A new shell server based upon the Alma Linux distribution is now available. The server name is “alma.eskimo.com”. It is available via ssh, vnc, rdp, and guacamole.

To access via guacamole (web) go to eskimo.com/

Then hover over web apps and select Terminal or Desktop. At the login prompt type “public” in both the login and password fields. Then select Alma Terminal or Alma Desktop, as you prefer, from the menu. Then type your login and password when prompted.

I believe it is reasonably complete, but if there is software not present that you would like, please send email to support@eskimo.com.

If you do not have an account with us, sign up for a free trial: eskimo.com/services/free-trial…

I was not a big fan of Newt Gingrich at the time yet I agree with him on this particular point he makes in this truncated speech.

This is what government socialistic health care is all about and why Oblama Care
was not such a good idea.

I am happy to see that we've just passed the 3,000 user mark. Speaking of Mark, I hope Mark Fuckerberg is happy that he's encouraged me to provide an alternative to his Kingdom.

friendica.eskimo.com/

Our friendica site, friendica.eskimo.com/, is just one user away from 3000! Be our 3000th user!

I started this almost three years ago now after being exiled from Farcebook for suggesting the clot-shot was neither effective nor safe.

I started friendica initially on an i7-6850k machine clocked at 3.8Ghz. It was a six core 12 thread machine with 128GB of RAM. It proved to be marginally sufficient, at times it will get very behind in the work queue and then later catch up.

I replaced the machine with an i9-10980xe processor clocked at 4.8Ghz, this is an 18 core 36 thread CPU supporting 256GB of RAM. Initially it ran well but after about a month it developed stability issues, finally found it's power supply was ill.

Fixed that, it ran for about a month and then 1/4th of it's memory disappeared. The motherboard had developed a bad memory channel.

Replaced the Asus Prime 390A II motherboard with another similar motherboard, it ran for about a month and then became unstable again.

I replaced it with an AsRock motherboard. The AsRock motherboard was not able to deliver the power required by this CPU and melted the solder at the power connection of the CPU socket.

I then replaced it with a Gigabyte Aorus Master and initially it ran good. Then developed stability problems AGAIN. After much troubleshooting I determined there were two problems, the power supply had again gone south, so this time I replaced the 1KW Gigabyte power supply with a 1200 watt Seasonic supply, so far so good. The other issue we ran into is 6.11 kernels have issue with the TPM RAPL code that cause premature throttling of the CPU. Disabled the TPM in BIOS and it fixed that issue.

Then when we upgrade to 6.11.3 and later stability again problematic, put it back to the 6.11.2 kernel and stable again so we're leaving it on that kernel for now.

This machine is up to the task load wise, CPU occupancy is around 4%, lots of overhead for the occasional traffic spike.

Because I think history is important, we have conversation retention set to 9999 days on this machine. I wish there were an infinite do not delete setting in friendica but for now this is best we can do. Probably by the time 9999 days has elapsed this will have changed.

Anyway, be our 3000 user, Join us at friendica.eskimo.com/

Dark Star is hands down one of my favorite films, not quite on the level of Hitchhiker's Galaxy but for an ultra-low budget film there is some great comedy.

Oh Wait that was 1900 BEFORE climate change.

guides.loc.gov/chronicling-ame…

Shell is a command line interface to an operating system. Most shell providers offer a simple text only interface via ssh, telnet, or rlogin. With some of these providers it may be possible to execute X commands and redirect them to your display. While this allows you to use graphical commands, it is a tedious process.

While Eskimo North does provide traditional shell access, we go much further offering full remote desktop access with sound. This is like having a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers plugged right into our servers and it is available from anywhere in the world. With a reasonably decent broadband connection, full motion video and high quality audio is possible.

Four popular remote desktop protocols are supported. All of these are tunnelled through ssh to provide encryption to protect your sensitive data and to prevent snooping on your activities or intercepting your login authentication credentials.

Guacamole Web Based Access
On our website under Web Apps, Desktop or Terminal Access, or by going directly to eskimo.com/guacamole/, login with “public” for the login and password. Then choose the server and whether you want a terminal or desktop and then login with your login and password. This allows you to access a terminal session or full remote desktop session from any HTML5 compliant web browser.

