For those of you who remember the OLD BBS, from 1982-1985, it was written in a modified basic that I called ComBASIC which has BASIC syntax and keywords but also had additional keywords for BBS functionality such as TYPE(filename) which would send a file to the RS-232 and screen paged.

I wrote ComBASIC in Z-80 assembly because there were no host programs available for the TRS-80 in the early days and the operating system didn’t know how to use the RS-232 port.  Also, Microsoft BASIC was painfully slow and I was able to get about a 40% improvement in BASIC interpretation speed, fix some bugs, and implement other things that were just too slow in BASIC.  Them were the days of “real programming”. 🙂

Well, those that miss playing with those old 80’s computers, I’ve got vintbas (Vintage Base) online now for your enjoyment on shellx.  To use it, create a basic program using any text editor, save it with an extension of ‘.bas’, and then run it as "vintbas program.bas".

Sorry no manual page was provided with it.  It’s actually implemented in Haskell, which is also available on shellx for your use.

I’ve added a new webpage that describes how Eskimo North’s spam filtering works and how to customize it to your needs and preferences.

Please see:

     http://www.eskimo.com/support/mail/spam_control.html

WordPress 3.6 has been released.  We’ve updated the version available in /misc/wordpress to version 3.6.

If you’re running an older version, go to your Dashboard and click on the little symbol with two arrows pointing at each other, that’s WordPress updates, and select the update option and it will update to 3.6 automatically.

Our web server has been updated to Apache 2.4.6.  Apache 2.4.5 was skipped because it was never released.

I’ve compiled SpamAssasin’s system-wide rules.  I tested from a gmail account to check delivery times.  Before it took 35 seconds for gmail mail to be delivered to a local mailbox.  Compiling the SpamAssassin system-wide rules reduced that to 5 seconds.

I have SSL working on the main web server.  You won’t see a lock on everything, even if you go there with https, because there is insecure data included such as the counter from histats, on some pages and that prevents your browser from showing a lock on those pages.

I have secured webmail, forums, and the new user application for shells.  It will take a bit to get everything secure but at least where you enter sensitive data it is in most places now.

Also, now that this is working, those of you who have virtual domains, if you want SSL on your virtual domain, this is something I can provide for you.  You will only need to purchase an SSL certificate and I will install it for you.

I’m still in the process of trying to get SSL to work properly on the web server.  In the process, I found out how to make ~user directories not show up on virtual domains so that is fixed now.

This may have unintended consequences if you are using CGI’s in your cgi-bin directory from your domain.  If so let me know and I’ll make necessary adjustments to your domain.

I will be doing some maintenance activity today that may result in very brief interruptions (less than one minute) and then just after midnight rebooting servers to make software updates go into effect, particular an update to glibc which is a standard library used by virtually all C programs (which is almost everything).

The reboots will take place between 12:05AM and 12:30am on July 14th, 2013.Those of you who have background tasks running on the shell server that do not restart automatically will need to restart them after the reboots.

Bayesian spam filtering (spam filters that LEARN what is spam and what is not based upon examples YOU send to them) are now implemented system wide.

Please send any spam you receive that isn’t properly classified as spam to: spamtrap@eskimo.com.  You can also send any other examples of spam to this address to help train the filters.

To properly function these filters also need examples of ‘ham’, non-spam.  Please send any copies of legitimate mail that get placed in your spam box or just any other legitimate mail you would like to make sure never gets improperly translated as spam to hamtrap@eskimo.com.  Please note, ham can ONLY be sent from eskimo accounts but spam can spam can be sent from anywhere.

For those of you who have WordPress blogs (or other web applications that can benefit from caching), we have memcached installed on the web server.

To take advantage of it, WordPress needs a plugin, and although there are many that are available, unless you like endlessly fiddling with configurations to get things to work, I recommend “Tribe Object Cache” because it is very simple to install and it is also effective at improving overall speed of your WordPress blog or other applications that are able to take advantage of memcached.

To install Tribe Object Cache on your WordPress blog, all you have to do is go to the Dashbord, select Plugins, and then Select “Add New”.  In the Search box put the words “tribe cache” and it will be the first thing to show up.  Select install tribe object cache now, and then activate tribe object cache now, and that’s it!

This will cause various objects to be cached in memory speeding up your blog or other memcached enabled web application.