Posted on May 21, 2022

This pertains to friendica.eskimo.com, hubzilla.eskimo.com, nextcloud.eskimo.com, and www.eskimo.com.

I finally received the info I needed from Ubiquiti and we have a new router ordered. It should be here in 7-10 days and will provide 6.8x the CPU power of the existing router.

Our existing router is sometimes saturating between 6pm-9pm Pacific Daylight Time, even though the bandwidth is not anywhere near maxed out. This causes latency and dropped packets.

The existing router handles high throughput if TCP traffic if packets are large, but it does not handle high UDP traffic or small TCP packets. The new router should improve this substantially.

I also bought an optional 1TB hard drive for the router (it has 128GB of flash internally) which will allow me to install a nice desktop and more security software.

For anyone looking for a router, I really love Ubiquiti products because of their excellent firewall capabilities and interface and the fact that they are Debian based so you can basically install anything from Debian as long as it is present in the MIPS ports, and if it isn’t you can self-compile as it also includes the normal Debian port of GCC and libs.

Posted on May 20, 2022 Pacific Daylight Time (GMT-0700)

Kernel upgrades and reboots are completed.

All services are active. All NFS mount points working. All NIS binding successful.

Only server where there was a problem was one customers private virtual server and that because he had configured SSL but the SSL certificates were not present.

Not really sure what changed, but all the machines booted significantly faster this time around. Not sure if this kernel boots better or if some changes Ubuntu made improved efficiency.

This impacts all eskimo.com services including shared web hosting, virtual private servers, e-mail, shell access, friendica.eskimo.com/, hubzilla.eskimo.com/, and nextcloud.eskimo.com/ federated social media services.

You can use WhatsApp Plus Rojo to block internet usage for specific apps. This configuration option is located in the main interface. Instead of having to navigate through the Ajustes section, just tap the icon for WiFi and choose 'Disable internet for this app'. Once you do that, you can keep using other apps and continue using your internet connection for other tasks. Then, you're ready to go!

To download WhatsApp Plus, open your phone's Google Play Store and install it. It's important to note that this app is not official and requires extra permissions. However, you can still use the original app to send and receive messages. Before installing WhatsApp Plus, uninstall all of your WhatsApp settings and reconnect all of your contacts. If you're worried about viruses, do not install WhatsApp Plus from the Google Play Store.

After installing WhatsApp Plus Rojo, you can change the color of your icon. You can change the background of the app and make it lighter or darker. Besides, it has universal and customizable colors. For those who love customization, WhatsApp Plus is a great option. Once installed, it can be customized to suit your personal needs and preferences. It also lets you make your own WhatsApp icon. If you're tired of the default color scheme, you can change its color to any other color you want.

Posted on May 19, 2022

We will be doing kernel updates on all systems Friday May 20th starting at 11pm Pacific Daylight Time (-0700 GMT). I expect interruptions of individual services not to be more than about ten minutes and it should be completed by 12PM (midnight).

This will impact all of Eskimo North’s services including:

eskimo.com/

nextcloud.eskimo.com/

friendica.eskimo.com/

hubzilla.eskimo.com/

This kernel upgrade is a point release that fixes some bugs. It does not change capabilities or interfaces so should have no impact except to prevent crashes and processes hanging. We haven’t experienced either of these with the current kernel but others have.

I use tickless kernels built from upstream sources on kernel.org in my own organization. Tickless kernels are especially valuable for laptops where wasted CPU cycles equal wasted battery life and on servers hosting virtual machines where all the time spent wasted on clock interrupts where no work is scheduled adds up to a significant portion of CPU cycles on the host machine. The downside to tickless kernels is there might be slightly more latency but not enough to affect audio or video on workstations as near as I can tell.

These kernels are available at eskimo.com/kernel/linux-(versi…

These Linux kernels are provided with no warantee. Use them only if you agree to accept all risk for any damage to your machine or it's contents.

The are several differences between these kernels and those provided by Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Redhat, etc.

First, these are all upstream kernels, they have no vendor patches.

Second, they are tickless kernels. CONFIG_NO_HZ is set, CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL is not set. On the client kernel, CONFIG_HZ_1000=y, on the server kernel, CONFIG_HZ_100=y.

