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:

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.

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 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.

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:

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..

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.