Canon Pixma owners: this simple trick can make your printer's feed rollers grab paper again!

(Grab an old sponge - yes, seriously)

I have a Canon Pixma MG5750, a Currys PC World purchase when I needed a cheap multifunction printer fast. Handy at £45 (another set of genuine ink for it costs the same, go figure). I never expected it to be perfect, I assumed it would at least be able to reliably accomplish basic things like print text onto paper.

Unfortunately, one of the fundamental printer requirements - loading its own paper during print jobs - was a little lacking with this unit. Research indicates it's sadly a common issue with this range of Canon printers.

Soon after buying mine, the paper feed (take-up of paper from the tray into the transport mechanism) started to behave irregularly. Soon after that, I ended up having to nudge each sheet of paper in to the printer, it was unable to take in paper itself. Not convenient.

I put up with this for a while but an attempt to print some documents evening pushed me into investigating. The fix, as it turns out, is really simple!

Click to read more and see photos of the paper feed roller fix

Dear mailserver operators: PLEASE stop using SSLv3!

I look after a few email servers and after implementing much stricter encryption settings at the start of the year, I noticed some emails were never making it to accounts - being rejected at the negotiation stage (where the remote server sending the email agrees an encryption protocol and cipher with the local server).

I was puzzled by this. TLS is hardly new, yet these servers were only ever attempting to use SSLv3 and then failing to 'upgrade' to TLS - not even TLS1.0. Poor show.

This isn't unique either - I periodically run a script which reports the spread of protocols and ciphers of incoming email connections; here's a sample from one server for the last hour...

...The stats don't make for pretty reading:

Quickly install DiG on Windows without a full BIND9 install

Today I needed to use - and install - DiG (Domain Information Groper!) on a Windows 10 box. Of course, Windows is useless when it comes to CLI tools - nslookup is past its prime and not even Windows 10 includes much by way of useful tools for DNS queries. It's shipped as part of the BIND9 DNS software from ISC.

So, let's see about DiG... Good news, everyone! - BIND9 is available for Windows, but I don't want to install the whole thing, ain't nobody got time for that. So, let's see about excerpting just the DiG executable and getting it so you can use it without specifying its full path every time, which will require setting its location in the PATH variable.

There's quite a few guides and tutorials to installing DiG on Windows. The simplest one I found was from Websistent, who recommended downloading their own zip of DiG and its necessary DLL dependencies, dropping those into windows\system32 (urk?) and using as normal.

We can do better than that:

Click to see how simple it is!

Fail2ban 0.10 on CentOS6 - yes we can! And my notes on successful manual upgrades

Fail2ban's official compile for CentOS6 has never advanced beyond 0.9.6-1.el6.1. While 0.9.6 works, it's old and has a few major inconveniences:

  1. No IPv6 support 🙁
  2. A tendency for the daemon to die when parsing many logs or a high volume of activity
  3. Quite slow to parse logs when restarting after a config change

So, what can we do? Well, compile from source and upgrade with the supplied python script! It's easier than I anticipated, but there's still a few things you need to watch out for.

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