Fedora was shut down unintentionally, it is back online.

     One of our name servers, ns3.eskimo.com, was down earlier.  I have restored it to service.  There were three others that were operational so this should have only caused a temporary delay in resolution if it happened to be the first chosen.

     A short while after I fixed Debian it ate itself again.  This time leaving itself in an unbootable state.  Rather than restoring from a stretch backup, I am doing a fresh install.  So much changed between stretch and buster that it is not surprising the upgrade wasn’t entirely smooth.

     It may take several days to get Debian back into a fully usable state.  In the meantime, other machines which provide a similar modern Debian based environment include Ubuntu, Mint, JuLinux, Zorin, and MxLinux.

     Around 7:15 PM this evening Debian networking went away.

     I logged into the console and everything at first appeared normal but I could not ping or connect to anything outside.

     I tried restarting networking, it was uneventful but did not restore connectivity.  I think restarted NetworkManager but it failed to start with the error stating it had been restarted too frequently.

     At this point I rebooted the machine.  After it came back up there was still no networking but the NetworkManager was working again.  I went in and found the Ethernet device was just gone.  I recreated it and now everything is working again.

     This must be a new NetPlan feature.   

     The Debian upgrade has been completed.  The shell server debian.eskimo.com is now “buster“, otherwise known as Debian 10.  It seems generally crisper.  I only had to sacrifice two programs to get it fully upgraded, eclipse an ide that wants jdk8, and buster is now jdk11, and a game, the name of which slips my mind now.

     Debian.eskmo.com is in the process of an upgrade from “stretch” to “buster”.  I did not expect it to interfere with service but it is currently not allowing logins.  I expect the upgrade to be completed sometime early this evening.

     X2go is fixed on Zorin.

     I’m banned from x2go-users list because I dared to disagree with Lord King Master Stephan Baur, the project owner. What will I do with the rest of my life? I know, I’ll install Guacamole on all my servers which provides the same functionality without the need for special client software except for an ordinary HTML5 compliant browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or Edge. Wait! I’ve already done that!

     To get a Desktop remote session on our shell servers, go to https://www.eskimo.com/ and from the Web Apps pull down menu, select Desktop or Terminal Sessions, use “public” for both the login and password, then select the server you wish and login with your normal login and password.

     One customer, who was migrating from centos6 to ubuntu, brought it to my attention that pine was not present on ubuntu and alpine had an unworkable default configuration.  I have fixed this not only on Ubuntu but on the rest of the shell servers as well.