The OTRS Group axes the Windows installer

With the release of OTRS Help Desk 4, it seems that running OTRS on a native Windows environment for all intents and purposes is no longer viable. By killing off the Windows installer and recommending migration into the OTRS appliance, the OTRS Group seems to be subtly hinting that OTRS on Windows is dead in the water. The now unmaintaned OTRS Windows installer. Switching to the OTRS appliance might be a good solution for some Windows installations, but in my case OTRS is configured with MS Active Directory as a customer and agent backend, and we’re relaying on IIS for single sign on.

How to configure KMail with GPG on Slackware Linux 14.1

No additional software is required on a full Slackware 14.1 install. Slackware 14.1 ships with KDE 4.10.5. Prerequisites If you don’t already have a key pair (secret and public key), then your first order of business is to create one. The preferrable option is to use the CLI with the command: gpg --gen-key KDE provides two graphical tools for working with GPG, namely KGpg and Kleopatra. KGpg will walk you through the initial setup using an interactive wizard and subsequently create the needed key pair and config files (do not use Kleopatra for your initial setup).

Outlook.com is silently discarding email messages

A while back I did some consulting work for a small ISP who had received complaints from a few customers that believed they could not use the ISP’s SMTP server to send email to outlook.com or hotmail.com accounts. These customers claimed they never got any bounce message (Non-Delivery Report)  in return, so they firmly believed the problem resided with the ISP.

BlueOnyx 5106R - Unresponsive Login Manager

BlueOnyx uses the PAM ABL module to mitigate brute force attacks. Though it’s not a good idea to rely solely on this module to protect your services, it’s definitely better than nothing. However, for some reason the database storing the failed hosts and users tends to corrupt easily on BlueOnyx systems.

How to install Dig on a Windows 8.1 64-bit system

This installation procedure will extract only relevant libraries and executables from the BIND 9 package, and not install a full-blown DNS server. The installation method is also applicable on Windows 7 64-bit systems. Head over to http://www.isc.org/downloads/ and download the BIND 9.10.0-P2 package. Select the 64-bit version and leave the 32-bit package as a last resort. The 64-bit version is dependent on the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable package, which you can download and install from http://www.

BioShock – No in-game sound on Windows 8

I bought BioShock on a Steam sale once upon a time and finally got around to playing it. However, a few minutes into the game I realized that the lack of sound was not due to my character going deaf from an initial explosion. Big Daddy is gonna kill me without even making a sound After trying to tweak the sound settings without any success I came to realize that BioShock is rather old as it was released back in 2007.

WordPress xmlrpc.php - Brute Force Attacks

What was supposed to be a quiet Saturday morning quickly turned into a couple of hours trying to mitigate an increasing strain on a  WordPress based site. After getting around 800 post requests per minute to the WordPress xmlrpc.php file, resources for the site in question was getting sparse.

Arch Linux 2014 review - Livin' on the edge

I’ve not been doing any serious distro hopping since 2008 and figured it was about time to see if there is anything new under the sun. Enter Arch Linux, a highly touted and matured distribution with a development model and philosophy I can appreciate. Honestly though, writing a review of Arch is somewhat daft as each installation will depend upon your own choices and preferences.

Lovelinks.us spam adverts on Android devices

What should have been a few relaxing minutes with (non Dana White approved) MMA related news on my Nexus 4, was soon to be turned into a browser hijacking battle courtesy of lovelink.us.

Slackware 14.1 review - Into Slackness

I did a review of Slackware Linux 14.0 a year ago and I was unsure as to whether I should make another one or not. There is rarely much change from a user point of view between different Slackware releases, and I expected to end up ripping off most of my previous review. Speaking of which, for a more well rounded assessment of Slackware Linux, please check out the Slackware 14.0 review.

Windows 8.1 update - Sorry we couldn't complete the update to Windows 8.1

Having a sick day, I jumped at the opportunity to download and install the latest Windows 8.1 release on my Asus ROG Tytan CG8480 Windows 8-based gaming pc. Since the update came at a solid 3.4GB I decided to let Windows handle this one on its own. When I came back to check out my new Windows system, I was informed that Windows unfortunately couldn’t complete the update. Windows 8.1 update failed to complete.