In case you didn’t know, OpenSMTPd is so outdated on Ubuntu systems, that you’ll need to install it from sources, otherwise expect some TLS issues 🙂
You will need to use the following:
./configure \
--with-user-smtpd=opensmtpd \
--with-user-queue=opensmtpq \
--with-group-queue=opensmtpq
mkdir -p /var/empty
ln -s /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt /usr/lib/ssl/cert.pem
Congrats, now you have a proper working SMTP server.
Cheers.
Alecu Ștefan-Iulian: “Long rant about “obsolete” languages (not):
Long rant about “obsolete” languages (not); contains swearing
Number two: #pascal (and #delphi). Going raw on this one.
“Pascal is just for teaching”. As if a language that’s easy to learn for beginners is bad. #python and #js are used a lot in teaching too and I don’t see them get shit for this. I pity people who start with #c because that’s an unreadable mess. Additionally, it came I think 2 years earlier than C, so it had to deal with the same constraints that C had. It has a lot of low level capabilities and plenty of compiler directives to choose from in case you’re a control freak. We even have asm blocks which, unlike C, aren’t (excuse my Spanish) dogshit to use, we can just reference variables inside them and it works as expected (you have to do some weird stuff in C to get that). We have pointers too and use them decently frequently. Pascal, along with ALGOL-60, was designed as a language for formal specification and teaching of algorithms, but contrary to ALGOL-68, emphasis was put on simplicity (imagine a world in which ALGOL-W was ALGOL-68…).
“Pascal is slow”. What? Pascal was fast even back when Turbo Pascal was all the rage, a direct competitor to C. #apple sure had their reasons to choose Object Pascal (basis for Delphi) when they did the Apple ][ and Apple ///). There also existed UCSD Pascal which ran on the UCSD p-System, popular at that time (it ran actual Pascal p-code, which means it was the Pascal equivalent of the #lisp Machine, really powerful). Free Pascal is on par sometimes with even GCC.
“Pascal is outdated”. News flash for people who’ve only tried Turbo Pascal: we have interfaces, generics, lambdas, Unicode support, database support through a common interface, dynamic arrays, abstract and sealed classes, for..in, operator overloading, static methods/properties, RTTI, type inference and so, so, so much more. We’re more than able to meet modern demands with the amount of libraries at our disposal. It runs on more platforms than it ever has before (I beg you to find me a more portable language than Pascal (and Free Pascal specifically) that’s not C, it’s gonna be a rough realization). I have actual enums that work like symbols, I can have negative indices, character indices, enum indices, whatever. That allows me a lot of freedom (for example, it’s a pain to iterate over enums in C, something I have to deal with in #cpp in my compiler). It’s fast, performant, easy to understand and still has room for improvement.
“Pascal’s syntax is too verbose”. It is verbose in a readable way, unlike some other public, static and void of any elegance main languages that are both terse and verbose in the most cursed way. The syntax is well structured and strict, which is good for not just beginners, but also parsers. In C, a function is 1. its signature and 2. the declaration of variables.. and definition of function which may be mixed up. In Pascal, it’s clear: 1. function/procedure signature, 2. declaration of variables, 3. definition of function/procedure/program. Simple as that, it follows a predictable structure. Don’t even get me started on C’s = vs == (which can BOTH be used as valid Boolean expressions), unlike Pascal where we have := for assignment and = for comparison (they’re mutually exclusive, as in assignment isn’t Boolean and comparison isn’t an assignment). We also have `<>` which is really different from != in C. I don’t need to insert break everywhere in my Case … Of section in Pascal because the syntax is strict and so it knows where to stop. There’s a strict difference between a pointer and a string (we have native strings too, btw, unlike C). We also have native set operators (and sets, obviously); we can check if an element is in a set via in, we can include/exclude elements, compare sets ((symmetric) difference), combine and intersect them). This is all in the language, no extra units needed.
You Pascal and Delphi haters (usually ones that never even attempted to try these languages, as always, the grapes sure are sour) aren’t grateful enough for these languages existing. For one, it’s the first widely used implementation of a bytecode (if you want to put it that way, it’s also the first VM). The chief designer of Delphi went on to create C# (which you don’t seem to have a problem with, mostly, although the Delphi influence is clear as the night sky in the mountains). Also, have you heard of these irrelevant programs named Skype and InnoSetup? Yeah, those ones. News flash: they’re in Pascal (I think Delphi specifically). Delphi essentially pioneered the concept of RAD (rapid application development) in an IDE form which is why it evolved to fit so nicely with GUI development in mind, unlike its C++ sibling in RAD Studio. It’s still hard to beat Delphi in the GUI department (too bad Embarcadero realized a bit too late that they needed a Community Edition… or Linux support). Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro, VB.NET, C#… it all started with Delphi.
I absolutely agree with Alecu about all of this, and about the rest of his rant as well.
There are so many awesome programming languages out there that do exactly what they are supposed to do, and yet no one talks about them, either because they don’t have a C-style syntax, or follow a different paradigm or they are not hyped.
