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.

Finally got the web server upgraded. Don’t really know what went wrong last night, pretty much repeated the same procedure but this time after I had finished the compile environment still worked so I was able to recompile apache2 and have it use the newer openssl 3.0.2.

So all of eskimo.com including friendica.eskimo.com, hubzilla.eskimo.com, and nextcloud.eskimo.com, and all the hosted websites are now running under Ubuntu 22.04.

I wish to wish all of you who are Mother’s a very happy Mother’s day!

My mother has been gone from this planet for about a decade now. She was the wisest woman I’ve ever known in my life. Lived a hard life but threw her best effort at it. She is with the Lord now I am sure, she was a good woman.

Today I also tested negative for Covid so in spite of being 63, diabetic, with high blood pressure and overweight it didn’t succeed in killing me! Well now I have natural immunity without having had a clot-shot. I know there are still people who believe in that thing but I would suggest strongly you avail yourself to some of the 75,000 pages of data Pfiezer was forced to release. Strangely, I have had some folks be angry at me for not taking the clot-shot but I’ve not endangered anyone as I completely self-isolated for the duration of the disease.

And on a final note, I will be taking the web server down again tonight for a while making one more attempt to upgrade. I actually had it working briefly under 22.04 last night but with the wrong version of openssl, and trying to correct that resulted in a chain reaction of deleted software owing to new dependencies in 22.04 that are going to require some work-arounds, so I had to revert to the previous backup.

End of life for the OS on the web server happens this July so push is coming close to shove. After that there are no security updates and the web server is perhaps the most exposed server in terms of the total number of services it makes available to exploit so it is of particular importance to keep current.

This will affect all web sites hosted under Eskimo North shared hosting plans as well as friendica.eskimo.com, hubzilla.eskimo.com/, nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and eskimo.com.

The plan is tonight to get it into the same state where it is on 22.04 but still running the old openssl, then write backups, then work on correcting that which unfortunately is going to also require fixing much of my build environment which upgrading to 22.04 also broke.