OTRS 5 - Unable to fetch email from external accounts

A few weeks back I got a call from a customer who complained that OTRS had been idle for a day without creating any new tickets. After some initial troubleshooting it became clear that OTRS was simply no longer able to retrieve mail.

Gentoo kernel upgrade checklist

These steps are partly dependent on my personal Gentoo installation and should not be viewed as a general recipe. Please refer to the official Gentoo wiki on the topic instead. I’m using genkernel to generate an initramfs and GRUB2 as my boot loader.

Entering the Dark Web

It’s time to take privacy to the next level and ship this website off to the dark web. As a longtime Tor user it has been a source of embarrassment to not have my content available in onionland. However, that’s all in the past and this website is currently available at slackiuxopmaoigo.onion

The Internet of Things are flooding my website

Most people have probably heard about the Internet of Things (IoT) by now and how these devices are constantly drafted for your friendly neighborhood botnet. My little place on the interweb is currently gaining popularity among my DVR based visitors. You know the type: running a public telnet service, using hard coded accounts and may occasionally be seen sporting an additional backdoor on port 31337.

These bots are posing as Googlebot, but they are effortless to identify due to their use of the old and largely abandoned HTTP 1.0 protocol.

How to build your own kernel on Slackware Linux

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’m sick of WordPress so I wrote a new theme to make it worse

In an attempt to have a WordPress theme optimized for running on the Raspberry Pi 3, I went through the hurdles of writing my own theme. Among my goals was to create something entirely free of third party CSS and JavaScript frameworks. Actually, I wanted a theme free from JavaScript altogether and in my opinion there are already more than enough websites built on the Bootstrap framework (you’ll recognize them, they all look the same).

Dovecot Panic: file mail-transaction-log.c

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.