Ever since I started this personal blog site, I was curious if people actually read what I write. Luckily, based on the responses I received on Twitter, LinkedIn and in private, there is no problem with that. Next I wanted to see numbers. I was told, that Google Analytics is the gold standard of measurement. Well…

Google Analytics

Lets start it with the basic problem: even my own visits are not counted. The reason is simple: uBlock Origin. I need to use my tablet to get my visit counted, the only device where I do not use an ad blocker. According to Google Analytics, my most popular blog is about listening to music, while my IT and security related blogs are barely read by anyone. When I check the raw logs, the picture is quite different. My estimate is, that depending on the topic, 20 to 80 percent of visitors fly under the radar, when it comes to Google Analytics.

Awffull

Once upon a time I used webalizer to analyze my logs. Awffull is a fork of webalizer, but also has been dead for a long time. But while 20 years ago its output was considered to be rich and beautiful, it is like a time capsule now. A bit of nostalgia, but otherwise not much useful. It includes all results, including search and other bots.

Other suggestions

Last week I asked around what should I use to replace Google Analytics. Quite a few people suggested that I keep using GA, as even if it is not much use, it is still the gold standard. However it is a personal blog without any ads. It is not a business site and I am more curious about real usage than how many ads I can serve.

Matomo

Another frequent suggestion was Matomo. It is available both on-premise and as a cloud service. When used from the cloud it has the same problems as GA. Probably a bit more accurate results, but still blocked by ad blockers. And some posts suggest that on-premise installations are also effectively blocked.

Plausible

To a lesser extent, but it seems to have the same problem as Matomo and GA.

What’s next?

I plan to experiment a bit. I might even try Matomo and/or Plausible. But first I plan to setup syslog-ng with Elasticsearch and Kibana, and see, what I can do with the raw logs myself. A couple of ideas:

• syslog-ng can parse Apache access log and store the results in Elasticsearch
• based on the User-Agent I can label some traffic as RSS, search engine and probably a few more categories
• probably the closest to the truth in terms of human visitors: check CSS downloads with a page referrer

I hope that I’ll learn not just about my website traffic, but also more about syslog-ng, Elasticsearch and Kibana. And as many of my friends are in information security, working with raw logs promises to be the most effective.

If you have any suggestions, you can reach me on Twitter or LinkedIn (links in the upper right corner).

Recently I’ve been indulging myself in pixel art again. One might assume that’s my comfort zone, but honestly I don’t feel like I’ve ever truly mastered it.

The initial push came from my friend, who quit his corporate job, to dive back into his passion and is working on games. Their first title is an oldschool pixel maze, (with a 2021 artistic twist, of course). His work inspired me to get back to pixel pushing.

To combine exploration with usefulness, I imagined mixing up of the new application icon style with pixels to perhaps bring back the fun of colorful patterns into a wallpaper.

Sadly the result is visually way too overwhelming, but the assets created can at least please your nostalgia bone here on planet GNOME (unless it becomes a mess without the stylesheet, we’ll see). Stay curious!

Panther is an open-source log management system, which is also available as a service for a time-limited trial. It is still in beta phase, but it looks promising. You can see the “beta” sign on its opening page: https://app.panther.support/ I tested the time-limited cloud service version, but you can also install it locally, either from Dockerhub, or you can build the containers locally from the source.

Even if it is still in beta phase, Panther comes with detailed documentation. There is a notable exception: while syslog-ng is shown on some of the figures, documenting it is still to be done. This blog helps you to get started with sending logs to Panther, using syslog-ng. You can use either legacy syslog with TLS encryption (still a bit problematic) or the http() destination to send logs to the Panther HTTP API.

Read my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/sending-logs-to-panther-using-syslog-ng

After a long break, we’re back with improvements for the notifications feature part of the beta program. Based on your feedback, we have introduced filters for your group notifications, a button to mark all your notifications as read and a notifications API. Group Filters On the My Notifications page, you can now filter notifications by groups. Here’s how it looks: Group notifications Manage Group Subscriptions You can subscribe to the events from your groups on...

If you’re a programmer and you’re looking for a Linux distro, this will help you find the perfect fit. Without further ado, we’ll go straight to the distro recommendations. If you want to learn more, scroll down to the bottom of the article. Here are the best Linux distros for programming: Ubuntu – best for […]

Source

The update of GNOME 41 in openSUSE’s rolling release Tumbleweed didn’t take long; the new GNOME landed a day after our last blog post.

Other software updates included in this week’s three snapshots include Mesa, PipeWire, Btrfs, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

Mesa’s 21.2.3 update focused on bug fixing, which arrived in snapshot 20211005. The 3D graphics package fixed a significant performance drop on the Radeon HD 8400 graphics card. Mozilla Thunderbird 91.1.2 now warns if an S/MIME encrypted message includes BCC recipients. The email client update also fixed delivery status notifications, which were only showing for the first recipient. Another email package, mailutils, updated to version 3.13 and fixed semantics of mail sending and saving commands. PipeWire 0.3.38 made various bluetooth compatibility improvements and the audio/video package for Linux now has better description service files for systemd. The only major-version update in the snapshot was sysvinit 3.00. The sysvinit package, which is for controlling the startup, running, and shutdown of a system, now provides better device detection of bootlogd. The btrfs file system updated to 5.14.1; the updated version fixes parsing of compression (option -c) and added a workaround for old kernels when reading zone sizes. Other packages to update in the snapshot were exim 4.95, Kernel-firmware 20210928 and more.

