I’ve been working hard over the last year to upgrade and update the infrastructure.  New web and ftp servers, new shell servers, entirely new mail infrastructure, new DNS servers, a move to a new co-location facility.

The new shell server supports a graphical user interface, is much faster than the old servers, and much more robust and stable.  It has a far richer set of applications than the old.  I’ve increased the standard disk quota from 400MB to 1GB.

The new mail servers allow encrypted sessions from customers (SSL or TLS) and when they connect to remote sites that also have TLS capability, they send and receive e-mail over the Internet TLS encrypted.  We allow up to 50MB of attachments though not all remote sites will receive attachments that large.

We’ve fixed many problems such as the inability to initiate a pop-3 session if you are at quota, or problems that resulted when your e-mail as accessed via multiple devices.

We’ve greatly enhanced the spam filtering and changed things so that spam is now kept in your spam folder rather than rejected giving you the option of reviewing it in the event expected mail does not arrive.  You now have the ability to configure spam filtering individually, to whitelist or blacklist addresses or domains, to set the sensitivity of spam filtering, or to adjust individual rules.

The new client mail server allows multiple imap sessions from multiple devices concurrently.

Our mail service allows you to receive e-mail by webmail, shell mailers, imap, or pop and you can freely switch between the different methods at your convenience.

No longer are we suffering the service outages of the past, web and mail are now stable.

In spite of all these things, I’m not seeing an increase in new users, and to survive long term, I need to increase the user base.  Also, from a purely personal standpoint, I really miss the old days when we had a pretty strong local community here.

So, please, tell me what you need to make Eskimo valuable for you and that would help you feel good about telling new potential customers about us.

You can leave comments here, post on our Forums at http://www.eskimo.com/bbs, or e-mail support.  I’d really appreciate it if you’d post on the forums as I’d like to get a good discussion going so that the future of Eskimo can be driven by your needs and desires.

New server for customer virtual servers is not behaving and now I am waiting on new RAM to arrive, expect that to happen about mid-July, then will be testing for several days to make sure it really fixes the problem.

Bayesian filtering for spamassassin system-wide, working on that, don’t have an ETA just yet but soon.

Working on upgrading the radius servers.  These really won’t affect service greatly as they are only used for dialup and DSL authentication but they and two shell servers (eskimo.com and shell.eskimo.com) are all that remain on old hardware and I’m trying to phase the rest of the old stuff out as it is  unmaintainable.

Also working on finding software that will run on the current platform to handle accounting as I’m also doing that on an old machine.

New help files for mail are in the works, I’ve taken screen shots for several common mailers (Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, and Thunderbird) and
am working on new web pages to replace the current out of date pages.

Working on getting the main web server SSL enabled, support is compiled in but working to get ‘www.eskimo.com’ certificate in place and configured properly.

After I get the website SSL enabled, I am going to work on adding ability for customers to do things like alter spam settings, check quota, account status, etc, online.

Once I get SSL working for our website it will also be an option for customers with virtual domains or web hosting plans here.

Generally working towards bringing the entire website to HTML5 compliance.

These are some of the projects currently in the works just to let you folks all know what is in progress.

I’ve totally replaced the old phpBB forums with new MyBB forum software.  Since there hasn’t been any activity in more than 100 days, other than spammers, I completely deleted the old database.

I’ve created only two categories initially, Eskimo North Support and Chatter.  I would like your input with regards to others you’d like created so that it can grow organically.

Please take a look at http://www.eskimo.com/bbs

Thank you.

Servers that were recently retired are up for grabs but only until this Friday at which point they’re going down to RePC.  These are dual core Ultra-2 400Mhz Sparc V9 (64-bit) CPU’s.  The machines have between 1-2 GB of RAM, two have 4GB of disk, one has 70.  If you want these call me quick at 206-812-0051 else they’re off to the recyclers on Friday.

The mutt mail program was misconfigured on shell and shellx resulting in mail being sent from those machines using mutt having from addresses of user@shell.eskimo.com and user@shellx.eskimo.com respectively.

This in turn caused people replying to e-mail from those incorrect addresses to have their e-mail bounced.

Not all customers experienced this problem as many who were more familiar with mutt simply added set domain=eskimo.com to their .muttrc files.

I have now added this to the system wide /etc/Muttrc file so it will now generate e-mail with correct From addresses.

Just after midnight tonight there will be a maintenance outage that
involves reboot of virtually all of our servers with the exception of
‘eskimo.com’ and ‘shell.eskimo.com’ to load new Linux kernels and other
updates. There will also be downtime of some of the servers to image them
after recent changes. This maintenance will take approximately one hour to
complete. The main file server will be first and the longest outage, about
20 minutes, the others will be brief.

