I had some issues today with the Akonadi server failing on my Slackware 14.1 box at the office, so I resorted to killing X for a quick revival. However, issuing startx only resulted in the following errors:

By working in the “web business” I do get my hands on a fair share of malware kits as attackers continuously try to infect any website available with their automated scripts.

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 :-)

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

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.

The shadow.service unit reported that it had failed and threw the following error message: “user ‘colord’: directory ‘/var/lib/colord’ does not exist”. I had no recollection of housing such a user, but by issuing the command below there was hard proof (image to the right) that colord was indeed a homeless user on my system, and her home was supposed to have been /var/lib/colord.

Remember that old saying: if you don’t know the source, don’t click it? With all these new URL shortening services, that advice seems to have been thrown out the window. As a result, evildoers are embracing the technology to disguise their malware sites behind shortened URLs.

This is obviously effective as an URL like hxxps://goo.gl/3BSi65 would have a much easier time getting past your spamfilter than say something like hxxp://h4x0r.tld/inject.aspx

Excited by the prospect of hosting my blog on the new Raspberry Pi 2, I decided lately to wave goodbye to the local datacenter and unleash a Slackware Linux box into the wild (full story here).

Everything went (mostly) without a hitch until I wanted to get back in sync with the Slackware-current tree. After applying the available updates and issuing a reboot, the system seemed operational and nothing from the logs gave any indication of imminent failure.

Two weeks ago, I decided to move this blog from its old hosting and deploy it on a Raspberry Pi 2. The geek in me could no longer resist the urge to discover if a $35 worth computer could replace the need for commercial hosting. Besides, what a great opportunity to finally get my hands on Slackware’s official ARM port.

After Windows 8.1 had performed an unscheduled reboot, I was greeted with the following error message when trying to start up a virtual machine in VMware Player:

This virtual machine appears to be in use.
If this virtual machine is not in use, press the “Take Ownership” button to obtain ownership of it. Otherwise, press the “Cancel” button to avoid damaging it.

Trying to start the game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men from the Steam client on a default Windows 8.1 installation will not work. Furthermore, you’ll get no error message other than the obvious lack of the gameplay.

With the release of OTRS Help Desk 4, it seems that running OTRS on a native Windows environment for all intents and purposes is no longer viable. By killing off the Windows installer and recommending migration into the OTRS appliance, the OTRS Group seems to be subtly hinting that OTRS on Windows is dead in the water.

No additional software is required on a full Slackware 14.1 install.
Slackware 14.1 ships with KDE 4.10.5.

A while back I did some consulting work for a small ISP who had received complaints from a few customers that believed they could not use the ISP’s SMTP server to send email to outlook.com or hotmail.com accounts. These customers claimed they never got any bounce message (Non-Delivery Report)  in return, so they firmly believed the problem resided with the ISP.