X2Go
X2Go is by far the preferable protocol to use. There are two clients that work with X2Go, the X2Go client, and PyHoca, a python client. The X2Go client is easy to configure with a simple graphical configuration interface. It tunnels all data through an SSH connection by default so there is little chance of accidentally establishing an unencrypted session and exposing critical data. It is the only remote desktop that supports sound well. It does an excellent job of eliminating X round-trip delays and it also compresses data very efficiently. It is the only remote desktop protocol that is sufficiently robust and efficient to make full motion video and audio work reasonably well over a cable modem connection. X2Go is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS/X based computers. For linux computers, it is usually included with your distribution. Try yum install x2go-client or apt-get install x2go-client.

VNC
VNC is an old X-forwarding protocol. The VNC servers we have here are configured to tunnel through ssh in order to provide a secure encrypted session. Consequently, you will either need a client that provides ssh tunnelling such as Chicken VNC (not to be confused with Chicken of the VNC which does not provide this functionality) or you will need to setup an ssh tunnel manually. VNC does not do such a good job of eliminating X round-trip delays nor does it compress as effeciently as X2Go or NX. However, VNC is available for more platforms and if you have an older computer this may be the best option.

RDP
RDP or Remote Desktop Protocol is the protocol used by Windows for remote desktop access. If you have a Windows machine, you most likely already have RDP built in so it is a quick way to get a remote desktop up and running. The performance of RDP is really not adequate for full motion video and it also lacks audio and remote printhttps://www.eskimo.com/services/free-trial/ing.

Free Trial: eskimo.com/services/free-trial…

It's not as cut and dry as the climate alarmists would have you believe, and at best, it is NOT an emergency, NOT worth starving to death millions and keeping billions in poverty over.

If you are having issues connecting to a shell server using ssh, we have found at least one cable company is blocking connections to port 22, the standard ssh port.

On most of our shell servers, we also listen to port 443. If ssh times out, try “ssh -p 443 server.eskimo.com”. Substitute “server” with the desired host, i.e., ubuntu, debian, rocky8, etc.

There is an error in one of the diagrams in this video. They are talking about thorium fuel cycled molten salt breeder reactors, but one of the diagrams shows a moderator. Moderators are used in thermal spectrum nuclear reactors, they are not used in breeder reactors where fast neutrons are required for even numbered isotopes to absorb them and transmute from fertile non-fissionable fuel into fissionable fuel. You can not burn thorium-232, U-238, or even actinides in thermal reactor, but you can transmute and THEN burn them in a fast breeder reactor.

Also, the narrator is somewhat a moron and makes the statement that in a conventional reactor that fuel is in a solid "control rod", actually no, the fuel rods are seperate and distinct from the fuel rods in a conventional reactor.

I'm a bit puzzled by why a group would name themselves the Fratellis, none the less this is a fun video.

I've always been fascinated by songs that use the flanging effect. I don't know why, technically I know exactly what this effect is, a comb filter, still it tickles a part of my auditory brain that says I can't get enough. In the old days there were two ways to obtain this effect, one was to create a delay by running tape through two tape recorders and adding together such that frequencies alternately cancelled and reinforced by slightly slowing one of them to get them not quite in sync, the other was to record mono on a stereo machine then skew the head slightly so the two tracks were out of phase while adding them together. Modern method is just to use a software comb filter but the effect is the same. You can also use a bucket-brigade reverb chip clocked at a high rate so the delay is very short but I haven't seen these used for decades.

Linux Friendly
Virtual Private Servers, Shell Accounts, and Hosting.
Tired of dealing with Godaddy, Hostgater, BlueHost? Contact Us!
Our Servers have full support for https and http/2.
Knowledgeable human assistance via phone, e-mail, or tickets.
Call Us Now at (206) 812-0051 or (800) 246-6874.

Web Apps
Web based applications. These are programs that actually run and display in your browser, such as Web Mail, phpMyAdmin, a Java SSH Shell, forums, StatusNet, Traceroute, and Your IP.
Services

Information about the services we offer
Linux shell accounts with rdp, vnc, x2go, and guacamole access, fast Web Hosting, Virtual Private Servers, Social Media, E-mail, and other services.

Support
Setup e-mail and Usenet news clients, customize spam filters, including white listing, black listing. Setup X2Go, OpenNX, NX player, and other remote desktops and configure DSL and 56k dial-up accounts. Help with websites, frequently asked questions, and trouble tickets.

Links
Links to Customer pages as well as many useful resources on the web, including Linux resources, useful information about building websites, and local resources relating to Shoreline and the surrounding Puget Sound area resources.

Information
The Information section contains information about our history, contact information, eskimo news, information and graphics for linking to us (we always appreciate that), payment information and also various customer review sites where you can find independent reviews of our service.

