Back in 2018, Patrick Volkerding mentioned that he was testing PAM and Kerberos to provide proper support for Active Directory and NFS on Slackware Linux. It seems like Mr. Volkerding has finally reached a decision.
As I was booting up my Arch Linux box, systemd informed me of a start job running for /dev/disk/by-uuid. 90 seconds later, the job timed-out and some fashionable colored messages flashed by with the speed of light.
About half a year ago, I decided to turn off my old Gentoo instance and end my run with WordPress. My current cloud instance is running Ubuntu, and I’ve migrated (most of) my content from the old WordPress installation to Hugo.
I’ve made the decision to go ahead and block another one of those pesky new gTLDs that are seemingly exclusively used by malicious actors. Email delivery from .best domains will no longer get past any spam filter under my control.
As a managed service provider (MSP) we’re using an off the shelf remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform. Recently, and just for curiosity’s sake, I decided to take a closer look at the Linux agent offered by this platform. I’ll admit to being somewhat shell-shocked when I discovered that the installer had Slackware Linux on the list of supported distributions.
Yesterday, my Scaleway hosted VPS was scheduled for migration to another physical server. According to Scaleway, the expected downtime was only a few minutes. The maintenance was scheduled to begin at 10:00 UTC, so I was expecting the server to be available when I tried to connect over SSH at 11:30 UTC. Unfortunately, there was no sign of life to be found.
Over the last several months, I’ve seen a steady flow of spam emails containing only a single line of text encouraging recipients to visit a blogspot.com address. Should the recipient choose to follow the link, they would soon find themselves on a cryptocurrency scam site with amazing propositions.
ICANN’s decision to cash in and allow an unlimited number of new gTLDs has provided us with several new TLDs used predominantly for criminal purposes by malicious actors. My inbound mail servers have been flooded with spam from thousands of .icu domains for the better part of 2019.
Patrick Volkerding has finally confirmed the authenticity of the Slackware Linux Patreon page in a post over at LinuxQuestions.org.
After the Slackware Patreon page was initially discovered in mid-June 2019, it has been the source of quite a bit of debate regarding its authenticity. Anyhow, with that question out of the way, the bigger question now is whether there is still enough interest in Slackware Linux to make it a sustainable business for Mr. Volkerding.
Last week I noticed yet another ongoing brute-force attack against our managed WordPress hosting. The botnet is very low key and each bot connects on average only once per day. Up until now, I’ve collected in the ballpark of 3100 unique bots.