A minor update of Firefox came on the first of the month in snapshot 20211001. The 92.0.1 web-browser update fixed an issue where audio playback was not working on some Linux systems. An update of salt 3003.3 added an enormous amount of patches and made a fix to periodically restart the fileserver update process to avoid leaks, according to the changelog. The update of audit 3.0.5 fixed various issues when dealing with corrupted logs. Roughly 10 other packages were updated in the snapshot.

GNOME 41 arrived in snapshot 20210929. The new release provides significant improvements for developers, a new developer documentation website, new features in the Builder IDE and GTK4 enhancements. The software center has a new look and makes it easier to browse and discover apps. GNOME’s new remote desktop client Connections replaces the remote desktop functionality that was previously found in Boxes. The CD/DVD burner brasero made translation improvements and added some Help improvements in version 3.12.3. There was an update to glib2 2.70.0 in the snapshot and a major update of libsoup 3.0.1 removed unused dependency on libxml. The 18.8.16 version of NetworkManager-openvpn fixed the parsing of incomplete IPv6 configurations pushed by a server. Other packages to update in the snapshot were upower 0.99.13, rubygem-bundler 2.2.27, gupnp 1.4.0, vte 0.66.0 and several other GNOME-related libraries.

A month ago, when sudo 1.9.8 was still under development, we checked out the new log_subcmds option. It allows you log all commands (with some limitations) that are executed by a command started through sudo. For example, you can see if a shell was started through a text editor. The intercept option brings this one step further: you can prevent sub-commands from even running.

Read the rest of my blog at https://blog.sudo.ws/posts/2021/10/sudo-1.9.8-intercepting-commands/

The openSUSE Project is trying to gather more information from open-source developers, development teams, packagers and maintainers through the latest survey that will run from Oct. 7 until Oct. 29.

There are tools to monitor the health of packages, but the project doesn’t have tools to monitor the health of packagers.

Giving the floor to packagers, who are the dedicated working hands behind the betterment of distributions, will illuminate areas the openSUSE Project can improve upon to gain new contributors. The project wants to give the floor to the packagers so they can express as a group the challenges and complexities they face.

The aim is to take this information and find ways to make their contributions more pleasant and rewarding. Apart from the typical demographics questions, there are questions about tooling, contributions and contributor satisfaction.

Visit https://survey.opensuse.org/ to take the survey today.

Qwant is a European search engine that respects your privacy. I learned about it from a Twitter thread. The European Processor Initiative announced last week that their first RiscV test chip samples were delivered and booted successfully. I tweeted that I would be happy to see not just European CPUs but also European software services, alternatives to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. Someone responded that a search engine is already available: https://www.qwant.com/

Testing

First, I did a couple of searches on the Qwant website. It was fast, gave relevant search results, there were no stupid ads, the links were not redirects, so it was love at first sight. Next, I wanted to replace Google with Qwant as my default search provider. My browser of choice is Firefox. Qwant is not yet available in the list of search providers, but luckily there is a Firefox extension, which can make Qwant your default search provider. So I switched to Qwant and never looked back ever since :-)

The good

• Fast. You might have heard the expression “Google-like speed”. Qwant is faster.
• No ads. On Google and other search engines, the first few hits are usually paid ads, which sometimes are almost indistinguishable from real results. There are no ads on Qwant.
• No redirects. If you find something, you get a real link for it, not a redirect. There is no slowdown and you can copy and paste the results without being tracked.
• More relevant results.
• It is not localized. I am Hungarian, but I am annoyed by localization. I prefer en_US everywhere. My browser is set to en_US, but Google and other search engines do not respect that. Qwant does.
• No suggestions while typing my query. Less network traffic, more privacy.

Room for improvement

• I do not speak French. Qwant is Made in France, and parts of the website are only available in French.
• Some spelling mistakes are automagically corrected, just like by Google. However, it is done silently and there is no way to search with the original spelling (which is sometimes the right spelling).
• There is also a maps part, but it is a lot more limited than Bing or Google Maps. It has no satellite images, it does not show districts within cities, etc. However, as data is coming from OpenStreetMap, parts of its maps feature are more detailed and up-to-date than other maps services.

Side effects

Ever since I use uBlock Origin in my main browser, my Google News feed started to show less and less relevant results. Now that I stopped using Google for searching, articles listed in Google News are almost completely irrelevant. Google cannot profile me as good as it did previously. I guess this is something I can live with :-)

Others?

Now, that I see that there is a viable alternative to Google Search here in Europe, I wonder what other services are available. Email, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. If you know any good European alternatives, let me know! You can reach me on Twitter or LinkedIn:

• https://twitter.com/PCzanik
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterczanik/

Version 3.33 of syslog-ng arrived with basic MQTT support. Version 3.34 has added many important features to it: user authentication, TLS support and WebSocket support. These features give you both security and flexibility while sending log messages to an MQTT broker.

This blog helps you to make your first steps securing your MQTT connection: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-3-34-mqtt-destination-with-tls-and-websocket-support