When installing a signed encryption certificate last night I made a typographical error that caused outbound mail to get stuck in queue and not send.

I discovered that someone was wrong this morning when a customer sent me e-mail around 8am, (incoming and local to local was good).

It took me four hours to find it but it has been corrected, all mail in queue is sent, and mail is processing normally.

I will be taking this system down about five minutes after midnight Saturday morning June 8th (just after midnight tonight) to image the machine now that I have it in a working configuration.

I’ve changed the system procmail rules as follows:

DROPPRIVS=yes
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
INCLUDERC=/etc/mail/spamassassin/spamassassin-default.rc
:0:
* ? test ! -f $HOME/.procmailrc
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
spam

The reason for this change is so the system procmail rules won’t put mail scored as spam in a spam folder with giving user procmail rules a chance to override.

If you have a .procmailrc file and want mail scored as spam to go into a spam folder, then you need a rule like this:

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
spam

If you’d rather have mail that scores as spam discarded, then you need a rule like this:

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
/dev/null

If you have no .profmailrc file, then the default behavior is still to put mail marked as spam in your spam folder.

On the very first Unix version of Eskimo running Xenix on a Tandy 16B, then later Tandy 6000, and on our SunOS shell server eskimo.com, we had a number of BSD text based games such as adventure, hack, phantasia, etc.

I have installed on shellx, a BSD game package that makes many of these available again.  They are located in /usr/games and to run them you need to add /usr/games to your $PATH variable.  You can do this by adding to your .profile or .kshrc or other appropriate shell start up file:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/games

This is a list of available games:

---x--s--x 1 games 178794 May 22 17:04 adventure
---x--s--x 1 games  20925 May 22 17:04 arithmetic
---x--s--x 1 games 132577 May 22 17:04 atc
---x--s--x 1 games 123623 May 22 17:04 backgammon
---x--s--x 1 games 247737 May 22 17:04 battlestar
---x--s--x 1 games  14026 May 22 17:04 bcd
---x--s--x 1 games  13112 May 22 17:04 caesar
---x--s--x 1 games  54952 May 22 17:04 canfield
---x--s--x 1 games  13289 May 22 17:04 cfscores
---x--s--x 1 games   3798 May 22 17:04 countmail
---x--s--x 1 games  24287 May 22 17:04 fish
---x--s--x 1 games 218013 Nov 10  2010 gtetrinet
---x--s--x 1 games 737118 May 22 17:04 hack
---x--s--x 1 games  36197 May 22 17:04 hangman
---x--s--x 1 games  67689 May 22 17:04 hunt
---x--s--x 1 games 124320 May 22 17:04 huntd
---x--s--x 1 games  85703 May 22 17:04 mille
---x--s--x 1 games  96662 May 22 17:04 monop
---x--s--x 1 games  15821 May 22 17:04 morse
---x--s--x 1 games  18387 May 22 17:04 number
---x--s--x 1 games 156762 May 22 17:04 phantasia
---x--s--x 1 games  14437 May 22 17:04 pig
---x--s--x 1 games  19492 May 22 17:04 pom
---x--s--x 1 games  14231 May 22 17:04 ppt
---x--s--x 1 games  85412 May 22 17:04 primes
---x--s--x 1 games  34484 May 22 17:04 quiz
---x--s--x 1 games  17422 May 22 17:04 rain
---x--s--x 1 games  14351 May 22 17:04 random
---x--s--x 1 games  72454 May 22 17:04 robots
---x--s--x 1 games   2001 May 22 17:04 rot13
---x--s--x 1 games 213871 May 22 17:04 sail
---x--s--x 1 games  41302 May 22 17:04 snake
---x--s--x 1 games  12627 May 22 17:04 snscore
---x--s--x 1 games 123297 May 22 17:04 teachgammon
---x--s--x 1 games  57680 May 22 17:04 tetris-bsd
---x--s--x 1 games 225757 May 22 17:04 trek
---x--s--x 1 games   2157 May 22 17:04 wargames
---x--s--x 1 games  23860 May 22 17:04 worm
---x--s--x 1 games  22285 May 22 17:04 worms
---x--s--x 1 games   1166 May 22 17:04 wtf
---x--s--x 1 games  36197 May 22 17:04 wump

Prozilla, a file transfer program that tends to do better in terms of transfer speeds than most, is now available on shellx.  This would be used for grabbing something from a remote site and bringing it to shellx efficiently.

Prozilla has the ability to make multiple connections to multiple servers and download from all of them to obtain better speeds than any one of them might provide.

The command is ‘proz’, you can type ‘proz –help’ to see a list of options, or ‘man proz’ to get a manual page from the command line.