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.

My office workstation recently went trough a Slackware release upgrade by following the excellent systemupgrade article from the Slackware Documentation Project. Personally I experienced a few snags along the way so I’ll add a few notes for future reference.

Time for another unfortunate run in with the OTRS 5 Daemon. Again I got a call from a customer informing me that OTRS had been idle for a day without creating any new tickets.

Building the latest Hugo release from AUR (Arch User Repository) fails with the following error message:

Last year I discovered that some of my content had been deleted from Google’s index. After confirming that Googlebot could still access the post in question and excluding every possibility of accidentally blocking Googlebot (robots.txt, firewall rules etc.), I opted to resubmit the post for indexing using Google search console.

A few weeks back I got a call from a customer who complained that OTRS had been idle for a day without creating any new tickets. After some initial troubleshooting it became clear that OTRS was simply no longer able to retrieve mail.

Disclaimer: this is a minimal approach bereft of automagic and thus likely not desirable for most users.

Just because Greg KH said that all users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade ;-) I’m happy to report that everything seems to be working as expected and have yet to notice any regressions.

In other “exciting” news: I’ve now been running this website on the RPi3 for 8 months without having a single “what just happened?” moment. Actually, the only reason why I’m still having a WordPress blog can be attributed to my amazement with the RPi3 actually being able to run this crap.

Dlackware is not your average “GNOME for Slackware” project but instead aims to take the slack out of Slackware. What you get in return is the latest in “enterprise” technology. Dlackware delivers a fully functional GNOME 3.22 desktop with PAM, Wayland and systemd.

These steps are partly dependent on my personal Gentoo installation and should not be viewed as a general recipe. Please refer to the official Gentoo wiki on the topic instead. I’m using genkernel to generate an initramfs and GRUB2 as my boot loader.

It’s time to take privacy to the next level and ship this website off to the dark web. As a longtime Tor user it has been a source of embarrassment to not have my content available in onionland. However, that’s all in the past and this website is currently available at slackiuxopmaoigo.onion

I’ve also mentioned a few times that I’m sick and tired of WordPress so I’ve gone and replaced it with the Hugo website engine (on the new site). If you’re fed up with WordPress and want something simple and powerful I would suggest giving Hugo a shot, it’s that awesome. By the way, I have not yet migrated all my old content to Hugo, but I’m hoping to find a solution for this in the future.

Most people have probably heard about the Internet of Things (IoT) by now and how these devices are constantly drafted for your friendly neighborhood botnet. My little place on the interweb is currently gaining popularity among my DVR based visitors. You know the type: running a public telnet service, using hard coded accounts and may occasionally be seen sporting an additional backdoor on port 31337.

These bots are posing as Googlebot, but they are effortless to identify due to their use of the old and largely abandoned HTTP 1.0 protocol.

With all the noise lately about Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) and the lack of patched kernels from Slackware’s “Benevolent Dictator for Life”, I decided it was time to roll up the sleeves and get it done. Since Slackware doesn’t have a “sophisticated” build system and all that grease, it’s a trivial matter to step up to the plate and take responsibility for your own system. I’ll be using “vanilla-kernelversion” as my tag for the kernel and initrd. Also notice that I build my kernels as a normal user.

In an attempt to have a WordPress theme optimized for running on the Raspberry Pi 3, I went through the hurdles of writing my own theme. Among my goals was to create something entirely free of third party CSS and JavaScript frameworks. Actually, I wanted a theme free from JavaScript altogether and in my opinion there are already more than enough websites built on the Bootstrap framework (you’ll recognize them, they all look the same).

I got a call last week from a client that was having some issues with retrieving email from a Dovecot IMAP server. The client was connecting over TLS and was using an Apple mail client. Upon checking the mailserver log, I was greeted with a flood of rather vicious looking errors. I’m not gonna post the entire backtrace since its rather long, but you’ll get the idea.