$ md5sum -c slackware-15.0-install-dvd.iso.md5

slackware-15.0-install-dvd.iso: OK

And so it begins...

So, opened up the #slackware home server for a very needed deep cleaning.

I was pleasantly surprised to see it was not too dusty.

I am really happy that this little Intel Atom machine is still working after all these years, and Slackware always performed perfectly on it.

It has been through a system disk change, from a Toshiba (?) HDD to a Crucial SSD, a change of power supply and provides access from the outside into the house LAN, including my Kallithea repo manager.

It also provides a central point for various backups, some additional services and various RSS stuff.

Uptime was up to 300 days until I powered it off in June.

Now, I am sure one of the BSDs would also have done a great job on this little machine, but, hey, I am a slacker!

Now, time to upgrade to Slackware 15 my old friend! 🤞

Drat, sometimes the old school tools are the best tools...

The Gnome disk utility gets all mixed up on the disk partition of the installation USB key while 'fdisk' will happily delete everything and recreate an empty partition.

The OpenSUSE installation tools does not know what a #Slackware
ISO image is, while 'dd' will happily write it to the USB key. Now waiting for it to finish...

Help! My head is being reformatted!

Fear not, gentle reader, as that poor little penguin's head was properly reformatted, with the installation proceeding without major issues...

The only problem was that the default kernel was not outputting anything to the VGA, selecting the "graphical" version solved that issue, at the price of a couple of resets.

Ah yes, the joys of updating a new #Slackware machine, 'slackpkg update' and 'slackpkg upgrade-all' will take care of it, but let's just say there is A LOT of stuff to update...

And I mean A LOT.

So, today:

- my re-installed home server runs perfectly stable, Yay! 😊

- links needs... all of X11 to run? Booo! 🤯

I mean take look at this:

slackpkg install pixman
slackpkg install libxcb libXau libegl
slackpkg install libxdcmp libglvnd
slackpkg install libXrender libXdmcp
slackpkg install libXext
slackpkg install fontconfig
slackpkg install x11-skel x11-ssh-askpass x11perf
slackpkg install libX11

All of this for a term app? Seriously?

- There is an update for dovecot, just sayin'

Also: "AllowUsers" is the BEST OpenSSH configuration toggle I can think of.

"PermitRootLogin no" takes care of 70% of SSH attacks

"AllowUsers your_name_here" takes care of the rest.

As long as they haven't guessed your user name of course... 😊

Compiling OSSEC 3.7.0 under #Slackware 15 requires you to edit the Makefile and change:

USE_SYSTEMD?=yes

to USE_SYSTEMD?=no

Because, of course, systemd. 🤦‍♂️

OSSEC used to have one of the BEST installation procedure: clear, simple, straightforward.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is with great displeasure that I have to announce this is NOT the case anymore. ☹️

Also: Logwatch - requires "HTML::Entities" apparently.

Running CPAN to install that is opening another can of worms...