Games
There are three games sections, Eskimo Arcade, games contained within our main website, presently is mostly broken as the result of a switch to https, I’m working on that, and two external sites Y B Bored (ybbored.com), and Defender Games (defender-games.net).

Check it out, explore, let me know of anything you think would make it better.

Try it out on your Smart Phone, it’s all responsive and mobile friendly. Some of the webmail options work on some SmartPhones. If the default webmail doesn’t work well for you, try the RoundCube or RainLoop alternatives. If neither of those work well, there is a ownCloud mail client that works very well on mobile devices.

Eskimo North, P.O. Box 55816, Shoreline, WA 98155 Tel: 206-812-0051

E-mail & Shells
We heavily leverage the capabilities of Linux to provide the services that we do. E-mail is included with all shell accounts and is not purchasable separately because many of the capabilities of our e-mail system require a Linux shell account to function.

When Free is not Free
Frequently people ask me, “Why should I pay for e-mail when I can readily get it for free?” The answer to that question is because free is not free. There are many hidden costs associated with “free” e-mail that far exceed the $60/year cost of an economy shell while providing far less capability. For example, free e-mail providers make money by collecting, utilizing, and selling information about you, and by exposing you to advertising. We never mine your e-mail for data, and we don’t fill your screen with advertising. What is the time you spend as a result of distractive advertisng worth? What is your privacy worth? Free e-mail providers come and go. We’ve provided the same e-mail domains since the beginning of the Internet in 1992, and prior to that via the UUCP smart routing project since 1985. How much hassle is it to have to notify all your contacts of a new address? If you are a business, how much cost is involved in changing all of your advertising? What is the potential loss of business when someone tries to use old contact information from an e-mail provider that has gone away? Spammers abuse free e-mail because they have zero investment at risk. As a consequence, mail you send from a free e-mail provider is much more likely to end up in the recipients spam box or be rejected outright. What is the message you send a potential employer when you use a free e-mail provider on your application or resume? The message is, “I want something for nothing.” which translates in the employers mind to, “I want you to pay me but I don’t expect to work for it.” The flexibility and capabilities our mail system offers can save you much time. What is your time worth?

Very Accessible
Our e-mail system is very accessible. You can access mail via webmail. You can access e-mail using text based mail clients, such as alpine, pine, mush, mh, elm, or BSD mail. You can access e-mail using a graphical client such as Thunderbird via a remote desktop connection. Running Thunderbird here via a remote desktop has the advantage of not exposing your machine to potential malware. You can access e-mail from a mail client on your machine such as Outlook or Mac Mail via either imap or pop3 protocols, including the TLS encrypted variants of these protocols. If you use IMAP you can keep your mailboxes on our server allowing you to access the same e-mail from multiple devices and have them all remain in sync.

Automatic Mail Processing
We use procmail as the mail delivery agent. Procmail provides an extremely powerful scripting language for processing e-mail. It can be used for simple tasks such as sorting e-mail into boxes, automatically responding to specific e-mail, or much more complex tasks like implementing a mail list system. You can save a lot of time by automating tasks that you would have to perform by hand with a free e-mail provider.

Mail Lists
On the subject of mail lists, every shell account has the capability of hosting mail lists using SmartList, list processing software that is implemented entirely in Procmail rules.

Spam Filtering
We have a sophisticated spam filtering system that uses a variety of means to identify spam and redirect it from your INBOX to your spam box. Your spam box is automatically emptied of any mail older than 30 days. This prevents spam from clogging up and wasting all of your disk space. At the center of our spam filtering is SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin uses several hundred rules to score e-mail with regard to it’s likelihood to be spam. Then procmail redirects any mail with a score above a customer defined threshold into your spam box. You have complete control over how SpamAssassin scores spam. You can alter the score associated with any of those hundreds of rules and you can white list or black list e-mail based on address, domain, or regular expressions. Further, you can use procmail to sort e-mail based upon ANY criteria you wish. With other providers, you are forced to live with whatever filtering they give you. If it sends to many legitimate e-mails to the bit bucket you have to live with it, if it lets through too much spam, you have to live with it. Here you can make any adjustments you desire to fine tune the filtering to your exacting requirements.

Customer Support
Just try to find human help at ANY of the free mail providers. I dare ya! Here you can call and speak to a knowledgeable human being without enduring the ravages of telephone trees and foreign workers reading scripts. There are many ways to contact us. No matter which way you choose your issue will receive prompt attention.

