I woke up this morning to a mail informing me that WordPress had been upgraded to version 4.4.1. Shortly after I tried to access my blog to verify that everything had gone smoothly, but unfortunately my webserver showed no sign of life. Since I’ve previously had a few hard learned lessons with the RPi2, that made me a bit uneasy. A couple of hours later though, as I was reviewing my logs, the problem became pretty obvious:

Distrowatch had an interesting “feature story” on Void Linux last year that caught my attention. Though the review painted a rather bleak image of the distribution, it still came through as an original project with some exiting features.

So the “DELETE your logs” message hit my server last night and at first glance it does look like a HTTP DELETE request :-)

However, this is not a delete request or even a valid HTTP request. Since I’m running ModSecurity it got rejected, but most servers will just throw a “400 Bad request” response. The user agent string “masspoem4u/1.0” identifies the messenger as a bot, and it’s probably misbehaving by design.

Prerequisites: xdg-utils

When clicking a magnet link, the Chrome (or Chromium) browser will launch an external application to handle the link (remember it’s a URI, hence the external protocol request message). Anyhow, if your system doesn’t have an application associated with magnet links, then the result will be no action at all.

Some big news was revealed through the Slackware Current (pre-release) changelog today as the switch from udev to eudev was finally announced.

And this is a big deal because?

udev, which is a device manager for the Linux kernel was absorbed into systemd back in 2012 with a notion of fully supporting systems not running systemd.

As a response to the merging of udev into systemd, the Gentoo eudev project (an udev fork) officially launched a few months later. Their goal was to provide better compatibility with existing software, older kernels, various toolchains and anything else required by users.

While installing some apps and extensions from the Chrome web store I noticed that there were a few well known products delivered by developers totally unknown to me (and Google search). LastPass, AVG AntiVirus, Snapchat, Viber and others were available sporting their trademark name and logo, but from publishers without any affiliation with the actual brand.

So the last report from my Slackware based RPi2 hosting project ended on a cliffhanger (pun intended), as I was just recovering after suffering data corruption, the occasional kernel panic and random errors. Suspecting the instability might be caused by my overly optimistic approach to overclocking and overvolting, I decided to turn things down a few notches.

So I wanted to split a 3840×1080 wallpaper in two halves for my dual monitor based KDE 4.10.5 setup. Obviously there are several applications that would do the job, but why bother when ImageMagick can do it with a one-liner. The “magick” is achieved by using a geometry argument:

When using a client other than Skype for Business (formerly known as Lync) to connect with your Office 365 account, you’ll need to provide the Microsoft Lync servers with a user-agent string they recognize as an “acceptable” client. The reasoning behind this is surely to give you the best possible experience and not at all to lock out other messaging clients.

Just for the record: collecting failed logins from Logwatch and feeding them to the firewall is by no means a viable strategy against brute force attacks or other intrusion attempts. There are better means to mitigate these kind of security concerns in real time.