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, nextcloud.eskimo.com/, friendica.eskimo.com/, hubzilla.eskimo.com/, and yacy.eskimo.com/.

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 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 friendica.eskimo.com, hubzilla.eskimo.com, nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and 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.

https://twitter.com/WarClandestine/status/1661801028017160218

Posted on May 25, 2023

The majority of spam filters here put spam in a folder named “spam” rather than rejecting it outright.

However, there are two types of spam that I manually block when discovered, virii and phishing scams. Virii are various computer viruses, especially ransomware. When I find a server is infected, I block mail from that server until there is some indication this has been fixed. The same is true of phishing scams, where people try to social engineer to get your authentication information here or elsewhere.

There are a few really bad players in this area, an outfit called Sendgrid is the absolute worst. I have had more than 30 of their servers blocked for ongoing malicious content and I’ve never gotten a response from them beyond a form letter and I’ve never seen the abuse actually stop. Unfortunately they are also used by major corporations to contact their customers. Therefore, I try to be very selective about servers blocked and limit only to clearly infected servers, but, occasionally I get overly broad. And these actions are manual which also make them less effective than they could be because often the scammer or spammer has already dumped his entire list when I notice and take action.

Yesterday I made a significant change in the way this is handled. I am no longer blocking servers and address space manually. Rather, I have created a fail2ban jail that recognizes many of these things, also things like a lot of mails sent to non-existent addresses, mail forged as being from eskimo.com but is coming from external sources, etc, and I’m now using it to block these sites.

After the first night of this being implemented, my spambox had about one third as much spam as it did previously. I believe this is because it’s acting much faster than I would do manually, but an additional plus, there will be less legitimate mail blocked because this is ALWAYS done on a per server basis never entire address blocks as I often did for some bad players and because these blocks are automatically removed after two days but if the abuse is repeated from the same server then it will be blocked on a longer basis.