Sorry for the down time.  Our second router to die in two weeks died yesterday afternoon.  At first I thought it was something I did but then after restoring from a backup when it was working it still didn’t.  The vendor had changed the software in such a way that the translation of firewall rules from the user interface to iptables internally was no longer happening correctly resulting in a broken firewall that can’t be disabled.

Since I had no further spares to drop back to, I configured out of the Linux servers to act as a router until we can get one.

     You can view our latest social media instance either by using Web Apps on our main web site https://www.eskimo.com/ and selecting Mastodon, or you can go there directly https://mastodon.eskimo.com/.

     Mastodon is a Twitter/X link interface but unlike Twitter, Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, like Friendica and Hubzilla, which consists of tens of thousands of sites with no one owner of the entire network.  Each site is responsible for moderating it’s own servers If it chooses to moderate at all.

Someone asked for us to setup a Diaspora node here, unfortunately because of openssh and ruby versions, we can not do this at present.  In theory this will be possible after the next Diaspora release which will be ported to ruby3 and openssh 3.x.

Ubuntu 22.04 ships with OpenSSL version 3, with no option of using OpenSSL 1 instead. The currently available diaspora* releases depend on Ruby 2.7, and are not yet compatible with Ruby 3. Unfortunately, Ruby 2.7 has no official support for OpenSSL 3, so setting up diaspora* on Ubuntu Jammy requires a lot of extra workarounds that the project team currently cannot offer help or support for.

We expect the next major release to support Ruby 3, and thus by extension Ubuntu Jammy. For now, please set up your pod on Ubuntu 20.04, and upgrade the distribution when diaspora* is ready.

     Also forgot to mention we’ll also be supporting Jumbo Frames (4500 byte frames) if you have a 1Gbps or better connection and your provider supports them.  This will help with performance for things like transfer of large files or streaming.

I’m not really sure what I broke but it was something I misconfigured on our new router.

We are having DNS issues all over the place, and even my home machine using non-eskimo serves is getting DNS errors, and no updates queued for Ubuntu seem to be relevant. It is these DNS issues that are causing problems with e-mail.  I am working on resolving, I have one incoming mail server working by using external servers that do seem to be “kind of”, as in they get an error with nslookup but still return the data.  So a big mystery, if anyone knows anything that might have happened with DNS system wide, please let me know.

I apologize for the disruption today.  Our gateway router crapped out entirely as in not crashed but dead as a door nail.  I had already purchased a new unit with a lot more CPU and memory to replace it but owing to my unfamiliarity it took some time to get it configured and operational.  But this unit is hands down way more powerful than the old so we shouldn’t see the lag during heavy traffic or be nearly as easily packet flooded as with the old unit.

     Going to reboot all or most machines at 11pm to upgrade kernels.

     This will affect all services, paid and unpaid.  With the exception of yacy which will take about 45 minutes, other services should not be down longer ten minutes.

     I had a problem with Iglulik firewall because quotad would not honor my configuration and listen to the configured port so that forced me to leave all ports open to other machines here.  Not a desirable situation for security.

     I filed a bug report and amazingly enough the Ubuntu folks (Canonical) got back to me with a fix.  Seems the arguments need quotes around them.  Because this file lacked official documentation, I did not know this.

     So need to reboot to make this change effective.  Most of the time this is non-eventful, but owing to the complexity of this particular machine systemd screws up sometimes and then a drive to the co-lo is required.  So outage is expected to be from 10pm-10:02pm but may last until about 10:40pm.  This outage will take the form of all things depending upon /home temporarily freezing.