Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Me (Page 2 of 29)

Heads-up: I am migrating slackware.nl to a different host on 14-aug

August 13, 2025 / / 11 Comments

Before the summer holiday ends and people start hammering my download servers again, I am going to that which I announced a while ago. In order to deal with increasing load on my main server I have been planning a re-distribution of its services to multiple new hosts.
The most important one – docs.slackware.com – was moved on June 17th. But the main package mirror and the git repositories still reside on the old host.

Therefore, tomorrow 14 August I am going to migrate the remaining services from old host “martin’ to new host “vance” which is more powerful.

Specifically, the services that will migrate are:

Expect some downtime while the hostnames move to their new IP address. I have a 10 minute TTL configured in DNS for the current DNS mappings. But I have noticed with earlier migrations that the propagation of my DNS changes across the globe sometimes take *much* longer than 10 minutes. The Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1) is usually pretty fast picking up those changes but Google DNS (8.8.8.8) sometimes takes an hour.
I also need to validate that I actually migrated all of the content and configuration properly.

If you wanted to use tomorrow, August 14th, as a perfect day to upgrade your Slackware computer or download a Live ISO from slackware.nl – wait another day please or use another mirror this once.

I understand this is an inconvenience but the service will improve! I expect more bandwidth, faster response time and no more aborted transfers.

Cheers, Eric

Final report-out 2025-aug-15:
The new server is up and running and there are no remaining issues to be resolved as far as I can see.
The migration to the new server also meant an upgrade from Slackware64 15.0 to -current. That caused a few unforeseen issues:

  • Segfaults in the ‘cgit’ web interface to my git repositories (as evidenced in ‘dmesg’ output) which turned out to be caused by a race condition in Lua version incompatibilities: cgit was compiled against luajit which is compatible with Lua 5.1, whereas lua-md5 which is used by cgit was compiled against the Slackware lua package (version 5.4).
    Resolved by recompiling cgit against Lua 5.4.
  • Crashes in the slakfinder database updater. The PHP and MariaDB on Slackware 15.0 were fine with ISO-8859 text inside slack-desc files, but on -current that throws an exception.
    Resolved by converting all imported text from slack-desc files to UTF-8 first.

Levi

July 11, 2025 / / 8 Comments

Animals enrich our life. Caring for pets makes you a better person. Letting your kids grow up together with animals in/around the house helps them learn the value of care and compassion.

We’ve had cats for almost 30 years now. The original sisterhood – two Holy Birman sisters – passed away ten and twelve years ago, and we adopted two Holy Birman half-brothers soon after, along with all their neuroses and traumas accumulated while being with their first family.
They were already more than eight years old when we took them into our care, and we knew that their time with us might not be that extensive. Still, we embraced them, they fully became part of our little circle and they in turn accepted us as their new humans.

Eventually old age takes its toll and today we had to euthanize Levi. He was deaf, demented, unable to care for and groom himself any longer, and his health had been deteriorating rapidly those last few months.

Levi was a beautiful cat, with a character made of gold. Never raised a claw against us, protesting only with his voice.
The gentle giant (he was almost 6 kilograms in his prime, almost twice the size of the females we had before) – he is no more. And I will miss him.

Migrating my infrastructure

June 19, 2025 / / 24 Comments

Roughly the last 12 months have been really hard on my server infrastructure – the servers that I rent and which host sites like slackware.nl, docs.slackware.com, download.liveslak.org, git.slackware.nl and several more.
An un-ending DDoS attack mostly by IP addresses from Chinese origin that keep requesting to download Slackware ISO files, many per second, effectively saturating bandwidth. Combine that with a massive onslaught of AI bots that roam the Internet scraping web content to feed to their LLM models. I have been mitigating these attacks and annoyances using web access control (because blocking all of China on IP level probably is exactly what the Chinese government is trying to achieve here: making sure that Chinese folks lose access to free and open source software).  Eventually these were also killing the Apache httpd daemon because that is where the access control is happening.
I am sure you’ve experienced that: when downloading an ISO from slackware.nl or running a “slackpkg upgrade-all” with slackware.nl as the package mirror, connections are aborted randomly.

So I had to make a decision: to deal with this in some way and improve the user experience for the average Slacker.

I have begun migrating my services away from the single physical host (and its hot standby) which has been running all these services sofar. They are being spread onto multiple (also more performant) new hosts.

Completed so far:

In progress; migrating slackware.nl, download.liveslak.org, git.slackware.nl, git.liveslak.org to a third server. Basically this affects all the mirror data that users want to download.
This part is actually more complex  and time-consuming due to the use of MSQL databases that need to be migrated as well (slakfinder for instance), multiple cron jobs to keep data in sync and backed-up and just a lot of data to shuffle around.

I aim to actually switch the various domains and hostnames to their new IP addresses somewhere in the next week. Expect a (hopefully) short downtime for the services mentioned above. If you get “file not found” errors or web sites go missing, just be patient and wait half an hour. If things take a concerning turn, leave your comments below this article and point me to the things that broke without me seeing it.

