We’ve installed Discord on Ubuntu.eskimo.com, Debian.eskimo.com, Julinux.yellow-snow.net, Mint.eskimo.com (no menu entry, launch from a terminal by typing discord), and Zorin.eskimo.com (no menu entry, launch from a terminal by typing discord).  On the systems with menu entries for discord, it is found in the “Internet” sub-menu.  Discord is a audio / video conferencing system very popular among gamers but usable for other functions.

     Steam has been installed on Ubuntu.eskimo.com (Games submenu) Debian.eskimo.com (Internet submenu), Mint.eskimo.com (Games submenu) Zorin.eskimo.com (Games submenu),

     Purple-discord, a plugin for libpurple that adds the option to use the Discord messaging service in all libpurple-based clients (including Pidgin and Finch), and harmony, for creating and managing Discord accounts although you can also use discord itself for the latter functionality, has been installed on those machines for which it was available, unfortunately, Debian wasn’t one of them.

     * I do not know of anyway to get the webcam capability working on Discord via x2go because I am told that USB forwarding is currently broken and that nobody has volunteered to work on it so probably will remain that way for the foreseeable future.  If anyone knows of a way around this please let me know.

     We upgraded our WordPress to 5.01 today.  Hopefully this will not cause problems.

‘     Our virtual domain system for ftp is changing and it will no longer automatically change to your directory when someone logs in anonymously.  They will need to cd to /home/user to get to your directory.  This is in preparation for changing the ftp server from wu-ftpd which has some compatibility issues with some version of filezilla which is the most widely used ftp client on Windows systems and often Mac and Linux as well, to a newer server.  Unfortunately, wu-ftpd was/is the only ftp daemon that had the capacity to automatically change directories based upon domain or IP address.

     I am also changing the IP address of some of our servers.  Because name service changes take some time to propagate, I will be having the servers listen to both addresses for a period of time until the changes have propagated.  These changes are requiring frequent restarting of the web server so there will be brief (1-5 second) interruptions.  They should not be longer unless I mistype something in the configuration files.

     Mint is completed.

     MxLinux has completed and is back in service.

     I will be rebooting servers between midnight – 2AM.  Downtime for any given service should not be more than 20 minutes per service, most will be shorter than that.  This is to upgrade kernel and apply some security patches.

     If you receive e-mail from: support <admin1@mailserver.com> 

     This mail is NOT from us.  It is a phishing scam attempting to get your authentication so they can take over your account.  Do NOT click on the link.  Delete it.  Any mail that comes from outside domains is not from us.

     I found people connecting to our mail server, giving the auth command, then disconnecting.  I found out that this was a Chinese botnet attempting to deliver spam but why they would issue an auth command and then not provide arguments is not clear. Perhaps they are aware of some bug in postfix that I am not.

     At any rate it is bad behavior so I have added rules to fail2ban to block IP addresses that do this.  That’s one less botnet delivering spam.

First I want to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving.

I’ve noticed the same explosion of spam here that I am sure you are
all suffering from. I have not been able to find anything wrong here but
there are a couple of viruses going around building botnets these folks
are using.

To try to improve things, I’ve enabled the DCC (Distributed Spam
Checksum Clearinghouse) plugin to spamassassin. Hopefully it will help.
If you notice anything in the headers that is common to a lot of these

      I will be rebooting servers to affect a kernel upgrade in just a few minutes. This will affect all machines but downtime for any given machine should not be more than about 15 minutes.

     I’ve added a couple of links to our links pull down on our web site.  One is to something called “Tech Rights” which deal with things like copyrights, patents, and particularly how they affect the open source and technological user community.

     The second link that I have added is to “Open Source“, a website that has many good technical articles including many good tutorials regarding how to utilize Linux and Open Source software.  These will help you make better use of many of the facilities here.