With all the noise lately about Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) and the lack of patched kernels from Slackware’s “Benevolent Dictator for Life”, I decided it was time to roll up the sleeves and get it done. Since Slackware doesn’t have a “sophisticated” build system and all that grease, it’s a trivial matter to step up to the plate and take responsibility for your own system. I’ll be using “vanilla-kernelversion” as my tag for the kernel and initrd. Also notice that I build my kernels as a normal user.
I got a call last week from a client that was having some issues with retrieving email from a Dovecot IMAP server. The client was connecting over TLS and was using an Apple mail client. Upon checking the mailserver log, I was greeted with a flood of rather vicious looking errors. I’m not gonna post the entire backtrace since its rather long, but you’ll get the idea.
My RPi3 just missed the six month uptime mark due to a power failure that also caused some minor data corruption. Interestingly, the RPi powered up before the network equipment was online and thus failed to synchronize the time. I didn’t notice immediately but things go sour quickly when a Internet connected device believes the date to be Jan 1 1970.
I was playing around with an open source video editor named OpenShot when I suddenly felt a familiar shiver going down my spine. I felt the unmistakable presence of evil, and it was coming from inside my own computer. ‘You will know me as the Google Analytics measurement protocol’ the beast answered upon detection.
On my Windows 10 computers I always work with a standard account and keep a separate administrator account. This provides some additional security as any operation needing administrative privileges will require an administrator’s approval.
As of Wednesday, August 24, 2016, Slackware ARM is out of retirement and ready to power your modern ARM devices. The Slackware ARM maintainer has made the decision to pick up development again and go ahead with a hard float port. It was announced three months ago that a hard float port was in the works, and today it’s powering my Raspberry Pi 2. Unfortunately the hard float release has been mostly ignored by the mainstream teach sites, but it’s definitely on top of my list. Get up to date with the latest development at arm.slackware.com.