Me
Hi all.
It was time to migrate my blog to a new server. The URL ‘alien.slackbook.org/blog/’ has changed to ‘blog.slackware.nl’.
For years, my hosting server has been https://harrier.slackbuilds.org/ – ever since I had to move away from the original host, the slackware.com server (Pat does not trust PHP code).
I am eternally grateful to the team of people (Robby Workman and friends) who purchased its hardware and have been maintaining it in a US datacenter for all that time. They gave me full root rights over my virtual machine. Also many thanks to Teklinks for offering colocation and bandwidth!
Check out harrier‘s frontpage to get an idea of all the Slackware community services are hosted on that iron.
But the QEMU VM which runs on harrier and which essentially hosted my blog, is still on Slackware 14.2. Over time I had to upgrade httpd, mariadb and php to keep the WordPress code happy, but now WordPress is again nagging me about not having PHP 8 and to be honest, Slackware 14.2 has not received security updates for two years now. I am not feeling comfortable with that.
I had a short chat with Robby and he indicated that there’s just too much to be done and too little time to do it. I fully understand that and I have not bothered him with my worries.
I decided to migrate the blog to a new Slackware -current host. I have done a few trial runs over the years; it is not trivial to move a WordPress blog to a new domain and at the same time to a new host. But I think I figured out the challenges and ironed out the kinks.
Also, this was a good opportunity to reconsider the hosting location. Harrier runs in a US datacenter. I am not at all happy with the racist and autocratic direction the US is taking under Trump and his MAGA cult. I’ve seen people being detained and/or sent back at airport border control checkpoints simply because they have written online posts that are unfavorable to Trump. Look at my previous posts here on the blog – I will not attempt to enter the US as long as Trump is its dictator. And therefore it makes sense to choose the European Union as the new location for my blog server.
Welcome to blog.slackware.nl! Please update your bookmarks.
I am creating a redirect for alien.slackbook.org/blog/ to get that forwarded to the new URL, but it never hurts to spread the word to your friends.
Cheers, Eric
Heh. I wonder what’s the story behind PHP? 🙂 And last paragraph, I get it. Been listening to a lot of Shostakovich lately, and his music makes a lot more sense.
Pat sees PHP code as a security breach waiting to happen. I disagree 🙂
Just so I don’t miss out, you’re keeping gwene.com.slackware.alien.blog ?
You’re trying to generate traffic to a domain which is for sale? That ‘gwene.com.slackware.alien.blog’ is not mine, has never been mine and it’s full of advertisements.
I advise everyone who reads this article *not* to visit it.
Just a quick note to thank you for your effort and contribution. Long live for this server in lands of liberty!.
Francisco
Legends, thanks Eric!
Uh, “legend” I meant, singular 😛
Greetings from the Borderland of the Beast Eric! I salute you, and the Dutch Volk for your heroic resistance to fascism, past and present. Given the fact that the “Puritans” invented overtly terroristic bourgeois dictatorship, my only surprise with this demented MAGAot infestation in North America is that it took so long to erupt, noisome carbuncle that such is. Let all Humanity work to LANCE THE MAGA BOIL! And disinfect the planet when it pops… –Gerald Morris
Hi Eric,
I’ve noticed that both your blog and repository at slackware.nl are experiencing slowness when accessed from here (Guaratinguetá, Brazil). Do you think I can do something about that?
Hi Fellype,
The infrastructure is a bit slower than a month before (few seconds to load a blog page for instance) due to the excessive DDoS many of Slackware community servers (and other OSS project servers) are experiencing. To me that is totally inexplicable, why are people trying to kill open source projects, but that is what we have to deal with.
I guess these are big corp AI crawling stuff
Hi Eric.
I have got 27 sec timeout every time I open Your blog or change articles .
Chromium, Firefox the same.
Yeah I have noticed this, it’s been going on for a while. I do not know what causes it, perhaps one of the plugins.
I noticed the “MY SLACKBUILDS” section in the right column is empty when the page takes a long time to load.
For me the complete page stays empty until suddenly everything gets loaded.
The blog’s backend (the admin section) does not suffer from these loading delays; it’s just all of the front-end pages. I still suspect a plugin is the cause and now trying (when time permits) to disable them one by one to see whether anything changes.