Someone has been looking at websites I run to think of ssh login names to try:

Oct 16 16:21:53 greenblatt sshd[19367]: Invalid user weather from 223.194.227.104
Oct 16 16:22:11 greenblatt sshd[19387]: Invalid user weatherstation from 223.194.227.104
Oct 16 16:55:07 greenblatt sshd[22596]: Invalid user weerstation from 223.194.227.104

All valid and published websites on this system: http://weather.idefix.net/, http://weatherstation.idefix.net/, http://weerstation.idefix.net/.

Ages ago my first homecomputer was a Commodore VIC-20. I did basic programming on it and played some games. I remember the game Centipede and loading games from audio cassette.

These days games seem to be enormously complex and expensive or filled with advertisments. I don't like these, the last time I seriously invested time in a game was Pinball Dreams.

I found out about the VIC-20 emulator xvic, part of the vice package. I even bought a cheap USB joystick to use. I never had a joystick with my VIC-20 so it was about time to get one. This joystick is a DragonRise Inc. Generic USB Joystick (yes, including the spaces) and I noticed today it wasn't working right: up and down on the joystick did not work. I found out eventually the left and right on the second stick mapped to up and down, thanks to a simple joystick tester from Joystick - Denialwiki in 7 lines of Basic.

Some searching found DragonRise USB Driver Issue - RetroPie which mentions this issue in hid-dr.ko happened in Linux 4.4 - 4.9.

I did not feel like going back to compiling my own kernels for this laptop, but there is a simple solution in Ubuntu 16.04: use hwe (hardware enablement) kernels. These seem to be aimed at the long term support server versions, but they fix my joystick problem and I can play centipede.

I got around again to working on the new homeserver 2017 and I worked on the installation of a 'testing' virtual machine with virt-install. This test machine also runs devuan linux. The first application I was testing on there is haproxy.

I noticed some defaults I did not expect (such as preferring IPv4 over IPv6). It seems the 'stable' devuan has the same age issues as 'stable' debian. Otherwise haproxy does what it is supposed to and I may standardize on it.

Upgrading was easy, I looked at Upgrading Devuan Jessie to Ascii and just changed jessie to ascii in /etc/apt/sources.list and did an apt-get dist-upgrade. The only minor issue afterwards is that the system now insists on using framebuffer video, which I find overkill for a virtual machine. VGA 80x25 is fine.

After working through the results of my participation in the Russian worldwide digimode contest 2017 I decided to run a graph again of contacts per month as I did in Februari 2017. And remember how I made those graphs this time and save it in a plot script.

And the plotscript:

set output "qslcount.png"
set terminal png size 440,300 fontscale 0.7
set timefmt "%Y-%m"
set xlabel "Month"
set ylabel "Number of contacts"
set xdata time
set style data lines
set xtics format "%b %Y" 
set xtics rotate
plot "dataset-qsocount" using 1:2 title "Contacts/Month"

The interesting peak in January 2017 is still visible, it was caused by two contests I participated in: the ARRL RTTY roundup 2017 and the UBA PSK63 prefix contest 2017.

Past weekend was the Russian worldwide digimode contest edition 2017. I mounted the endfed antenna outside and participated when time was available.

Thinks went good in search and pounce mode, there were multiple instances of making more than one contact in the same minute according to the log. Calling cq gave less response but I also got some contacts logged that way.

Band  QSOs Dupes Points Mults
160      0     0      0     0
80       0     0      0     0
40      46     0    280    32
20      41     0    129    35
15       0     0      0     0
10       0     0      0     0
======================================
Total   87     0    409    67
Claimed score is 27403 points

Since I operated in more than one band and with power above QRP levels I entered in the SINGLE-OP ALL HIGH category.

I am used to being unable to unmount filesystems as long as they are NFS exported. It took me a while to find out how to correctly unexport filesystems before trying to unmount them. The easy solution would be to unexport everything and just export the other filesystems, but I'd rather not interrupt NFS availability of other filesystems.

So it was time to check some large filesystems again and I'd rather not do that during boot as it can delay booting for up to an hour. Currently those filesystems are exported via IPv4 and IPv6. Removing the export for IPv4 is easy:

# exportfs -u 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0:/export

But for IPv6 it gets harder:

# exportfs -u 2001:db8:a::/64:/export
exportfs: Invalid unexporting option: 2001

So it is still exported via IPv6. And next thing I try to unmount it and notice it's ok to unmount a filesystem that is only exported via IPv6. I guess this shows some interesting bug.

In today's mail problems:

   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to ecp-nl.mail.protection.outlook.com.:
>>> DATA
<<< 450 4.7.26 Service does not accept messages sent over IPv6 [2001:980:14ca:61::13] unless they pass either SPF or DKIM validation (message not signed) [VE1EUR01FT036.eop-EUR01.prod.protection.outlook.com]
<info@ecp.nl>... Deferred: 450 4.7.26 Service does not accept messages sent over IPv6 [2001:980:14ca:61::13] unless they pass either SPF or DKIM validation (message not signed) [VE1EUR01FT036.eop-EUR01.prod.protection.outlook.com]
Warning: message still undelivered after 4 hours
Will keep trying until message is 5 days old

Rerouting mail for ecp.nl via xs4all servers in the hopes of getting it delivered.

Some research shows me that the xs4all outgoing mailservers (smtp.xs4all.nl) do offer incoming connectivity via IPv6 but don't connect to the IPv6 addresses of mailservers they are trying to reach.

The imap server where I fetch my work mail changed and suddenly the enigmail plugin on one system could not decrypt gpg-encrypted messages anymore with a 'partial decrypt' error. I remember seeing this before but had to look up the details.

Found again, it's a setting in enigmail (not in the general thunderbird preferences!), Enigmail → Preferences → select Advanced → Only download attachments when opened (IMAP only) has to be unchecked.

Answer found via Resolving Thunderbird/Enigmail decryption errors for encrypted emails with large attachments

This weekend was the CQ WW RTTY Contest 2017. I participated when possible in an otherwise very filled weekend.

In the end I made 81 contacts, 32 on the 20 meter band and 49 on the 40 meter band. One station in the US, KI1G in the state of Rhode Island (a new state). And the counter of worked DXCC's went up one, so I was browsing the log trying to find out which was the new country and it turned out that I made the first contact with Luxembourgh, LX7X. I will put that call on the list for a QSL card.

Finishing the log took a while. I set fldigi to contest style "CQWW RTTY" and used that template to export the log. But the logged CQ zone and state did not show in the Cabrillo export. I had to do that all by hand. Next time prepare the macros to log this correctly!