This WordPress blog is now hosted on a Raspberry Pi 3 after a year of running on a Raspberry Pi 2. Unlike with the RPi2, I’ve not done any overclocking on this device. I’m hoping that decision will decrease the number of file system related issues and obscure kernel oopses I’ve experienced lately, but I guess time will tell.
Let’s get ready to rumble: a battle of two Slackware ARM powered webservers.
Hosting your WordPress installation on a RPi2 can be a challenge on multiple levels. Apart from stability issues, my biggest concern is always subpar PHP performance and additional overhead with TLS connections. To determine the potential gain of upgrading my hosting platform to a RPi3, I’ve done a few tests with a MicroSD card I recently retired due to data corruption.
Since I hit the one year mark today I thought I would do a quick update on my RPi2 project. A short recap to kick things off: the project had a rough start due to some overly ambitious overclocking that eventually resulted in severe data corruption. However, after implementing the necessary modifications I enjoyed close to 300 days of easy uptime before a power failure took the RPi2 down. My initial thought after the power failure was that everything was still dandy, but a few weeks later things started to go downhill fast. It all began with a few file system errors:
So this website was pretty much free of trackers with one notable exception, the fonts provided by the Twenty Fifteen theme. By its use of the Google Fonts API, most visitors were still leaking data back to the great chocolate factory. However, as the fonts are open source we’re free to use them outside of Google’s realm.
‘Tis the season to be cracking.
In the webhosting business we’re used to seeing an increase in attacks during the holidays, as most people by then are busy with real life. If you’re a cracker though, this is your favorite time of the year.
SimpleScreenRecorder (ssr) is a feature-rich screen recorder for Linux that supports X11 and OpenGL. SimpleScreenRecorder is available as a SlackBuild script from slackbuilds.org, but by only installing the listed dependency, namely FFmpeg, you’ll end up with a rather limited set of supported codecs.
By now most people have gotten up to speed with latest news regarding the attack against the Linux Mint infrastructure and the ripples it created within the Mint community. If not, here is yet another quick and superficial recap:
Due to a city wide power outage I lost just short of 300 days of uptime on the RPi2. The RPi2 did boot back up when the power returned, but since I had received a new IP address I needed to make a DNS update before the server was reachable again. That’s obviously the downside of running a server on a dynamic IP space, but hey it doesn’t cost me a cent. I have a 300 seconds TTL (Time To Live) on my blog.paranoidpenguin.net A record so I think it’s good enough for a hobby project.
The symptom is rather ominous, your wp-content/cache/supercache folder is suddenly populated by additional domain name folders having no connection to your website. What could have caused this? Has your website been compromised or is there some reasonable explanation for this behavior.
Who would have thought, right? :-)
After installing my certificate from Let’s Encrypt last week I was immediately confronted with the fact that I had made the wrong choice in regard to key sizes. By using a 4096-bit private key I was relying too heavily on the RPi2’s CPU. This became abundantly clear as page load times were increased by 500 – 1000ms.