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Category: IT related

Goodbye Nicklaus Wirth

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Niklaus WirthOn January 1, 2024, Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of the Pascal, Modula2 and other less widespread programming languages, left us.

He is one of the names that marked global IT evolution in the 80s and 90s. His very famous book “Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs” was the textbook in many university courses around the world, and established the foundations of structured programming.

Pascal, in Borland’s Turbo Pascal version on Ms-Dos PC, was the only “serious” programming language I ever used aside from bash scripting.

I created a small program for generating statistics on the JAM message base of RemoteAccess, the software I used for my FidoNet BBS. It had a certain following among sysops for a while but then fell into disuse and I also lost the sources.

RIP Professor Wirth.

30 years of Slackware!

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slackware30

Slackware Linux has officially turned 30!

Today July 17th is the anniversary of the release of version 1.0 which took place on July 17th 1993.

Ten years ago I wrote a post for the twentieth anniversary, in which I indicated some risks and problems that the development of Slackware could have faced in the following years, in particular the advent of systemd and wayland.

Now, after 10 years, the situation has seen some evolutions and confirmations. Most notably, Slackware has managed to still remain systemd-free. While by now there is an entire generation of system administrators and Linux users who only know systemd and have never interacted with anything else, sysvinit, rc scripts, resolv.conf and a whole series of traditional – but not less effective – commands and logics remain in Slackware. And we can only be happy about it. However, a minimum of compatibility needed with systemd and logind has been achieved with the use of elogind, and for the moment it seems to be sufficient to keep up with the times.

As far as Wayland is concerned, the use of elogind has made it possible to use it on Slackware in a relatively simple way and for some time now it has been possible to launch KDE Plasma in a wayland session without particular problems. Other desktops and WE using wayland also manage to work on Slackware.

In conclusion, the various threats that posed to a peaceful survival of Slackware over the years seem to have not yet caused irreparable damage after a decade and therefore we celebrate this anniversary with some optimism and good hopes for many more years of satisfaction and joy with the best Linux distribution. 😀

Memories of FidoNet

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Giorgio Rutigliano has recently made available a website dedicated to FidoNet Italia.

[wiki base=”Wikipedia EN”]FidoNet[/wiki] is the amateur telematic network that was born and spread worldwide between the 80s and the early 2000s, before the Internet was widely available and accessible. It was based on the use of analog modems connected to normal voice telephone lines and on asynchronous communications, that is, sending a message took hours / days to arrive at its destination and the same amount of time needed for replies to return to the sender.

I was part of FidoNet Italia, as a member node, from around 1989 until 1996/97. I came out not so much for the legal problems connected to Fidobust, but rather because the passion for real-time communications represented by chats, IRC, Videotel grew in me and I had less and less interest in leaving my PC dedicated to the BBS.

It must be said that the FidoNet worldwide network has never ceased to exist in all these years. Membership has decreased a lot but a certain number of nodes have always remained active, especially in countries where it has also become a vehicle for political activism.

Recently in Italy there has been a flashback for Fidonet and the BBS, even if limited to old users and Sysop who still have memories of the past, and some nodes are returning to be operational on the network using the internet as transport instead of the old lines telephone.

I have not yet seriously considered the idea of ​​being able to go back online, but maybe who knows …

Minimalism in software development

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This is a talk held by my friend Katolaz some months ago, explaining what minimalism is and how it is relevant when developing OpenSource software.

 

New SSL certificates by Let’s Encrypt

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httpsBetween yesterday and today I changed the SSL certificate used on the websites of lonestar.it and unixportal.net, and for the SMTP / IMAP mail services of mail.lonestar.it.

Up to now I used a wildcard certificate, regularly purchased on StartSSL . It was a cost-effective service to get a 2-year wildcard certificate. The convenience is that the certificate was valid for * .lonestar.it, and therefore in any network service.

But the StartSSL Certification Authority has been deprecated by major browsers because of some irregularities committed after acquisition by a Chinese company.

As a result, as of recent versions of Firefox and Chrome, certificates issued by this authority are no longer accepted as valid (green color next to the url bar), but are shown as unrecognized (red color next to the url bar).

So I’ve decided to start using the free service of Let’s Encrypt , which has been very successful lately thanks to the new philosophy of free release of certificates to anyone, for a short time (90 days maximum), so as to encourage adoption of https and tls protocols by everyone.

The short duration of certificates implies the transition to an automatic renewal and replacement mechanism, compared to the previous habit of obtaining a valid certificate for a few years and then install it manually on the various servers involved.

Let’s Encrypt offers an official python-based client to perform these automated tasks on the most popular distributions and common services. But since I use Slackware as distribution and s/qmail as a mail service, I preferred to use the Dehydrated script, which is based on bash and curl.

So I’ve set up some scripts that request certificates, no longer wildcard but individual for each service, and install them where necessary.

All seems to be working 🙂

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