Spambots found Status.NET and trashed it out pretty bad today.  I spent around six hours deleting spam and bogus accounts.

I’ve added a captcha and some other measures to address this.

I’ve installed a plugin called “WP Status.net” which causes posts I make to our Eskimo North News blog to be cross-posted to our Status.net server.

If you have a blog and would like to have similar functionality, just go to your Dashboard, select “Plugins”, “Add New”, then specify Status.net in the search box.

Install and activate the plugin.  Then go down to settings and choose the WP Status.net plugin.  In the boxes put “www.eskimo.com/statusnet” as the server, “api” as the path, your username and password on Status.net here, and then save settings.

After that, any post you make to your blog will also show up in Status.net.

Requested by the same customer, Vera Zonglitch, who had requested Concinella and Ejabberd, we’ve installed StatusNet.

Access it at http://www.eskimo.com/statusnet or by selecting “StatusNet” from the web applications on our home page.

Per a request by the same customer that requested Coccinella, we have installed Ejabberd, an XMPP Instant messenging server on shellx.

To access it use Coccinella (a graphical application installed on shellx) or any other XMPP IM client on your machine and use host shellx.eskimo.com, port 5222, password authentication plain-text, do not require encryption as it is presently not working.

At the request of one of our customers, Vera Zonglitch, Coccinella, an instant messenger client that incorporates a whiteboard, has been installed on Shellx.

If there is any software applications that you would find useful that are currently not present on Shellx, please e-mail support@eskimo.com with your request.

Shellx.eskimo.com will now accept connections via VNC. Various resolutions and color depths are available:

• Port 5900 (display 0) 1024×768 Color Depth 16 bits
• Port 5901 (display 1) 800×600 Color Depth 16 bits
• Port 5902 (display 2) 640-480 Color Depth 16 bits
• Port 5903 (display 3) 1024×768 Color Depth 8 bits
• Port 5904 (display 4) 800×600 Color Depth 8 bits
• Port 5905 (display 5) 640×480 Color Depth 8 bits
• Port 5906 (display 6) 1680×1050 Color Depth 16 bits
• Port 5907 (display 7) 1280×800 Color Depth 16 bits

VNC is an older protocol for remote consoles.  NX is far superior in terms of performance and security, however, VNC is more widely available.  You can get VNC viewers for smart phones and tablets. NX is pretty much limited to Mac OS-X, Windows, and Linux.

On Apple, I recommend Chicken or Chicken-of-the-VNC, Chicken is an offshoot of Chicken of the VNC and works pretty much the same except that it has the ability to tunnel over ssh built-in.

If you are using “Chicken” or other VNC viewer that has built-in ssh tunneling, be aware that the login that ssh is going to try to use on the destination machine is the login you are using on the originating box.  If the VNC viewer gives you a place to add ssh options, you can add -l login (where login is your login here), otherwise, you will either need to change your login on your originating machine to match or setup an ssh tunnel manually.

On Linux, TigerVNC Viewer.

On Windows TightVNC Viewer.

Connecting to VNC directly is insecure because login, passwords, and any text typed goes over the connection unencrypted.  However, it is possible to forward over SSH and avoid these problems.  With Chicken or Chicken of the VNC, all you need do is check the box that says forward over ssh.  Your username on your machine must be the same as here for this to work because it doesn’t prompt for a login.  For other platforms you’ll need to setup forwarding manually.  I’ll write more about this after I figure it out myself.

This is an alternate way to get a full Gnome desktop from our server on your machine.  It is not as efficient as NX but less buggy.  You’ll get a better image and faster response with NX but NX sometimes takes multiple attempts to connect.  VNC is an older and very well established protocol and there are many VNC viewers available free.

ISOMEDIA will be performing maintenance on network core infrastructure Sunday, September 15th, between 1AM and 4AM Pacific Time. This work may cause two brief disruptions in connectivity lasting up to five minutes in duration while work is completed.

‘bip’ which is an IRC is now installed on shellx.  If you have been using it on shell, it is now available on shellx.

We will be taking various machines down for imaging and rebooting August 31st just after midnight, that is early Saturday morning.

This is necessary to create images for rapid restoration and to upgrade to a newer Linux kernel.

Downtime for any one machine should not exceed about fifteen minutes, but various servers will be affected when the main NFS server is rebooted, so there will be a time when other machines freeze in addition to their rebooting.

I expect maintenance activities will be concluded by approximately 1AM.