I just noticed that fail2ban was reporting that there had been no failed attempts to connect to my SSH server for a few days, which can't be right because they are almost constantly happening.
This seems to be because of a change in openssh 9.8:

 * sshd(8): the server has been split into a...

Today I fixed a strange problem where BT Business Cloud Voice phones would have about a 10 second delay when answering, or when dialing out. When answering a call it would stay silent for a few seconds before finally working. The phones are Yealink T46 supplied by BT, the problem would have probably...

I still haven't completely solved the problem of my PC sometimes failing to resume from sleep, and when it happens it acts as if it had crashed and then just starts up normally. This means I wan't to check the disks to make sure the file system is all OK. This can be done on Slackware by creating a...

Sometimes a command is so long that it doesn't fit on one line. ps usually truncates it but sometimes you want it to wrap instead so you can see the full command.
The proper method is to use the -w option twice. From the man page:

-w     Wide output.  Use this option twice for unlimited wid...

Today it felt like something was running slowly so I opened htop and saw a command called exe was using quite high CPU. But what is exe? It's a very suspicious looking name.

The PID for exe is 9645, so I can check where the actual executable is by looking in /proc.

$ ls -l /proc/964...

The commands I needed to run to allow SSH to a headless Debian 12 Pi OS install were:

mkdir /mnt/pi
mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/pi
touch /mnt/pi/ssh
echo pi:$6$fGzsGCnOaRjJxAl7$oyr66oRzD4e5jIKmJgE7Xxnvtg...

I have a Draytek Vigor 2762 which has been working well with my block of 8 static IPv4 addresses for a few years, but now my IP range is changing so I needed to update the router settings. It's still a /29 but different addresses.
When I first got the router it was easy to click on IP Routed Subne...

Since switching to the Octopus Agile tariff I have been saving about 35% a month on my electricity bill. I am not a very heavy user, and I don't have an electric vehicle or house battery. But I don't need to use much electricity between 16:00 and 19:00 which I think gives me the biggest saving. I al...

For some reason there doesn't seem to be any official reminder sent out when it's time to submit a VAT return, not from my accounts software or HMRC.
I thought it would be easy to just add a reminder for the 2nd Friday every 3 months but my Google Calendar didn't seem to support the "2nd Friday" bi...

With the price of everything going up I felt like I needed to start tracking what I spend money on a bit better, so I looked for some open source software which would help me do that. The best looking one for me was HomeBank. After manually entering transactions for a couple of weeks I decided I s...

I have used Borg backup for a long time to backup my servers and some desktop PCs to a central location. These backups are encrypted by Borg and stored on external USB disks. I finally got around to getting that backup data stored in the cloud so I didn't have to worry about switching those USB di...

It's been a couple of years since I last had a go at getting hibernate / suspend to disk working on my Slackware system. Back then the problem seemed to be that the Nvidia drivers just didn't like hibernate. They didn't like sleep / suspend either, but that wasn't as bad. The idea was that when I pr...

When I bought my Ezviz doorbell a few years ago I expected it to play a notification on my Google Home Mini too, since it said compatible with Google Home. But it never worked, it would just tell me it found the device but I couldn't do anything with it. Now I finally bothered to find a way to rece...

I bought an ezviz DB1 camera a while ago, expecting to be able to set it up to play a notification on my Google Home mini when someone pressed the doorbell but it looks like the only way to get any notification is through ezviz's own app. The problem is that notification takes 30 seconds or more to...

I use the Openbox window manager with Xfce applications, and for some strange reason during 2023 the Xfce Terminal started opening behind other windows. It must be because of a change in Xfce, since Openbox hasn't been updated forever. The problem only happened if I already had a terminal open whi...

Sometimes I need to cross compile something on my PC to run on a Raspberry Pi. It's really handy that Go has cross compilation built in, it would be even better if I could remember the right environment variables to use whenever I needed to build stuff. It should be easy to remember them, they are....