Never underestimate a tiny programming language that gets shit done, or an old programming language that learned from its mistakes.
Between the hours of Mon Jul 3 03:05:59 2023 and Tue Jul 4 01:10:15 2023 the home server named BSD.am (also known as pingvinashen.am) was completely down.
The event was triggered by a battery issue due to high temperature at the apartment where the home server resides.
A battery swell caused the computer to shut down as it produced higher than normal heat into the system.
The event was detected by the monitoring system at mon.bsd.am which notified the operators using email and chat systems (XMPP).
This incident affected 100% of the users of the following services:
Multiple community members contacted the operator (yours truly) asking for an ETA.
After receiving an email at Mon Jul 3 03:06:49 2023, the Chief Debugging Officer (yours truly) started analyzing the possible issue. According to Monit (mon.bsd.am) all the services were unavailable and the server was not reachable by IP (based on ICMP).
The usual possibility, network failure at the ISP level, was ruled out, as the second home server (arnet.am) was functioning properly.
The person closest to the server physically, was the operator’s sibling (lucy.vartanian.am), however she did not have the background in Unix system administration nor in hardware maintenance. Also, she was asleep.
Hours later the siblings (yours truly) organized a FaceTime call to debug the issues remotely.
The system did boot the kernel properly, however it would shutdown before the services could complete their startup.
Clearly, the machine needed to be shipped to the operator (yours truly) to be debugged at the spot.
So that’s what the team did.
Precise addresses are removed for privacy
At the operator’s (yours truly) location, the BIOS logs have listed that the system suffered from a ASF2 Force Off. This usually means a thermal problem.
The operator (yours truly) disassembled the laptop, hoping the system needs a little dust clean-up and a thermal paste update.
Turns out the problem was actually a swollen battery.
After removing the battery, the system booted fine. Just to be sure that the swollen battery was the root cause, a complete system stress test was ran. No issues detected (Well, except “Missing Battery”).
The systems was returned to its residency, connected to the internet and all services were accessible again.
Precise addresses are removed for privacy
If you’re new here, then first of all I’d like to thank you for reading this IR Postmortem article.
Yes, this was an IR Postmortem of a home server of a tiny community in a tiny country. This was not about Amazon, Google, Netflix, etc.
I wrote this for two reasons.
First, I wanted to show you how awesome the actual internet is. You see, when Amazon dies, everything dies with it. Your startup infra, your website, your hobby projects, everything.
When my server dies, only my server dies. And that’s the beauty of the internet. If you can, please, keep that beauty going.
Second, I run a small security company, illuria, Inc., where we help companies harden their environment and recover from incidents. It’s been years since I wrote an IR postmortem personally (my team members who do that are way smarter than me!), and I thought it would be a nice exercise to write it all by myself 🙂
I hope you liked this.
That’s all folks…
Really Apple?
I just learned that the WordPress mobile app supports non-block classical editor. Wow this is a life saver! Now I can blog on the move without opening my laptop or mobile browser!
A customer asked me to help them setup a tiny lab with many open-source tools. They are planning to move from corporate services to open-source alternatives such as NextCloud, Gitea, etc.
Unfortunately, they run only Linux, Ubuntu to be more specific, and as a UNIX gentlemen, I didn’t want to put everything into a single host, so I decided to use containers, in this case, LXC, a.k.a Linux Containers.
How hard could it be?
Oh god, layers of abstraction on within the system that have no idea about each other.
Like, who would assume that LXC would automatically download and install dnsmasq and assign IP addresses without my knowledge, or that it would push rules into the firewall?
The more I use Linux Container, the more I understand why FreeBSD Jails / illumos Zones didn’t win.
People don’t want automation or control, they want “please do this for me as I don’t wanna do it myself” tools.
I’d expect at least a message post-installation that says “We have installed and configured dnsmasq, reconfigured some systemd things, modified the following file (which is not mentioned in any man page, so you can use Google instead of man/apropos) and will use IP address ranges that you didn’t approve”
Is this why Docker won? Is it because people DIDN’T want to learn how to do software packaging? I hope not. I wanna believe its because developers wanted to “think operationally”
Oh, and from a FreeBSD perspective, what’s even more weird is that
lxc but I’m using 20 utilities named lxc-*, and I still cannot find the proper documentation for thatlxc) that has multiple config files with no proper versioning, pretty complex manual pages and the not even examples or HowTos.I’m looking at this and thinking ”oh well, if we build a proper tool, I bet we can win some of the market” until you realize, of course, that when people hear FreeBSD, they will be thinking ”it’s not Linux? maybe it’s not worth it, otherwise I would’ve heard about it”
I’m just angry here. Please ignore my rants.
Cheers y’all.
For the last 6 to 10 months, I’ve been trying to find the proper digital tools to manage my life. Spoiler alert: I keep failing to do that.
