleshooting and reviving this, it would be much appreciated.

Please e-mail nanook@eskimo.com.