Category Archives: Sys Admin

Material related to systems administration.

Disable HTTP gzip compression in W3 Total Cache

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This is a note for Future John.

I recently installed W3 Total Cache for WordPress for my blog.

Then I started having this weird problem where sometimes when I loaded the blog home page I would see binary garbage rendered as text in my browser. I think the problem was either that the Content-Type header was being set incorrectly or that the data was being double gzipped.

On the second assumption I found this setting:

W3 Total Cache > General Settings > Browser Cache > Enable HTTP (gzip) compression.

I disabled HTTP (gzip) compression and now my page seems to be working correctly again. But I will need to keep an eye on it. If you have a problem accessing my blog, please let me know!

New WordPress plugins for the blog

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I have been rolling out CloudFront for a few of my domains, including blog.jj5.net.

In order to integrate CloudFront with WordPress I used the W3 Total Cache plugin.

And in order to set the <link rel=”canonical”> element I used the Yoast SEO plugin.

At one point I had a problem with garbled content in my browser. Looked like the browser was trying to display compressed content as text. But now I can’t reproduce, so hopefully whatever the issue was it is now fixed…

Thank God

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From CVE-2024-3094 XZ Backdoor: All you need to know:

Fortunately, the malicious code was discovered quickly by the OSS community and managed to infect only two of the most recent versions of the package, 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, which were released within the past month.

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Sat Apr 06 19:45:51 [bash:5.2.15 jobs:0 error:0 time:0]
jj5@charisma:/home/jj5
$ xz --version
xz (XZ Utils) 5.4.1
liblzma 5.4.1
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New computer ‘trail’

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I have built a new computer ‘trail‘ out of my old workstation ‘tradition‘. I was able to do this because I migrated the VirtualBox VMs that were running on ‘tradition’ over to QEMU/KVM VMs now running on ‘lore‘.

My new computer ‘trail’ is setup as the recording workstation for the “booth” in my studio. This is good because now I can record at 4K in the booth!

I don’t use Windows much these days but this new studio workstation runs Windows 11 Pro. I haven’t used software RAID on Windows before but for this workstation I setup a RAID1 mirror using 2x 2TB NVMe drives. I was able to configure the block size for the NTFS file system so I picked 2MB (which was the maximum) as this RAID array will only be for storing video recordings (which are huge files).

How to Remove Old and Useless Drivers in Windows

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I had a problem where I needed to delete a device driver that had been installed so that I could install a replacement. I found How to Remove Old and Useless Drivers in Windows and the process was roughly:

  • Win + X: Windows PowerShell (Admin)
  • SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1
  • Win + X: Device Manager
  • View -> Show hidden devices

You can then look for the old driver and remove it.