Tue, 15 Sep 2015
Eternal Spring
This year we spent our holidays in the island of eternal spring. I have been to Madeira in 2010 at a conference, and I had only about two and half days to visit something outside the hotel. This time, we decided to spend two weeks there: one week in Funchal, and another one somewhere close to the Northern coast.
We tried to ask travel agencies whether two-weeks trip with them is possible, but the reply was that it would be difficult. So we ended up booking the flight and accomodation for both weeks separately. Surprisingly enough, the price was about the same as with the travel agency.
We enjoyed the sea, gardens in Funchal, mountains, and of course levada walks. The weather was nice: it was about 19 °C and foggy weather in the mountains, while the temperature attacked unbearable values of 35 °C in Brno. I can highly recommend Madeira, I would say there is still at least another week worth of interesting places for us to see there.
Have a look at a short description (about 25 photos, in Czech), or a larger photo gallery (about 200 photos).
Speaking of photo galleries: I used Photoswipe for the above gallery. It turned out to be customizable enough for my needs. The only drawback is that it does not work well in Fennec (a mobile version of Firefox on Android).
Mon, 14 Sep 2015
Service Bloat
I have (finally) upgraded my home workstation/server/router to Fedora 22. Newer Fedora releases have an anti-feature called "product": one cannot simply install "Fedora", the "Fedora Product", such as Fedora Workstation, should be selected first. For a system with X session (two X sessions, in my case), "Fedora Workstation" seems to be a natural choice. It is not: "Fedora Workstation" can be translated from Fedora Newspeak to an ordinary English as "Fedora GNOME 3". So this is a no-go.
A time ago, I came across a suggestion that "Fedora Server" is probably
the closest thing to former "Fedora". So I upgraded my home box to
"Fedora Server". Today, after a routine inspection of open ports on my
home server, I discovered that something is listening on port 9090
on INADDR_ANY (and IN6ADDR_ANY as well). One fuser -n tcp,
and I discovered that the listening process is called cockpit-ws.
Digging further into it, it seems that this is a web-based administrative
interface (do you remember linuxconf, anyone?), probably another futile
attempt to encapsulate the strength of all the configuration files to some
useless web-based interface. Moreover, it cannot be uninstalled, as it
depends on the fedora-release-server package.
A side note: the cockpit-ws package contains font files,
which is probably against Fedora Font Packaging Guidelines.
I wonder what happened to the "no unnecessary services should be enabled by default" philosophy. It seems that Cockpit is a blatant example of an unnecessary service, which is not only installed by default, but also enabled by default in Fedora Server 22. I recommend to run the following commands:
# systemctl stop cockpit.socket # systemctl disable cockpit.socket
What other kinds of service-bloat did you find on your computers? Watch for newly opened ports after Fedora upgrades.