Ubuntu

The site went offline a few hours today. Sorry.

It turns out Ubuntu once again changed a major component and the upgrade path didn’t work as it should to keep the lights on after the upgrade.

I’ve been updating the security settings on the server all around, and one of the things I wanted to do was adding TLSv1.3 support (and nothing before TLSv1.2). For that I needed, it seemed the best option to push forward the Ubuntu server version to the newer LTS version (18.04) and as part of this get a newer NGINX with TLSv1.3 support. That part worked sort of great.

It’s been quiet here for a while, but be things have been happening behind the scenes. In case your wondering the site (and surroundings) have been seeing a number of updates which eventually may make it into separate posts.

• I’m running on a Digital Ocean droplet. It was provisioned as an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which is dead by now (as in no more updates including security updates). The server has now been roll up to an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in place.
• As I was messing around with the server, I’ve added IPv6 support.
• The DNS has been updated to have full support for DNSSEC.
• My Let’s Encrypt Certificates now has automated certificate renewals and I’ve upgraded to CAA support.
• The Webserver has been switched from Apache to NGINX.
• The PHP has been switched from PHP 5.6 series to a modern 7.0.
• I’m adopting full Git-backed backup of all server setup and configuration using BitBucket.org. It’s not complete but most config files have been added and managed using GitHub.

These was the majority of changes on the site and server the past few months. With these updates in place, I might get back to producing content for the site.

Sure it doesn’t happen that often, but sometimes you might need to change the IP number of your machine running Ubuntu. Either to configure it with a static IP number on your LAN or temporarily to configure a Wifi router - the latter being my case.

The first shot at changing the ip number, was going to the “System” menu, choosing Administration and Network Tools. It sounded just about right - but it’s wrong. Sure you view settings and some statistics, but it’s all read only.

Just a few days before leaving for South Africa, the latest version af Ubuntu was released. I really didn’t have the nerve to try and upgrade before my vacation, but today was the day.

Ubuntu is an operating system – like windows – but based upon (Debian) Linux. It can probably do everything you need – and it’s free. With the packaging done to Linux by the Ubuntu team(s), it’s a complete user-friendly and easy to use alternative for most computer users, and it has worked pretty well for me for the quite some time.

In Kubuntu the default browser is Konquerer, but as a longtime Firefox user I wanted to use that as the system default browser. Googling around, I found a way to switch to the browser in Thunderbird, so that links in mails opened in Firefox, but it didn’t change in desktop links and other applications. Now another switcher found the solution. Acutally there isn’t much of a solution in it. It’s more a configuration thing, once you know where to fix it. In the /etc/alternatives/ there is a bunch of links, which points to default applications in several different areas.