I was not planning to add support for MTA-STS for my domain as I’ve previously deployed DANE for SMTP transport security. MTA-STS is an alternative solution that does not require DNSSEC for authentication but instead relies on certification authorities.

After migrating my blog from WordPress to Hugo, I wanted to find a simple solution that allowed me to mirror my blog content effortlessly to my hidden services. As Hugo is a static content generator, I didn’t have the opportunity to dynamically rewrite content on the fly by pulling the HTTP host from the current request.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I figured it was about time for this Gentoo powered blog to enjoy the security and performance enhancements provided by TLSv1.3. However, that meant leaving “Gentoo stable” behind and travel on a journey of discovery into the land of the unmasked and dangerous.

I was unaware that Facebook recently had started to add a unique click identifier to all outbound links on facebook.com. Coincidentally, one of the security measures of this server is to disallow query strings as part of the URL. Thus, any visitors coming over from Facebook were suddenly blocked and banned on sight.

A while back I lost access to the email address with which I had subscribed to the slackware-security mailing list. This does not please Bob, so today I logged into my webmail account and sent along a new request to join slackware-security and slackware-announce. The response I got in return gave me a good laugh and a swift feel of nostalgia.

I’ve never really felt all that good about storing my passwords on the public cloud, but after we started using LastPass at work I somehow got lulled into adopting it for personal use as well.

So I had just implemented DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) on a Postfix server and was confident that the signing process was correct, but on testing, the recipient’s SMTP server insisted that the message had failed authentication due to an invalid public key.

I’m currently experimenting with a few rule conditions to explicitly whitelist the resources I want clients to be able to retrieve on my server. The initial target for this exercise was my onion site which has an issue with misbehaving (poorly written) Tor bots, but I thought it would be fun to extend the experiment to paranoidpenguin.net.

In the last two weeks I’ve seen a steady increase of bots trying to exploit a remote command execution flaw on D-Link routers. The majority of the attacks are originating from IP blocks belonging to Telecom Egypt Data.

Shortly following the distribution’s 25th year anniversary, Slackware maintainer Patrick Volkerding has shared some insight into his current financial situation and the issues he’s facing due to a lack of revenue from the Slackware store. According to Volkerding, the store has not forwarded any founds from sales or donations for the past two years.

At the end of last year, I decided to install an interesting looking operating system named GuixSD. This was to be my first experience of running a system consisting entirely of free software. Unfortunately, the absence of non-free firmware also meant that I in 2018 would be giving up on wireless internet.

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.

Arch pushed out Gnome 3.28 today but unfortunately for me, my system failed to boot properly after the upgrade. The system simply locked up after the “Reached target Graphical Interface” stage. GDM (The GNOME Display Manager) was a prime suspect in my book, so the first order of business was booting into a lower runlevel to figure out what was going on.