Monthly Archives: October 2018

boot issues, fedora, linux

Automatic update of Fedora Fails

I tried doing an update of fedora the other day, with the dnf system upgrade business, to upgrade in place. I should have known better. The failure is almost certainly related to the ongoing frustration of the graphics card.

One is offered the choice of two nice poisons. One may elect to use the open source nouveau driver, in which case the graphics driver will spontaneously crash about once a week forcing a reboot. Or, alternatively, one may choose instead to install the proprietary nvidia driver, in which case every few months one will get a new kernel that invalidates the driver, and the machine will suddenly not boot at all, requiring that you get in and fool around with grub and intitramfs until you can get it up enough to download and rebuild a new nvidia driver. Continue reading Automatic update of Fedora Fails →

apache, cloud, encryption, fedora, linux, mail, postfix, security, ubuntu, website building

Certificates Redux

An earlier post talked about switching my server tarragon (where this blog sits) to a wildcard certificate from letsencrypt. There were two reasons why I was using a wildcard certificate. One had to do with test versions of websites that run on this server, and the need that some of those sites have for wildcards, of the form: bob.websitename.com, sally.websitename.com, etc. The other reason was that I have a lot of hosts (oregano, cinnamon, paprika, lemongrass) in addition to tarragon that “need” to have a certificate, for https, for imap, and for smtp, and when I was having to pay for them, it was cheaper to get one wildcard for wmbuck.net. Continue reading Certificates Redux →

cloud, fedora, linux, ubuntu

Dynamic DNS

I have used dynamic dns for around 20 years, I think. But I have always used dyndns.com which these days seems to want to call themselves dyn.com. And some years back they were bought by Oracle, the kiss of death, and now they are impossible to deal with, arrogant, unsupportive, insular – all the things I expect of Oracle.

And why have I kept using them? Because that is what the routers supported. Dyndns was  there first, and the ubiquitous linksys and netgear routers usually have a feature to do automatic updates for dynamic dns, but (often) the router will only update dyndns: nobody else. And I’ve got routers installed in various people houses that are doing this.

But I recently added a new house that I support, and that person has a proprietary and ponderous comcast router, which will barely do anything useful, and has no facility to update dynamic dns.

Continue reading Dynamic DNS →

apache, encryption, fedora, linux, security, website building

Apache Quiet Failure on Certificate/Key mismatch

In an earlier post I related how I had moved to letsencrypt for tarragon. In the process of doing some cleanup of the /etc/letsencypt directory, and my repository, I managed to stupidly get one wrong private key file into the batch of all the https vhosts, such that the http config file for xyz.com specified an SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile which did not match.

It took me hours and hours to figure this out, because Apache simply fails to start and gives no indication whatever what has pissed him off. I wasn’t too stupid to figure out that I had been messing with the certs yesterday, and the problem might lie there somehow. But I have about 15 vhosts, so it was tedious. In the end I resorted to strace, and saw the problem.