On my Windows 10 computers I always work with a standard account and keep a separate administrator account. This provides some additional security as any operation needing administrative privileges will require an administrator’s approval.

As of Wednesday, August 24, 2016, Slackware ARM is out of retirement and ready to power your modern ARM devices. The Slackware ARM maintainer has made the decision to pick up development again and go ahead with a hard float port. It was announced three months ago that a hard float port was in the works, and today it’s powering my Raspberry Pi 2. Unfortunately the hard float release has been mostly ignored by the mainstream teach sites, but it’s definitely on top of my list. Get up to date with the latest development at arm.slackware.com.

After reading the latest horror stories depicting the Windows 10 anniversary update as a merciless destroyer of everything Linux, I was somewhat concerned before applying the latest and greatest from Redmond. Sure, it would make absolutely no sense if Microsoft was actually deleting data from their customers devices, but mistakes do happen so I made sure to back everything up before upgrading.

First up was my primary Windows 10 / Slackware 14.2 based notebook, an ASUS G771JM with 256GB SSD and 1 TB HDD running under UEFI/GPT with secure boot disabled.

After four months of hosting this WordPress blog on a RPi3 I have yet to experience a single issue. No filesystem errors, no kernel oops’s and no hard freezes. Definitely an enjoyable change of pace from the preceding twelve months of hosting this site on a Raspberry Pi 2.

I’ve not been doing any overclocking whatsoever on this device and I believe that to be the decisive factor when it comes to improved stability. My old RPi2 is pretty much useless at this point and I’m guessing it simply got burned out before its time. As for storage, I’m still using a SanDisk MicroSDHC Ultra UHS-I 32GB card.

Configuring and using a generic kernel on EFI-based platforms with ELILO is pretty much an identical exercise to using LILO with legacy systems. Slackware provides you with a mkinitrd generator script to assist in making an initrd image to boot your system.

While trying to install a RapidSSL wildcard certificate on our Zimbra 8 server a while back, I ran into some issues while using Zimbra’s zmcertmgr command:

When I began writing this review there had been 921 days since the last stable Slackware release. The apparent dormant state of development raised a few questions about the health of the distribution, but as usual the rumors of Slackware’s decline was greatly exaggerated.

Some unfortunate but understandable news emerged on the Slackware ARM website today as ARM maintainer Stuart Winter released the following announcement:

As a Tor (The Onion Router) user I already have a negative impression of CloudFlare due to their captcha trolling. It therefore gives me no joy to see CloudFlare Always Online circumventing my hotlink protection in order to “cache” my content on their service.

I’m pretty much done with getting annoyed by all the spam and fake applications populating the Chrome Web Store. But still, once in a while you come across something special that is just too good to pass up.

This WordPress blog is now hosted on a Raspberry Pi 3 after a year of running on a Raspberry Pi 2. Unlike with the RPi2, I’ve not done any overclocking on this device. I’m hoping that decision will decrease the number of file system related issues and obscure kernel oopses I’ve experienced lately, but I guess time will tell.

The RPi3 is still running Slackware ARM 14.2 and the Linux kernel is at version 4.4.7 at time of writing.

Let’s get ready to rumble: a battle of two Slackware ARM powered webservers.

Hosting your WordPress installation on a RPi2 can be a challenge on multiple levels. Apart from stability issues, my biggest concern is always subpar PHP performance and additional overhead with TLS connections. To determine the potential gain of upgrading my hosting platform to a RPi3, I’ve done a few tests with a MicroSD card I recently retired due to data corruption.

Since I hit the one year mark today I thought I would do a quick update on my RPi2 project. A short recap to kick things off: the project had a rough start due to some overly ambitious overclocking that eventually resulted in severe data corruption. However, after implementing the necessary modifications I enjoyed close to 300 days of easy uptime before a power failure took the RPi2 down. My initial thought after the power failure was that everything was still dandy, but a few weeks later things started to go downhill fast. It all began with a few file system errors:

So this website was pretty much free of trackers with one notable exception, the fonts provided by the Twenty Fifteen theme. By its use of the Google Fonts API, most visitors were still leaking data back to the great chocolate factory. However, as the fonts are open source we’re free to use them outside of Google’s realm.

‘Tis the season to be cracking.
In the webhosting business we’re used to seeing an increase in attacks during the holidays, as most people by then are busy with real life. If you’re a cracker though, this is your favorite time of the year.