In the last 5 years, my main and only job was to do one thing and one thing only, run illuria, Inc., a company that I co-founded with my friends. At some point, specifically when your team has more than three people, you need some kind of task management tool. And I’ll be honest here, I don’t care which one that is, most of them do the same thing anyway. We ended up using Notion, and we like it very much. I like the database feature and my team loves the Kanban boards. Half of the team does development and the other half does development-related things (release engineering, infra) and business-y stuff, such as sales, marketing, what have you, so we never had any issues with Notion.
(To be clear, while I like Notion and any other tool would do the job as well, I have to say that I never liked Jira’s UI/UX. That one is, indeed, enterprise-y, but that’s a story for another day).
But last year I started taking some more responsibilities (kind-of-)outside of work. Co-hosting and producing a podcast, running a community of Armenian hackers, teaching cybersecurity (I actually end up teaching Unix + Networking + how computers work, but turns out that’s what actually 80% of cybersecurity is anyway), contributing more to open-source (specially since we open-sourced our little utility, Jailer) to name a few.
Which meant that I needed a digital tool to manage the non-work part of my life as well.
The obvious choice was to use Notion, since I know it anyway. That ended up being a disaster for a very weird reason: It only works online. Even if you have the desktop app, it’s still just a wrapper around the website with some nice things like desktop notifications and such.
I know, this sounds strange to many people, but I don’t like being online all the time. Sometimes I enable iOS/macOS’s DnD, to get some work done, but sometimes I go completely offline with no distractions at all.
Unlike most other developers, I work completely locally. From my development environment to my infrastructure tools, everything is synced local/prod. This is actually a good reason to not use the fancy features of the cloud, but again, that’s a story for another day.
I have been told, by my friends, that my options are the following:
Go as basic as possible and use Notes.app. Well, I like this option, but I had two issues.
First, it’s Apple only. Yes, you can actually connect the Notes.app to your IMAP account and sync that with other Unix machines using clients like Evolution, but now the features are limited to text only. Not even tables :/
Second, the iCloud sync has some weird issues. not always, but from time to time, I was shouting “WHERE ARE MY NOTES???” just to see them appear minutes later.
Apple Notes.app? tested, liked it overall, but it’s not for me.
My friends’ second option? Go as deep as Obsidian!
I fired up Obsidian and I fell in love immediately. It was like love at first sight. Vi keybindings? it’s there. Plugins? it’s there. Run shell commands on your notes? it’s there!
After couple of days, I had everything ready. I had my folders (please, let’s call them directories!), my notes all migrated, all the plugins I needed for my weekly and daily notes (similar to what we had on Notion at work), etc etc.
And then days passed, and then weeks passed. What happened? I totally forgot that Obsidian even exists. I noticed that my wall had… sticky notes (FreeBSD branded!), my Mac had… sticky notes!
This made me so frustrated for multiple reasons.
Not that I only had two types of sticky notes (analog and digital), I also could not “search” in them!
I ended up turning the analog notes into digital, and tagging them at their title, so I could at least search using the macOS Window API.
And then I saw something awesome. Cortex Podcast released the Sidekick Notepad!
Wait wait wait, are you thinking that I bought the Sidekick Notepad? Nope, I did not 🙂
But what I ended up doing is putting all of our office’s legal pads next to me at home, we were not using them in the office anyway!
Two weeks later and I’m writing everything as needed. I take notes, I write my todo lists. I made my legal pads horizontal, similar to the Sidekick Notepad and woof is was awesome!
For a moment there I started using the Moleskine Classic Notebook, since it was more portable than yellow/white legal pads, but that didn’t work as well. I guess I needed something that can be teardown on the fly and no very-hard cover.
Why am I telling you about all of this? Well, uncle Dexter has asked on Mastodon “500 reMarkable ads later… Is anyone using one? Would you recommend it?”
I have used reMarkable (the first one), and I loved it. Not because it was an awesome technology or such, but because it made me think the same as if I was writing on paper with a pen.
So, if you, like me, have suffered for a long time to find the best “digital time/notes/todo management tool”, then you’re probably an analog person, like me.
Just take a sheet of paper, start writing on it with a pen.
That’s all folks…
P.S. I might actually end up buying the reMarkable 2 and check how that goes, or even the Sidekick Notepad. But with my writing speed, I’d need at least 4 Sidekicks every 3 months. Let’s wait and see 🙂
“If eyes are the window to the soul, then writing is the door to the mind.”
It’s Only Words
Colin Walker
Currently reading It’s Only Words by Colin Walker while sitting in a bus.
5 years ago today, I wrote my first English blog post.
At the time I was using Hugo, the hosting was (and still is) provided by me, with the electricity that comes to my house, with an ISP that gave me IP addresses for (kinda-)free and all of it using FreeBSD.
These days, it’s not much different. I still use FreeBSD, I still use electricity, but I’ve moved from Hugo to WordPress and I write using MarsEdit, my favorite macOS software.
So, what have I done in the last 5 years? Well, not much, here are some basic statistic.
I have
And I want to thank you all, for being here, with me, during my hardest days and happiest nights.
I love you all 🙂
Cheers!