Thirdly, these kernels all provide support for both UDP and TCP protocol NFS versions, 2, 3, 4, 4.1, and 4.2. Ubuntu has chosen to eliminate support for NFS UDP and version 2, and effectively version 3 since there is no provision in the original version 3 specification for TCP.

The server kernel is non-premptive, the client kernel is fully preemptive. This provides maximum processing ability on the server, minimal latency on client machines.

Unlike in the past where I compiled only '.deb' packages for debian based systems, I am also now providing '.rpm' packages for Redhat based systems.

There are also RPM only packages in a subdirectory called centos6, this kernel is compiled specifically for centos6 which does not work on the default Ubuntu configuration from which my configuration is derived.

There is a set of .deb files in "debian", these are the same as the server kernels except that zstd compression is NOT used in the packages because of debians version of dpkg being unable to support it and they are signed so that debian package loader doesn't squak.

In the case of Debian, download all three '.deb' files for the kernel of your choice and install with: dpkg -i *.deb

In the case of Redhat based systems, everything from Centos6 to CentosStream, Fedora all modern flavors, and Scientific Linux, install by downloading both .rpm packages and install with "rpm -i *.rpm"

Note, in the case of RPM some systems will complain that it conflicts with existing header packages installed, in which case remove the existing package first with:

rpm --nodeps -e kernel-header

I am trying to get Redhat 6.2 working on a Sparc qemu emulator but all three of the Redhat 6.2 Zoot disks I had, vintage 2007, have gone south and can not be read completely without errors and will not install.

I've google searched for an ISO but every link I've found is dead.

Can anyone help me locate an ISO for UltraSparc (Sun4u) Redhat 6.2?

I ordinarily do kernel upgrades on Friday so I have a weekend to recover if something goes wrong before the heavier business usage during the week, however, because my car is in the shop I am going to do them this Sunday evening starting at 11pm. That day because my wife has it off so if something locks up and I need to go to the co-location facility I can use her car.

If the kernel upgrade goes well, I may attempt to upgrade some of the physical servers to 22.04 now that I have the NFS issues with 22.04 resolved.

This will affect all of Eskimo’s Services, various services will be down for as long as 10 minutes but not all at the same time.

This will affect all sites hosted here including private virtual servers, shared web hosting, Linux shell services, e-mail, and our social media sites, friendica.eskimo.com/, hubzilla.eskimo.com/, and nextcloud.eskimo.com/, as well as our own site eskimo.com/ but the interruptions should in general be ten minutes or less.

I wrote a few days ago about my dissatisfaction with NFS under version 22.04, as it turns out it is only defaults that have changed, but I'm relating this should anyone else who has a hetrogeneous network consisting of Linux Ubuntu 22.04 NFS servers and version 2, 3, and 4 clients.

For anyone maintaining a hetrogeneous network utilizing Linux NFS servers, when I upgraded from 20.04 to 22.04 on our mail server which exports the mail spool to various machines, most using version 4.2 over TCP NFS but some using version 3 UDP and one using version 2 UDP, it broke all of our machines mounting using version 2 or version 3 NFS even though rpcinfo -p showed these protocols exported.

It turns out that what changed is capabilities and defaults. All three NFS versions are supported, but all now DEFAULT to TCP only. This makes ZERO sense as UDP was the only protocol available in the NFS version 2 and version 3 specification.

However, it is configurable in /etc/nfs.conf and now everything is back in service and I can move forward with updating the rest of our machines that are 20.04 to 22.04.

Our router at the co-lo facility is running short of CPU during peak traffic times in the evenings resulting in greater latency and some packet loss.

I am currently researching a replacement which will have approximately 6x as much CPU to accommodate this traffic and future growth.

The current router is an Edgerouter Lite which has two 500 Mhz MIPS CPUs, the replacement I’m looking at is a Ubiquiti Dream Machine, which has four 1.7 Ghz cores. The latter is designed for an enterprise environment.

The Dream Machine comes in a lot of different flavors and I’m not familiar with all the terminology used in the specifications so I’m waiting on Ubiquiti support to answer a few questions before placing an order.