After a long rebuild session yesterday due to the Python 3.6 upgrade, I was not overly impressed when issuing emerge --sync eventually resulted in a proposition to revert yesterdays work:

Python 3.6 recently replaced Python 3.5 in the default Python targets on Gentoo systems. The change was announced a month ago, which provided more than enough time for me to forget all about it. Because of this, I was somewhat surprised today as Portage complained about unmet requirements for the fail2ban-0.9.6 ebuild.

As a firm believer in online privacy I refuse to use Skype, Google Hangouts or whatever non end-to-end encrypted service “normal people” are using for their online communication. As a consequence, friends who wants to message me are “encouraged” to install and use Signal. Recently this backfired as one friend insisted it was my responsibility to backup and restore messages on his new Android phone.

I recently learned that it’s possible to use Google Authenticator (or any other authenticator app) with Office 365 for 2-step verification. That’s great as I’ve always believed it was Microsoft Authenticator or the highway. I’m sure Microsoft Authenticator works fine, but I don’t want multiple authenticator apps on my phone.

A month ago I issued a wildcard certificate for *.paranoidpenguin.net and patiently awaited the expiration of my old HPKP policy. Eventually the time to install the new key and certificate arrived, but to my great dismay, things did not turn out according to plan. Upon restarting the Apache web server, I got served with the following (epic) failure:

While configuring my first Gentoo VPS I somehow managed to crash a service and discovered that I had actually no idea how to recover it. The service no longer had any matching processes but it still refused to stop, and simultaneously insisted it was already started. Severely embarrassed I made sure nobody was looking and rebooted the server.

I recently read a thread on reddit titled “A Privacy & Security Concern Regarding GNOME Software” that addressed a few issues regarding the fwupd daemon. The developer eventually responded and was able to justify and debunk most of the claims made against his software. However, that prompted me to have a closer look at the traffic originating from GNOME Software.

I’ve never owned a single Apple product but lately I’ve been wondering how good a real UNIX certified operating system might actually be. To get my feet wet, I decided to try out macOS Sierra in a VirtualBox session on a Linux host. I’m aware that much of the Apple experience is closely connected to the hardware, but personally I was more interested in the isolated OS experience.

So I was minding my own business while connected to my VPN service when I noticed several blocked outbound network connections appearing in my firewall log. For some reason my wifi adapter (wlp3s0) was trying to connect directly to the internet without having traffic routed through my VPN interface (tun0). Was this my reward for not reviewing AUR PKGBUILD files, or was there another explanation as to why wlp3s0 wanted to disclose my real IP address?

There has been a long and tedious debate among slackers over whether the distribution should stick with KDE4 or move to Plasma 5. According to Slackware’s KDE maintainer Eric Hameleers, a decision has been made and Slackware 15.0 will ship Plasma 5.

So today I’ve experienced a more significant than usual attack against WordPress installations hosted on one of our company servers. So far I’ve blocked more than 17000 21000 unique IP addresses, but the attackers seem to have an endless supply and they’re not slowing down. Note: This article was updated on January 27, 2018.

I recently added support for the HTTP/2 protocol on this server and I am really pleased with the additional performance gains. This VPS was already running a functional LAMP stack, so the following steps describe the necessary configuration changes for my setup which relies on Apache with PHP-FPM.