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.
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.
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.
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.