tag: #linux

Stretch is out, dedicated to Ian Murdock, with over 90% of packages now reproducible, MariaDB instead of MySQL, and the modern GnuPG by default. It also renames your network interfaces out from under you, which is how a routine upgrade locks you out of your own server. Here is what is worth caring about, and what to check before you reboot.

Self-hosting email used to mean installing Postfix and pointing an MX record at it. In 2017, the deliverability fight against Gmail and Outlook is the real work, and most of the difficulty is not the mail server itself.

Borg 1.0 has been stable since February. If your backup strategy is still rsync to an external drive, you are leaving real safety on the table. Encryption, deduplication, and compression are not optional anymore.

A race in mm/gup.c lets any local user write to read-only memory and rewrite setuid binaries. It sat in the kernel for nine years. Here is how the race actually works, and why "it's only local" was always a lie, especially now that everyone runs containers.

Let's Encrypt left beta last week and entered general availability. Free, automated, ninety-day certificates from a CA that browsers actually trust. The change is bigger than the price tag suggests.

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