Going a little retro

Yes, I am still here. This thing is still on. I'm in the process of clearing up a few small things and bringing it up to date where I am now. The last time I made a serious effort to keep this "current" would have been

Since our last episode....

2024: An Update Oddysey - Changes and happenings in the months since I last posted and plans to add some extras

"It belongs in a museum!"

Old man moves younger man's website on to modern infrastructure - be shocked to find both men are one, just 25 years apart!

So I've saved the blog...

So I saved the blog but what a clusterfuck. Some Nodejs jockeys should stick to being amateur hackers.

PSA: Do you own this netblock?

Will the idiots at Viettel Corp in Vietnam wake up and smash their misbehaving ssh-scanning customers/compromised systems.. and/or just fuck off.

Retiring my old status pages...

Even good solutions need to be quietly retired, occasionally at short notice.

Oh Amazon Lightsail...

Not-Area-Man fires up a Lightsail instance because client is cheap, is surprised with the results, but not in a good way.

ThatFlemingGent's Shut In Show

Isolation Insanity kicks in, shut-in installs Streamlabs and remembers he has a Twitch account

A word on that virus everyone's talking about

Yeah I'm talking about COVID-19, along with most everyone else. It's serious and you should treat it as such. While people might see the mortality rate (around 3%) as low that's still a metric shitload of people (ask the Chinese and Italians) and it

Old Dog Learns New Trick

Middle aged server hacker and software packager reads manual pages, gets enlightened.

Customer UnService: Netflix Account Edition.

Australian man finds data integrity problem with his streaming service account. Netflix sends Terrence St John Fuckwitt to investigate. Idiocy ensues.

Goodbye Wordpress

So about 13 years since I moved from a tiny little proto-blog app (the long departed "Project Steve Guttenberg", also my first contribution to PHP development, long before Github and pull requests) to an early version of Wordpress, I'm moving again Because it's nearly

Felt motivated....

Made some changes to old cringeworthy pages I’ve not touched in years, laughed at the old servers, might delete later ? The Servers page updates were good laugh, who said Moore’s Law didn’t apply any more? My alarm clock now has more computing power than they did. I’

Is this thing still on?

Holy hell, I remembered I had this thing.  I literally hadn’t posted here for over half a decade. Too busy with work, my better half and Skyrim / Eve Online / Witcher. etc etc. To be honest I am certain as death and taxes that long form blogging is fairly dead,

boycott

Moving domain registrars - NoDaddy Day

My domains are currently registered with GoDaddy, which seemed like a good idea at the timebutgiven the company’s and their CEO Bob Parsons’ blatant disregard for customers, common decency, ethics and acceptable business practices I’m moving them en-masse to different registrars. As for why? Let me count the

brisbanefloods

A response to Danny Nalliah

(Non-technical post: Fedora folks can skip this if they like, I just feel the need to rant as this offends me deeply) Context: My city of Brisbane, Australia is currently experiencing the worst floods in the region since 1974; Outlying areas and regional towns and cities are cut off and

fedora

Pardon the disruption..

Due to a lost / corrupted GPG keyring and passphrase I’ve had to issue a new RPM signing key for my ThatFlemingGent repository [https://www.thatfleminggent.com/rpm-packages]. I’m fixing the breakage now and I can’t say I’m too pleased, it’s a pain in the proverbial

internetblackout

Going dark...

Don’t be alarmed, I’ve not been compromised ? In support of the Open Internet / No Clean Feed initiatives fighting proposed mandatory Internet filtering here in Australia, I’m “turning the lights out” on my site until the 29th. The Great Australian Internet Blackout site (http://www.internetblackout.com.au)

caffeine

Keeping afloat in a binary ocean

Micro-rant: One of my pet peeves as a guy who likes to say his piece online is the number of really interesting and useful technologies / ideas completely ruined by lazy attempts at marketing by even lazier “salesmen” and marketers. Look at email – DKIM/SPF/DNSBLs/greylisting just to keep the

Another closed protocol failure...

It looks like the Microsoft Windows Live Messenger Service protocol servers are unresponsive tonight (http login still works) – I’ve got some friends from old workplaces and other Windows hold-outs using it, so I still have an active account. If you haven’t convinced friends/loved ones/co-workers to switch

dns

Getting a PowerDNS recursor up and going, fast!

This post is another one of my “quick and dirty” service tutorials This time, I’ll cover getting a recursive DNS service up and going, using the PowerDNS recursor [http://www.powerdns.com/] package. Traditionally Red Hat/Fedora users would opt for BIND (with or without the old “caching-nameserver” package

geoip

Keeping it simple isn't stupid

GeoIP / IPv6 As an IPv6 enthusiast/proponent/fanboy I was really happy to see Maxmind finally put up a free-as-in-beer IPv6 GeoIP database[1]. Now to find some applications that will make good use of this data… ? (Don’t worry, I’ll pull it into EPEL/Fedora GeoIP packages either

courtesy

How polite!

I’m testing the Prosody XMPP server [http://prosody.im/] package I’d mentioned some time back (I’ve worked with jabberd/jabberd2 and ejabberd, figured a new tinker toy was on the cards) and got this when trying to check the service status – as a non-privileged serf/peon >

bloodyidiots

Just Plain Bad Service

I almost lost two of my domains this week – a registrar / hosting company that will not be named decided to close them off without any notice – no email, letter or even a phone call. 15 minutes in a phone queue as the “next to be answered” and a debate with