GNU/Linux

Slackware ARM on the Raspberry Pi 2- 38 days later

Excited by the prospect of hosting my blog on the new Raspberry Pi 2, I decided lately to wave goodbye to the local datacenter and unleash a Slackware Linux box into the wild (full story here). Everything went (mostly) without a hitch until I wanted to get back in sync with the Slackware-current tree. After applying the available updates and issuing a reboot, the system seemed operational and nothing from the logs gave any indication of imminent failure.

WordPress on Raspberry Pi 2 running Slackware ARM

Two weeks ago, I decided to move this blog from its old hosting and deploy it on a Raspberry Pi 2. The geek in me could no longer resist the urge to discover if a $35 worth computer could replace the need for commercial hosting. Besides, what a great opportunity to finally get my hands on Slackware’s official ARM port. RPi2 setup: Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Raspberry Pi 2 Micro USB Power Cable 1.

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).

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.

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.

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.