Monthly Archives: July 2024

Brief Web Outage 14:24-14:27 July 17th

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     The brief web outage today lasting approximately two minutes was to apply a security update to the Apache server bringing it up to 2.4.62 owing to vulnerabilities found in the previous version.

     At the same time, I also upgraded the kernel to 6.10.0.  The 6.10 kernel has some improvements that speed up encryption.

Fedora and Rocky8 Info

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     Some update pushed on Rocky8 and Fedora broke rwho and ruptime on those machines.  They will still provide user status to other servers but are no longer pulling other servers for rwhod.

     Further, ruptime requires the ‘daemon’ command which is no longer available on these machines.

     At some point NIS will disappear from Fedora and when it does we will be forced to retire the machine at that time.  Because we don’t know when this will happen we can not predict this date.  Therefore we recommend NOT relying on that machine for anything.  If you have cron jobs on it, please move them to rocky8 or if you do not need a Redhat environment, one of the other servers.

Don’t Buy Epson!

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I am a little bit more than pissed off at what Epson pulled. I had a WF2950 all-in-wonder inkjet printer / scanner / fax. It isn’t officially supported under Linux but it mostly works. The mostly being the need to boot windows for Firmware updates. Today it just stopped working, the scanner wasn’t seen anymore in Windows or Linux, but there was a firmware upgrade available. So I installed it. After doing so the scanner was seen again in Windows but not Linux, however, after the firmware upgrade it refused to do anything except complain about the non-Epson ink cartridges I have in it. These worked just fine prior to the upgrade. If they think I am going to pay as much as the friggin printer for ink that last about ten pages they got another thought coming. Previously I have gone with HP, and although they always tell you a non-HP cartridge is installed they always have worked fine in spite of complaining. However mechanically they aren’t the best built, frequent issues with scanner parts breaking. But hell if I’m going to be held hostage by Epson. Once you pay for something you don’t expect them to take away functionality with firmware upgrades but that is exactly what they did, so EPSON, FUCK YOU! I bought another HP!