Today’s May 30th between 1:45 PM Pacific Daylight Time and 4:10 PM Pacific Daylight Time, outage was caused by a circuit breaker failure at the co-location facility where our equipment is co-located. Our equipment did not lose power but their core routers did.

This affected all of our paid and free services, e-mail, web hosting, Linux shell accounts, virtual private servers, and our free services, https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/, https://friendica.eskimo.com/, https://hubzilla.eskimo.com/, and https://yacy.eskimo.com/.

Earlier this month, Free Speech Systems proposed a bankruptcy plan that would pay an annual salary of $520,000 to Jones and leave $7 million to $10 million to annually pay creditors, including the victims’ families.

Alex Jones reportedly concealing funds to avoid $1.5bn payout to Sandy Hook families

The conspiracy theorist was ordered to pay the families of the victims damages for claims that 2012 shooting was a hoax

^{Maya Yang (The Guardian)}

Posted on May 25, 2023

Saturday evening starting at 11PM we will be performing a kernel upgrade of all of our servers to version 6.1.30. It has some significant fixes for bugs that, while they haven’t bitten us yet, could.

I expect reboots to be completed by 11:30PM, various services that don’t restart properly and NFS and NIS issues resolved by midnight provided everything works.

I do not expect downtime for any individual service, except for https://yacy.eskimo.com/, to exceed ten minutes but yacy will take 30-45 minutes to come back online owing to it’s keeping an index in memory that it needs to regenerate after each reboot.

This will affect all of Eskimo’s paid and free services including e-mail, Linux shells, Web hosting, virtual private servers, and free services such as https://friendica.eskimo.com, https://hubzilla.eskimo.com, https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and https://yacy.eskimo.com/.

Other positive news, I’ve got all the hardware for our new bigger server now. I am beginning assembly tonight. This will take some time to bring into fully operational mode as the thermal budget is rather tight and getting as much performance out of the i9-10900x as possible will take a lot of benchmarking and adjusting. Because this is used in a co-location facility, I do not wish to go with water cooling and the normal dissipation for this CPU is 160 watts and can double that with extreme overclocking.

Because this CPU is likely to be thermally limited before it is electrically limited, my plan is start with stock everything and increase the clock until it hits thermal limits under heavy load, then reduce the voltage and try to find the point where thermal limits and electrical stability are limiting at approximately the same point so that I’ve got as much performance out of the chip as possible.

This chip is a very hot chip but it’s the only chip capable of addressing more than 128GB of RAM in the Intel lineup except Xeon chips, and I don’t like Xeon because the memory controllers tend to be on the slow side so you can not get as much performance as the clock speed would indicate. I don’t like AMD chips because they tend to suffer worse CPU rot and also their thermal protection generally consists of exploding holes in the die. I’ve had some Intel chips arrive dead, but I’ve never had any fail in service, but my experience with AMD has been less pleasant which is unfortunate as they do tend to make more clock cycles / watt of heat than Intel, but the thermal protection is just inadequate.

This new machine eventually will replace Iglulik as the main web server, as well as holding home directories, the large amount of RAM will allow it to cache more of the files as well as allowing yacy to run more smoothly. I plan on running the web server on bare metal to get as much performance as I possibly can. Iglulik will then primarily serve to host virtual private servers and some file systems like /misc. Between having four memory channels and 48 PCIe lanes, this will have horrendous I/O capabilities which should lend itself well to this application. The OS and web server software will sit on a couple of Western Digital nvme SSD’s in a RAID0 configuration and the user files and other non-speed critical system files and also a swap partition will go on a couple of 14TB 7200 RPM rotary drives. Though the write speed of these high density drives isn’t great, with 256GB of RAM there will be plenty of RAM to buffer writes so it will not negatively impact overall system performance.