Last year I spun up a new VPS and deployed my own IPFS node with an HTTP gateway. I used DNSLink to map the domain name paranoidpengu.in to the latest version of my website hosted on IPFS. The performance was seemingly impressive when serving content from the local repository, but how would it compare to serving static content.

If your Fedora Linux installation had only one hour left to live, where would you go and what would you do? Welcome to another brand new installment of my adventures in enterprise Linux’ing.

So .buzz is another one of those new gTLD’s that saw the light of day during ICANN’s “show me the money” run back in 2013. It’s managed by dotStrategy, and it’s advertised as a great domain name for generating buzz around your product.

I always keep a terminal window open to monitor system logs in real-time when I’m in front of my computer. Therefore, it immediately caught my attention when the systemd journal offered zero new lines of output. The most recent entry simply contained information about the previous shutdown.

It’s always DNS, right? Well, at least that appeared to be the root cause today as Njalla’s DNS servers became unresponsive. I don’t know how this could happen with anycast DNS, but regardless, every service went offline. My initial concern was that the unscheduled downtime could be the result of actions taken by law enforcement.

Today I struggled with an annoying issue concerning the sound system on my Dell XPS 13 7390. Ignoring whatever output sound device I selected, Ubuntu would instead play the audio directly through the built-in speakers. To quote what I regularly hear from my users, “it worked yesterday, and I didn’t change a thing!”

Is there anything more annoying in this world than dealing with Microsoft support? You might assume that Microsoft would appreciate reports detailing the abuse of its services or even act upon that information. But alas, in both cases you’d be wrong.

Content warning: This article contains mildly sexually explicit text and images.

As a longtime believer in a decentralized web, I’m glad to finally have been able to put this blog on the InterPlanetary File System. It’s been a fun little side project, and it allowed me to cut my teeth on IPFS.

In the modern computing era, Slackware might be considered an old relic of a long-forgotten past. The old king may have abdicated the throne, but the embers of past glory still smolder. As we’re on our way towards the release of Slackware 15, allow me to share a few amusing Slackware tales I’ve collected over the years.

Slackers rejoice! The dark ages have finally come to an end. Our benevolent dictator for life has spoken, and KDE Plasma 5 has arrived in /testing on Slackware-current. Patrick Volkerding announced the update with his usual lack of fanfare on the Slackware-current changelog:

The other day I got an automated alert from our managed WordPress hosting service, notifying me of an issue with resource exhaustion for a virtual site. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the adversary was not your everyday aimless botnet, but something darker, and far more sinister.

ShortDot SA, the top-level domain registry that brought us the infamous .ICU TLD is back with yet another useless domain extension. Say hello to .CYOU TLD, the “savvy and uber-cool domain”, at least according to ShortDot.

Enjoying a lazy Sunday morning, I decided to boot up my Slackware-current laptop to install yet another batch of kernel updates. To repay my kindness, Slackware gave me what I can only describe as a malicious jumpscare that nearly resulted in a heart attack.

A few months ago I was complaining about the lack of MTA-STS adaptation with major email service providers besides Google. Recently though, I’ve noticed a new player connecting to mta-sts.paranoidpenguin.net to retrieve my MTA-STS policy.

I’ve been getting quite a few emails from people wanting to know if I’ve made any progress on the deliverability issues I was facing when delivering email to outlook.com. As good fortune would have it, Microsoft accepted my request to delist my mail server from outlook.com’s internal IP blocklist.