I’ve sent mail to folks to encourage you to try NX to connect to shellx if you haven’t yet because it opens up so many new tools and features.

For those of you who haven’t done so yet, please see:

http://www.eskimo.com/shell/gui.html

It does pain me when people leave without having any idea all of the new things that are available here.  If you develop web pages, there are two tools on shellx that you should be aware of, KompoZer and KLinkStatus.

KompoZer

KompoZer is a web editor that is very similar in terms of look and feel to Dreamweaver.  Dreamweaver has more bells and whistles but this has most of the basics you need and it’s included with the service, no need to buy and install expensive software on your computer.

KompoZer can edit files locally or FTP publish.  That means you can use it to edit your websites here locally and any changes will be made live instantly.  You can also use it to ftp publish, which means you can use it to edit your websites elsewhere as well.

KompoZer features a WSIWIG “Design” view, a syntax hi-lighted “Code” view, or a split screen in which you can see any changes you make in the code immediately reflected in the design view, or changes you make in the design window reflected in the code.

KompoZer has tabbed files so you can open up your CSS in one tab and HTML in another, and JavaScript in third and readily switch between them.

KompoZer can be invoked from the Gnome Desktop as Applications->Programming->Kompozer.

KLinkStatus

Google attempts to provide a good experience for the end user and to that end, they tend to rank sites which are technically correct higher than sites that have HTML errors or dead links.

Content on the web comes and goes and moves around.  As time passes, a percentage of links become invalid for one reason or another.  The page is gone and there is a 404 error.  The page is redirected to somewhere else.  The server is gone and the page times out.  Manually regularly checking link status is a tedious job that consumes a lot of time and often tends not to get done.

KLinkStatus to the rescue.  KLinkStatus will crawl even a large site in just a few minutes, smaller sites in seconds, and find all broken links turning a once tedious chore into a trivial snap.

KlinkStatus can be invoked from the Gnome Desktop as Applications->Programming->KLinkStatus.

MySQL databases are available to anyone with an account here; to obtain one all that you need to do is send e-mail to support@eskimo.com.  Include a password for the database.

The databases can be manipulated using the mysql client on shellx.eskimo.com.

From the shell server use mysql -h mysql.eskimo.com -u (your login) -p

… it will prompt for your database password.

From web pages, refer to the host as ‘localhost’, the mysql server, Apache web server, and ftp server all share the same host.

The mysql version as of this posting is 5.1.66.

Mozilla Sunbird is a cross-platform calendar application, built upon Mozilla Toolkit. It brings Mozilla-style ease-of-use to your calendar, without tying you to a particular storage solution.

Scribus is an desktop open source page layout program with the aim of producing commercial grade output in PDF and Postscript, primarily, though not exclusively for Linux.
While the goals of the program are for ease of use and simple easy to understand tools, Scribus offers support for professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, easy PDF creation, Encapsulated Postscript import/export and creation of color separations.

The program ccal, a curses based calendar, journal, diary, to-do list program has been installed on shellx.eskimo.com.

Abook, a text based address book for the mutt e-mail client has been installed on shellx.

Python3 has been installed on both shellx.eskimo.com and the web server so that it is available as a scripting language for your web pages as well.

In both cases, the path to Python3 is /usr/local/bin/python3 (in CGI scripts the first line should start with #!/usr/local/bin/python3).

Last night, December 28th, 2012, Eskimo North moved from an Integra co-location facility to an Isomedia facility.

First off, I want to thank the crew at Isomedia that worked with us to make this happen successfully.  In all we managed to accomplish this with less than two hours downtime.

The primary reason for our move was cost, Integra’s old rate was 1.5x what Isomedia charges, and they had in November sent me a notice that the rates were going up another $50, but when the invoice came they were $673, and I’ve yet to get an explanation from any of my contacts there, making the new Integra rate 2.5x higher than their competitor.

Secondary reasons for that were service, the last time there was a commercial AC power outage, their generator failed to start and the UPS quickly drained and we were down for lack of power a number of hours.

Then there was the incident where they lost air conditioning in the facility, our web server went down and when I got there it was 108F in the building and when I called the NOC, they were totally unaware that anything was wrong.

Or while I was gone, and they failed to reach my son regarding payment and their solution was to shut our Internet connectivity off for a weekend, a fiasco that cost me a significant number of web hosting customers.

So those were some of my reasons for leaving.  That said, I’m impressed with Isomedia so far.  The facility is better lit, and instead of blowing hurricane force winds through the entire building they have air come up through the floor of the cabinet and exit out the top.  The lighting is much better.  And they have a nice thing they refer to as crash carts, role around carts with a keyboard and monitor that will allow most people not to have to bring one.  Unfortunately, we found the monitors couldn’t handle Sun video so we still had to bring a monitor for our Sun equipment, but it’s a nice plus.

