So the annual “Slackware needs PAM and Kerberos” thread is going strong over at linuxquestions.org at the moment. This particular topic always seem to awaken a collective inferiority complex within the Slackware community, where users are aggressively refuting any claim that Slackware is not a viable choice for business use (you can do anything with some lines of bash right?…). At the opposite side you have users arguing that Slackware has become a niche hobbyist distribution due to its reluctance to implement mainstream technologies.

My plan was to have a Zimbra e-mail server running in VirtualBox using the internal networking model with a local domain. To make this work, I have a virtual pfSense box running on the same internal network to provide “outside” access. Additionally, pfSense is also running a DNS resolver so I figured it would be a trivial matter to add the local records I needed.

Looking through my server logs I noticed how Baidu’s web spider was causing an unexpected redirect loop while trying to index an image attachment page. Since I deliberately redirect all attachment page requests to the actual post owning the attachment, I decided to take a closer look. The following request triggered the loop:

I was recently surprised to discover that I could no longer manage my posts (invalid post type) or modify any of my installed plugins (sorry, you are not allowed to access this page). I’ve been exposed to these kind of problems before, both through database corruption and by my own hand so to speak. However, this time around everything checked out so I enabled debugging to track down the error.

Microsoft bingbot is a repeat offender on my RPi and as a consequence it’s subjected to extended periods of jail time. However, being a good netizen I like to provide an even playing field for all web crawlers. With that in mind, what would be the easiest way of purging all IP addresses from fail2ban?

Let’s Encrypt suffered from a major service disruption today leaving users unable to access various services. The cause of the problem seems to have been an update to Boulder (ACME CA) which has since been reversed.

I regularly spend time investigating my server logs and occasionally come across a few special snowflakes. My onion (Tor) server hosted with a popular cloud provider was recently visited by a research scanner. The scanner initially greeted the server with a few standard GET requests:

In the last few days I’ve noticed a few unusual GET requests for supposedly exposed SSH private keys. All requests are following the same pattern:

It’s live, prepare to self-destruct in 3..2..1..

HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP)

A new HTTP header that allows web host operators to instruct user agents to remember (“pin”) the hosts’ cryptographic identities over a period of time. During that time, user agents (UAs) will require that the host presents a certificate chain including at least one Subject Public Key Info structure whose fingerprint matches one of the pinned fingerprints for that host. Source: RFC 7469

This website recently celebrated its second year of Raspberry Pi based hosting. It’s currently running on a RPi3 with Slackware ARM 14.2 (32-bit soft float). Somewhat to my surprise, the second year went by without a single glitch.

Perl upgrades on Gentoo Linux have been laborious for me in the past, but with Perl 5.24 that was no longer the case. I’ve previously managed Perl upgrades by using the oneshot option and manually resolving any remaining conflicts afterwards. With this upgrade though, it looked to be close enough so I decided to try with the backtrack option as suggested from the following output.

My plan to install the latest Windows 10 Creators Update fell short during the weekend due to an error identified as 0xc1900200. I was using the “Windows 10 Update Assistant” to perform the upgrade, and the assistant did initially confirm that my system was ready for the upgrade.

Referrers from a domain called anonymizeme.pro have been filling up my logs lately. I initially believed it was visitors using an anonymizing service, but alas, it’s yet another referrer scam.

In a time-frame of just 10 seconds I got 1200 requests from the Jorgee vulnerability scanner, originating from 15 unique IP addresses. As usual it was just a blind attack probing a /24 subnet.

When you’ve been running GNU/Linux distributions for an adequate number of years, I do believe you’ll eventually find yourself walking the path to Mount Gentoo in hope of joining the ancient Greybeards. Many have met their demise on the road ahead, but armed with the Gentoo handbook we’re confident that it’s within our reach.