I was recently surprised to discover that I could no longer manage my posts (invalid post type) or modify any of my installed plugins (sorry, you are not allowed to access this page). I’ve been exposed to these kind of problems before, both through database corruption and by my own hand so to speak. However, this time around everything checked out so I enabled debugging to track down the error.

Last year I discovered that some of my content had been deleted from Google’s index. After confirming that Googlebot could still access the post in question and excluding every possibility of accidentally blocking Googlebot (robots.txt, firewall rules etc.), I opted to resubmit the post for indexing using Google search console.

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).

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.

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:

• The Linux Mint website was compromised.
• The Mint forum database containing 145k accounts was sold online.
• The Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition was reassembled and bundled with malware.

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.

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.

RPi2 setup:

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
Raspberry Pi 2 Micro USB Power Cable 1.2A
MicroSDHC Ultra UHS-I 32GB

LAMP setup:

Slackware ARM current
Package series: a, ap, d, l, k, n (and a few from “x”).
Apache 2.4.12 (rebuilt)
MariaDB 5.5.40 (rebuilt)
PHP 5.4.40 with mod_proxy_fcgi and php-fpm (rebuilt)

Non stock packages:
Modsecurity 2.9.0
Fail2ban 0.9.1

Why use Slackware and not a hard float port?

A hardware floating-point unit you say, well I’d never heard of it.

What was supposed to be a quiet Saturday morning quickly turned into a couple of hours trying to mitigate an increasing strain on a  WordPress based site. After getting around 800 post requests per minute to the WordPress xmlrpc.php file, resources for the site in question was getting sparse.