In the last few days I’ve noticed a few unusual GET requests for supposedly exposed SSH private keys. All requests are following the same pattern:

It’s live, prepare to self-destruct in 3..2..1..

HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP)

A new HTTP header that allows web host operators to instruct user agents to remember (“pin”) the hosts’ cryptographic identities over a period of time. During that time, user agents (UAs) will require that the host presents a certificate chain including at least one Subject Public Key Info structure whose fingerprint matches one of the pinned fingerprints for that host. Source: RFC 7469

This website recently celebrated its second year of Raspberry Pi based hosting. It’s currently running on a RPi3 with Slackware ARM 14.2 (32-bit soft float). Somewhat to my surprise, the second year went by without a single glitch.

Perl upgrades on Gentoo Linux have been laborious for me in the past, but with Perl 5.24 that was no longer the case. I’ve previously managed Perl upgrades by using the oneshot option and manually resolving any remaining conflicts afterwards. With this upgrade though, it looked to be close enough so I decided to try with the backtrack option as suggested from the following output.

My plan to install the latest Windows 10 Creators Update fell short during the weekend due to an error identified as 0xc1900200. I was using the “Windows 10 Update Assistant” to perform the upgrade, and the assistant did initially confirm that my system was ready for the upgrade.

Referrers from a domain called anonymizeme.pro have been filling up my logs lately. I initially believed it was visitors using an anonymizing service, but alas, it’s yet another referrer scam.

In a time-frame of just 10 seconds I got 1200 requests from the Jorgee vulnerability scanner, originating from 15 unique IP addresses. As usual it was just a blind attack probing a /24 subnet.

When you’ve been running GNU/Linux distributions for an adequate number of years, I do believe you’ll eventually find yourself walking the path to Mount Gentoo in hope of joining the ancient Greybeards. Many have met their demise on the road ahead, but armed with the Gentoo handbook we’re confident that it’s within our reach.

My office workstation recently went trough a Slackware release upgrade by following the excellent systemupgrade article from the Slackware Documentation Project. Personally I experienced a few snags along the way so I’ll add a few notes for future reference.

Time for another unfortunate run in with the OTRS 5 Daemon. Again I got a call from a customer informing me that OTRS had been idle for a day without creating any new tickets.