I hope to have informed you properly and timely 🙂

Cheers Eric

Let me remind you who started the war in Ukraine and how

February 19, 2025 /

I am going to spit 77 million people in the face here, and it needs to be done. I am raging. If you live in the USA and do not want to be confronted by my ‘leftist’ or ‘commie’ political views then unsubscribe from this blog and get the fuck out.
Listen carefully. Blatant lies are coming from the Oval office with the intention to destroy an ally.

The war in Ukraine did not start in 2022, and it was not started by Ukraine.

In February of 2014 Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. NATO shied away from aiding Ukraine because of a justified fear of escalating the conflict. And in July of 2014, Russians shot down a commercial airplane over eastern Ukraine, killing hundreds of passengers. Hard work of a journalist collective provided the proof which held up in court.

In the years that followed, Russia kept arming and fueling the hatred of separatists in the eastern Ukraine. Why? Possibly because with the occupation of the Donbas, Russia now has control over 40% of Ukraine’s mineral riches. It’s always about the money, right? Or is the hunger for power stronger than greed?

In 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine from multiple fronts. Not because of what the traitor in the Oval office tells you – that  Ukraine started this war because of their request to join NATO – no, that request was sent to NATO in 2002, TWENTY years before Putin started his ‘special operation’. The invasion of Ukraine was ordered by a mad Russian dictator whose pride was hurt when the West kept ignoring him as a serious partner on the world stage.

Remember this account from what happened during those initial days?

This is not what happens if you pre-empt a strike because you fear your opponent. This is brutal sadism, trademark of Russian warfare where the state, not people, is the only thing that counts.

Those of you who put a traitor in the Oval office have made yourselves complicit, not just because you have enabled the autocracy or even dictatorship which is being created in the USA as we speak. But also complicit in the possible destruction of a European country: Ukraine. Your president with his delusions of grandeur will try again to grab Canada, Panama and Greenland and will leave Ukraine defenseless against Russia’s aggression. He does not care about you. He is a narcissist.
Next may be the start of an all-out war in Europe because Putin sees an opportunity. The USA now believes that Russia is not the enemy and Europe is its own enemy. And who the fuck cares about that in the USA?
I don’t understand you assholes who put this conman on a throne. All because you could not tolerate a black woman in the Oval office?
You don’t believe this? The orange guy keeps doing exactly what he has been telling you for years. There’s no reason to believe that he will change all of a sudden.

Fuck you all, maggots.

And indeed, I have disabled comments to this article. Suck it up.

Your input requested for DAW Live

December 15, 2024 / / 27 Comments

It has been a long time since I had a serious look at my audio software set, and the Slackware DAW Live ISO image which is meant to showcase all of that software.

Life interfered and priorities shifted.

Now I am looking at 2025 and the Christmas holiday week which precedes it, and am pondering where to put my energy and time. Considering the lack of clarity about the next stable Slackware release (something which really annoyed me in the few years leading up to Slackware 15.0) and the relative certainty that KDE Plasma 6 is not going to be included in that next release, I am not looking forward to kickstarting my obsolete ktown repository for Plasma 6. It would eat up a lot of my time and I am a happy Plasma 5 user.
So, I decided it would be more productive and rewarding to revive the DAW and audio software project.

I will not focus on a refresher of my Slackware 15 based DAW Live Edition. I want to switch to Slackware -current, realizing full well that this may cause new frustrations along the way when stuff breaks as a result of a Slackware update, but I really want to experiment with Pipewire – for sure as a replacement for Pulseaudio but perhaps also as a replacement for the Jack Audio Toolkit. Who knows.

However, I have not been playing/experimenting with Slackware’s sound system since 2022, the whole Pipewire adventure has passed me by. If I want to rebuild & refresh that large set of software, I need to start with the basics and that is to get a low-latency ‘pro’ sound subsystem off the ground that I can understand and adapt to the needs of a Live Edition.

HELP!

Therefore a request to you, blog regulars, to help me understand how to get rid of Pulseaudo in Slackware and replace it with Pipewire. How does Jack still fit in this configuration? Should it remain the main sound server? Should Pipewire replace it, providing the binary API to Jack-enabled applications? Should the choice to have Pipewire or Jack as the main sound server be something you would want to make after login?

Anything you have already mastered and all the bugs and nasties that you have already eradicated, will save me some precious time and give me more motivation to restart the project during my Christmas break.  Use the comments section below to describe your challenges, your solutions and your resulting setup; or link to pages / pastebins that contain Slackware-specific information.

And somewhat related, since I am not a musician or audio technician: I want to understand better how to connect the audio software to audio hardware: how do you link up a DAW like Ardour to an external USB sound card, a MIDI controller keyboard, hardware synths, microphones etc.
Some synths present themselves as another external USB sound card as well – how do you deal with that when you already route your audio through your FocusRite Scarlett? It boggles the mind when you have to try and make sense of it when you do not have music-making friends in physical proximity.

Eventually I want to have a working studio in my attic and be able to create music, not just create a music production enviroment like Slackware DAW Live.

I would love to read all your feedback and hopefully it will be enough already next weekend to help me startup when my off-week starts 🙂

Cheers, Eric

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