Author: Michiel

Site speed

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The site became dead slow the last days. The main reason was an update in a WordPress plugin called tinyMCE. Although the writer claims that he had fixed all things slowing down websites, rolling back to an earlier release is the solution that really works to return to the speed we were used to.

Another thing that looked like slowing down the site was the Facebook plugin, these “Like” buttons that were all over the site. Now that really didn’t slowed down the site because the call was asynchronous, fact was that it looked a bit strange that after a page was loaded, the page was reformatted again when the buttons arrived and were parsed. Almost nobody used these buttons, so now only the generic Facebook button in the header is still there.

Progress migration to Slackware.

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All articles original written for Arch Linux are now converted to Slackware, or are now more or less universal articles. Only the article about VoIP base installation needs more work. Most Slackware based packages are available now on the Slackware extra download site.

I am planning to add a whole new series of articles, Sound engineering and Sound on Linux. For a bit over 40 years I do things with sound, music and bands. That means I have seen everything from tubes to digital sound processing. Computers, and so Linux too, are becoming more important on sound production. In the studio this is already for a few years, but now it is more and more used for live sound as well.

New download site for my Extra Slackware packages.

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All Extra Slackware packages are removed from this site, and hey are now available from it’s own site. This makes the sources for the packages available too and it looks more like a general Slackware packages tree. This move removes some load from this site, it became too slow because the file database was getting big.

In the meantime, most articles are rewritten for Slackware again, just eight to go and they are done.

Happy New Year and some updates

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First of all, a happy new year to all our readers. The site has now a facebook page, so FB users can now more easy follow a number of changes on this site. Use the like buttons or the button in the header to go there.

Syslinux boot

Syslinux boot

The reworking of the existing articles from Arch Linux into Slackware Linux is making good progress. It’s a good opportunity to make some articles more or less distribution independent.

Today I wrote a new article to finish the basic system installation using syslinux as boot loader and so that the basic installation is now a more complete story.

Only One Server to go..

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That’s right, just one server that I maintain is still running Arch Linux. This server is in another part of town, so I need to go there to migrate that one to Slackware. The virtual Linux on that server is already migrated because that can be done via the Internet. Such a thing is just a matter of preparing a new virtual root disk on a local system and install it on the remote server. A reconfigure of the disks and reboot and such virtual server is up and running again in a few minutes. This is just one of the advantages of using virtual servers.

At first I didn’t want to put the complete Slackware packages from my repository on line, but this week I decided to make these packages available for download. Lets see how it goes with the limited bandwidth here.

Half of the articles about the home server are adjusted to Slackware, slowly the rest will follow.

Progress dropping Arch

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In the last weeks I prepared the move of the virtual routers from Arch Linux to Slackware 14.0. Now two routers and two web servers are running Slackware again. The largest work will be the host that runs the virtual machines. A lot of packages need to be prepared to minimize the downtime. Luckily I used to have two root partitions so that the system can run dual boot with two distro’s. This allows me to reboot Arch if it takes too long or if extra packages need to be build. This can happen as the host server has all the network drives with the packages and sources.

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Back to Slackware

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Up to now the home server project and articles were based on Arch Linux. Before I wrote these articles I had mostly used Slackware, but for this project I used Arch because it was more flexible at that time. But things change over time, and not always for the better. The first problems with Arch started when they abandoned the net-tools package. The scripts that should replace this functionality are still not good enough for this server project and possible for a lot of other projects.

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Iptables >= 1.4.16 and fwbuilder doesn’t work

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If you use fwbuilder to configure the firewalls on your server, then don’t upgrade to iptables 1.4.16 but keep 1.4.15. Version 1.4.16 does work, but you will see a lot of warnings like:

WARNING: The state match is obsolete. Use conntrack instead.

The syntax of several iptables and ip6tables commands will change, and fwbuilder needs an upgrade so that the correct rules will be generated again. It’s just a matter of time until it really doesn’t work anymore. To stop upgrading, add IgnorePkg = iptables in /etc/pacman.conf until a fwbuilder will be released that generates the new syntax. The iptables package only depends on glibc, and as long as there is no major glibc update you can safely use the 1.4.15 version.