The greatest thing though is the people, Robb and Martin and Eric, all of you guys are great and I really appreciate your attitude of partnering with your customers and commitment to find a way to get it done.

Eskimo North was started as a single line computer BBS (bulletin board system), back in 1982, running on a 2 Mhz Z-80 based Trs-80 model III with a whopping 48kb of RAM and two single sided 40 track floppy drives which held about 180kb of data, or 144kb on the system disk.

After getting involved with a project to port Minibin to my host driver and vice versa, it became a Minibin-derived room message system.

In 1985, when we went to a Xenix system, I looked for some way to provide similar functionality and for a while we ran an MMBBS (MicroMagic BBS) that was a Unix Citadel like clone, but it really never enjoyed much popularity.

Still, I liked and missed the old room style message systems because they seemed to promote more intelligent conversations than most other computer media.

I put up a phpBB forum here, which is a web based forum, at first it got some use but that died down.  I think the combination of the old server being painfully slow for PHP applications and spam and the fact that users couldn’t create forums all contributed to that.  The speed issue has been resolved and the spammers brought under control, so I’m hoping it might revive.

But, I’ve also added a Citadel BBS now and opened it up to the public, anyone can join, post, and create rooms (topics).  It can be accessed either as a web forum or you can telnet to it.

To access from the web go to http://citadel.eskimo.com:8080/

To access via telnet, type telnet citadel.eskimo.com

If you are coming in from Windows you can type the telnet command from the DOS command prompt.

There is a bug in the telnet portion that is causing it to not accept connections from MacIntosh machines, but there is also a work around.  If you’re on a Mac, connect to one of the shell servers.

If you telnet in to citadel.eskimo.com, you’ll get the old familiar interface very much like you used to get if you dialed in.  I haven’t created a bunch of rooms because I want you folks to create things that interest you.

To create a room:

If you telnet in, type .Enter Room and give it a room name.

If you access via the web, Select the “Advanced” options from the menu on left, then on the right under Advanced Room Commands, select the Create Room option.

The Citadel is free to everyone that doesn’t abuse it so invite your friends.  Spammers aren’t welcomed and will be ejected.

I’ve replaced our old UltraSparc machine running Apache 1.3.3 under Redhat 6.2, with a new sever running Apache 2.4.3 under Centos 6.3.  PHP has been upgraded to 5.3.3, MySQL 5.1.66, and Perl to 5.10.1.

This allows running modern applications like WordPress, Drupal (Drupal 6 works properly at this point, there is currently some issues with Drupal 7), the current version of SquirrelMail, CopperMine, and phpBB.

What you are reading here now is a blog using WordPress.  I used to blog using Blogger.com and FTP publishing to publish to my website here.  Shortly after Google ate Blogger, they discontinued FTP publishing leaving me and a lot of others in a lurch.

WordPress has available a Blogger Import module.  I used it to move my blogs from Blogger over to WordPress and get them back to where I could post, in the original locations.

The import module mostly worked.  I failed to import any links I had to video.  Otherwise I got my blogs back pretty easy, and, so can you!  To set up a WordPress blog, all you need to do is login to shellx.eskimo.com and cd to your public_html directory.  Decide where you want your blog to be, suppose it’s ~username/blog (blog in your home directory), cp the WordPress files to that location.  I’ve made that easy for you by unpacking a copy of wordpress into /misc/wordpress.

cd public_html

cp -a /misc/wordpress blog

Then with your browser, go to http://www.eskimo.com/~username/blog

If you do not yet have a MySQL database, request one from support.  That will happen fast now because I’ve scripted adding new users to MySQL so I no longer have to get my MySQL book out and try to remember how to setup the grant tables because it’s been six years since last time.  Now I just type ‘myadd username’ and boom, it’s done.

So once you have that, WordPress will inform you that you don’t have a config file, and offer to create one.  You accept, and will prompt for a database name, that will be the same as your username, which it will also prompt for, and a password.  If you already have a MySQL database, the password will be whatever it is, if you ask me to create one, include the password you wish to use.  Lastly, it will ask for the table prefix which by default will be ws_. The only reason you might wish to change this is that you have more than one WordPress installation (if you maintain multiple blogs as I do, that will be the case), then do something like ws_blogname_ instead of just ws_.

Now click the install button, then login to your new blog and begin customizing as you desire.  There are a gazillion themes to choose from and the majority have a great deal of ability to be customized.

As a general rule, you want to install the plugins you need and not more than you need because each additional plugin is that much more PHP code to load and execute and so slows the overall performance of your blog.

For example, to import a blog from blogger, you’ll need the blogger import plugin, but after you’ve imported the blog, you no longer need it so get rid of it.