Free Trial (No Payment Info Required Up Front) eskimo.com/services/free-trial…

A free trial which requires no upfront payment info, only a name, telephone number and e-mail address, is available at eskimo.com/services/free-trial…

Available Shell Servers

We have a variety of Linux Servers with a variety of Linux Distributions and Desktop Environments. Linux servers in use here are of three basic lines, those derived from RedHat, such as Fedora, Centos, and Scientific Linux, and those derived from Debian such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint. Ubuntu is the most current and feature rich. Then there is Manjaro, derived from Arch Linux. Arch is more often broken because it is a real “do it yourself” Linux, an excellent learning platform, a good development platform, not a good production platform.

All of these servers are available if you have a shell account here. You can use them to learn various versions, decide which to install, and as one place you can develop applications for all versions. We install a wide variety of development tools on all of our publicly available servers.

Our servers listen to port 443 in addition to the standard ssh port of 22 to provide a means to connect from behind a firewall that blocks non-web access. You can also utilize Guacamole on our website (login public, password public).

Debian.Eskimo.Com
This server is running on Debian Bullseye. It has a rich assortment of software installed, including hundreds of Games, a huge variety of Office Productivity software, many Educational and Scientific applications, a variety of Integrated Development Environments, and many programming languages. All of the documentation available online these applications is also loaded.

Fedora.Eskimo.Com
This server runs Fedora Rawhide. It can be accessed graphically using x2go and the Mate desktop. It has the most applications of any of the Redhat derived servers. I install just about everything I can get to work on this machine so it has a huge variety of applications installed.

Manjaro.Eskimo.Com
Manjaro is a good choice for a Linux user who wants to just install and go. There is a pleasant user interface and a good choice of software in the Manjaro repositories. It is a less technical Linux than Ubuntu, you can do most things through graphical interfaces and the default xfce interface is extremely light in terms of memory footprint. Like most modern distros, a variety of Windows systems are available and we have Gnome, Mate, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and LXQT installed.

Mint.Eskimo.Com
This is another recent addition to our shell servers. It is running Mint, although we have the Mate Desktop installed for graphical access. This is necessary because Unity and other compositing Desktops are incompatible with x2go and really work very roughly with VNC. If you like games, this is a good server to use and there are many installed. Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu which in turn is derived from Debian and this server thus follows the structure and layout of Debian and Ubuntu.

MxLinux.Eskimo.Com
MxLinux is an excellent choice for a computer with limited resources. Before the overhead of a Desktop is considered, MxLinux uses 200MB less RAM out of the box than does Ubuntu. If you’re not a fan of Poettering and Systemd, you’ll like this OS as it still uses a System-V init with Systemd shims to allow packages requiring systemd to function. You can also run systemd and in fact I am doing so because it boots faster. The default Desktop is LXDE which is also small and efficient. But if you like eye candy you can install any Desktop you like and as with other servers I will install all that I can get to work on this OS.

PopOS.Eskimo.Com
PopOS is a modern appearing OS based upon Ubuntu, and not just indirectly, it actually utilizes Ubuntu’s repositories in addition to it’s own. The Desktops presently available on it are Gnome and Mate, though Gnome is a special edition known as Sparkle, and it does not operate properly with X2go. Presently X2go and ssh are the only two access methods. I am working on the others.

Rocky8.Eskimo.Com
Rocky8 is a RedHat derived operating system very similar to Centos before Centos was absorbed, and ruined, by Redhat. While Centos support, with the exception of Centos9 is going away on June 30th, 2024, and CentOS9 is not usable because of the deletion of NIS by RedRat which is necessary to our organization, Rocky8 will be supported for security updates through May of 2029, thus provides us a means of continuing to offer a Redhat based environment for another five years.

Ubuntu.Eskimo.Com
This is the latest stable Ubuntu release. It can be accessed graphically using x2go and the Mate Desktop. The native Unity desktop is a compositing desktop which is incompatible with x2go. This machine is equipped with many applications including a huge number of games, a rich assortment of development tools and computer programming languages, a huge assortment of Office productivity software, many scientific, electronic, and educational tools.

Zorin.Eskimo.Com
Zorin is a Ubuntu derived operating system. It combines the eye candy of some other Ubuntu flavors such as Mint, with the security awareness and up to date nature of Ubuntu providing a really superb server environment. This machine is our best equipped server. It has the full Ubuntu Studio Suite, a very large assortment of development tools, language packs for all supported languages, many games, both Libre and Caligra Office Suites, and much more. X2go is supported on this machine.