Proxy Mailcow behind Nginx Proxy Manager the easy way

Posted on Sat 14 September 2024 in Technical • Tagged with mailcow, nginx proxy manager, docker

A quick one as no-one seems to have written it down properly.
Mailcow (https://mailcow.email) is a dockerized mail system. By default it will run on port 80 and port 443 of an IP address, so it occupies the web addresses of, say, a cheap VM.
Nginx Proxy Manager …


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Fixing a frozen screen caused by systemd 256

Posted on Sat 03 August 2024 in Technical • Tagged with tech, freeze, laptop, systemd

Systemd version 256 has been rolled out in several distributions recently, including Arch and Debian and variants. It adds a feature where user sessions are frozen when the system enters sleep, but in my case, running Manjaro Linux with KDE on a Gen 1 Lenovo T14, this meant that when …


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A fix for 'cert is required but missing for this certificate' in certbot

Posted on Tue 30 July 2024 in Technical • Tagged with certbot, ssl

Yes, this is probably a bit search spammy (like search actually works any more), but it\s an interesting little fix and a view into how certbot works. Apart from when new posts are published, a server I manage is served wholly from Cloudflare. We have recently migrated it and …


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Adventures in BTRFS: Replacing an array

Posted on Wed 20 December 2023 in Technical • Tagged with btrfs, self-hosting, cloud storage, hardware

Preamble ramble

There aren't a lot of real world examples of using BTRFS around online. Some of the most useful advice I found was in r/BTRFS on Reddit but it's hard to actually find user experiences beyond the theroretical.
This is sort of one, but the tl;dr is …


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Closing down an instance

Posted on Sun 22 October 2023 in Technical • Tagged with tech, Culture, Fediverse, Mastodon, Musing

I set up offworld.fedisonic.cloud when it was apparent that Twitter was going to start circling the drain pretty quickly. I had an idea of running a Mastodon instance for anyone in my circle who wanted it, but with my usual overambition I started to think that it could …


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The Scape of Net

Posted on Thu 19 October 2023 in Technical • Tagged with anecdotage, Netscape

A touch of #anecdotage: I worked at Easynet in the early days of the UK commercial Internet, and we packaged #Netscape browser in our welcome pack as it was initially free for non-commercial purposes and we stated we were providing it as an option for browsing the web rather than …


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Adding S3-compatible cloud storage to Pixelfed

Posted on Mon 11 September 2023 in Technical • Tagged with tech, fediverse, pixelfed, s3

Pixelfed is a federated photo sharing service that is an alternative to Instagram and uses ActivityPub to share posts across other services such as Mastodon, Pleroma and indeed WordPress. It is one of the more mature Fediverse apps and has been in continuous development for several years.

As with Mastodon …


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Adding an IPv6 default route with network-scripts in an EL8 server at OVH

Posted on Wed 06 September 2023 in Technical • Tagged with tech, Enterprise Linux, IPV6, Linux, Networking

This is a bit of a niche one, not least because network-scripts is supposed to be on its way out as a configuration method, despite cPanel still not supporting NetworkManager properly. No problem people, it's only been around for ten years.
This may also be specific to OVH's network …


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On microblogging

Posted on Thu 31 August 2023 in Technical • Tagged with culture, blogging, anecdotage, microblogging

On his blog, Terence Eden wrote about the Time I Invented Twitter and it's an interesting proposition which would have just been slightly ahead of its time in 2003. Microblogging probably needed Internet enabled phones to take off, like social networking in general.

Douglas Adams was a very intelligent man …


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Disabling a Wacom laptop touchscreen in an Arch Linux based OS

Posted on Tue 22 August 2023 in Technical • Tagged with tech, laptop, linux, manjaro, touchscreen, hardware

(Without disabling everything else)

My main laptop is a Lenovo X1 Yoga 2nd Gen running Manjaro KDE Plasma. Lovely machine and does what I want it to do. As a Yoga device, it has a touchscreen, which I don't use a lot and have often thought of disabling.

The other …


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