Every single WordPress tag is returning a 404 error

That tag “stuff” is not working on our corporate website, please fix asap the costumer complained. Sure, will do immediately I replied confidently, believing this to be a simple matter of purging some old cache or refreshing permalinks. Sadly that was not to be the case so I ended up having to get my hands dirty. To my absolute horror, the site was running one of those godawful themeforest themes.

Red Hat 7.4 - VirtualBox Guest Additions issues

With the latest Red Hat release I experienced an issue with increasing the screen resolution above 1027×768. After checking out the VirtualBox forums, I found my answer and a solution to the issue.

Do we need a Slackware Enterprise Linux?

So the annual “Slackware needs PAM and Kerberos” thread is going strong over at linuxquestions.org at the moment. This particular topic always seem to awaken a collective inferiority complex within the Slackware community, where users are aggressively refuting any claim that Slackware is not a viable choice for business use (you can do anything with some lines of bash right?…). At the opposite side you have users arguing that Slackware has become a niche hobbyist distribution due to its reluctance to implement mainstream technologies.

pfSense - How to add a MX record to a local zone

My plan was to have a Zimbra e-mail server running in VirtualBox using the internal networking model with a local domain. To make this work, I have a virtual pfSense box running on the same internal network to provide “outside” access. Additionally, pfSense is also running a DNS resolver so I figured it would be a trivial matter to add the local records I needed.

The WordPress Attachment Page redirect loop

Looking through my server logs I noticed how Baidu’s web spider was causing an unexpected redirect loop while trying to index an image attachment page. Since I deliberately redirect all attachment page requests to the actual post owning the attachment, I decided to take a closer look. The following request triggered the loop:

WordPress errors on Apache 2.4.26 with PHP-FPM

I was recently surprised to discover that I could no longer manage my posts (invalid post type) or modify any of my installed plugins (sorry, you are not allowed to access this page). I’ve been exposed to these kind of problems before, both through database corruption and by my own hand so to speak. However, this time around everything checked out so I enabled debugging to track down the error.

How to purge all banned IP's from fail2ban 0.9.x

Microsoft bingbot is a repeat offender on my RPi and as a consequence it’s subjected to extended periods of jail time. However, being a good netizen I like to provide an even playing field for all web crawlers. With that in mind, what would be the easiest way of purging all IP addresses from fail2ban?

Let's Encrypt goes TITSUP

Let’s Encrypt suffered from a major service disruption today leaving users unable to access various services. The cause of the problem seems to have been an update to Boulder (ACME CA) which has since been reversed.

Important security research from the RWTH Aachen University

I regularly spend time investigating my server logs and occasionally come across a few special snowflakes. My onion (Tor) server hosted with a popular cloud provider was recently visited by a research scanner. The scanner initially greeted the server with a few standard GET requests: