The fax machine has been replaced and now it’s in my office so I’ll actually notice when something arrives.

We’ve got a new way to connect graphically now, called x2go.

Go to http://www.x2go.org/

Go to the downloads section and download the client for your operating system, Windows, Mac, or various incarnations of Linux.  If you’re running CentOS or Scientific Linux, use the Fedora client, it works fine.

X2Go supports Sound in addition to display so now you can connect to shellx and get a remote desktop where sound works!

(I had sound working and now I broke it, but not sure if I just broke it for my account or everybody.  Also, the Mac client doesn’t work right, at least under Linux, the keyboard is scrambled.)

And, it’s EASY to setup.  All you need to do is create a new profile, put in the hostname, “shellx.eskimo.com”, select Gnome and full screen mode preferably (though you’re welcome to try the other display managers, I haven’t yet), and click on the profile.

Type in your password and go!

There is a problem with the Mac client, at least on Lion it won’t accept input at the password prompt.  I’d love to here from other Mac users with respect to this.

Okay there’s some bugs but this is new and it’s being actively developed so they’ll be worked out.

Friday, the 8th, I applied some updates and in the process PHP sessions stopped working.  This broke all the web applications online.

I was not able to quickly determine what was wrong, so I restored the machine from an image made a couple of weeks prior.

I forgot that I had changed all of the web addresses and ftp addresses so when I reverted to the previously imaged machine, none of the addresses the web server was configured to listen to matched the domains it was hosting.

I had to manually edit all the addresses in the conf file.  This took a little over two hours and as a result, service to all of the virtual domains was restored shortly after 1pm.  The FTP service was restored by about 3pm.

I have re-applied the updates that failed to work properly the first time, this time successfully, and imaged the machine with the updated addresses so if another restore is necessary in the future it won’t require recreating the httpd configuration by hand.

The maintenance that was scheduled to happen early this morning will instead happen just after midnight tonight.

I will need to reboot and image various servers because CentOS has released updates to libraries which require a reboot to activate.

No one machine should be down for more than about 15 minutes, but the entire process is expected to take around an hour to complete.

This will start about five minutes after midnight early Saturday morning and is expected to be completed by around 1AM.

There is presently a problem with DSL on CenturyLink circuits in Western Washington caused by a failure of an ATM card in a switch owned by the company that we use to provide DSL backhaul for CenturyLink circuits.

They have technicians working to restore service.

I’m looking for 56k wholesale providers, especially one that has service in Puerto Rico as GlobalPOPs will no longer be servicing that region as of November 1st.

If anyone knows of any, please e-mail support@eskimo.com.  Thank you.

I’ve spent the last year and a half pretty much re-working Eskimo’s infrastructure to address reliability, speed, and functional issues.

Now things are stable, fast, and more capable.  For example, mail now supports SSL or TLS encryption, not only between your mail client and our server, but also between other TLS encrypted servers.

Mail now supports access from multiple devices simultaneously without corrupting your INBOX.

Your INBOX quota has increased from 200MB to 1GB and even if quota is reached, you will always be able to retrieve your mail.  You will never be locked out because of the need for pop to duplicate your INBOX and not having the quota to do so.

Mail now allows you to customize spam filtering and has much more advanced virus and spam filtering than it had in the past.

Shell now supports graphical access and a full remote desktop, is much faster, and has many new applications including a full office suite, web development applications, software development applications, financial, and scientific applications.

The web server now supports SSL encryption and in addition has modern versions of PHP, Perl, and MySQL.  It’s also reliable and fast.

All of these improvements have reduced the rate that people leave but hasn’t increased the rate that new customers come and that’s a problem.

Please tell me what you need to make this relevant and useful to you today and also something that you’d want to tell your friends about.

You can e-mail support@eskimo.com or me personally at nanook@eskimo.com.

Thank you.

Because only one person volunteered to moderate and I’ve been spending hours a day deleting spam and can not continue to do that, I’ve set StatusNet to invite only which means in order to register an account you will need to get an invite from an existing user.

If you are an Eskimo North customer and would like access please e-mail support@eskimo.com.

If you are not an Eskimo North customer, you will need to know an existing StatusNet user here and contact them.

The captcha helped, it only took half an hour to clear out the spam this morning instead of six hours.

It is my belief that the people doing the spamming are SEO folks trying to get as many links to their customers websites out there as possible to improve their ranking.  Part of the reason I believe this is that every single spam consists of one sentence and a link.

These links are only valuable to them if they stay up there long enough for Google to crawl.  Getting them down as fast as possible reduces their incentive for spamming.

I am looking for volunteer moderators to delete spammers from StatusNet.  It is really very simple, you see a spam, you click on the username in the header.  On the right you get a moderate pull down, select delete.  It will ask for confirmation, you say yes, spammer and all his posts are gone.

If you would be interested in helping moderate Status.NET, please drop an e-mail to support@eskimo.com.

Thank you!