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 apart from the initial caching phase it runs with no load. As the key components were synced over by rsync, this copied over the LetsEncrypt certificates, which, because of the Cloudflare caching, failed to renew at some point, silently. Certbot\s version control is in the /etc/letsencrypt/archive folder. Certificate files are written here with a number appended to them and symlinked to /etc/letsencrypt/live, so while certbot works correctly, there will be an archive file with a number, so cert1.pem, cert2.pem etc. In this case however, the certificate files in /archive weren\t numbered, so when attempting to renew the certificate manually, certbot fails with the error cert is required but missing for this certificate. The fix is, fortunately, simple: rename the cert files in /archive with a number and relink them to the files in /live. Run the renew command again and the certificates will be reissued correctly.
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 have good backups and learn from your experiences. The practical stuff starts at ‘The Practical Stuff’.
I’ve had a home disk array for a long time for various reasons. As much as anything I have a home music streaming system as I prefer to buy and own music, even if it is as a download, and over the years I have digitised CDs, originally into iTunes but currently using Funkwhale.
The current disk array is a Terramaster D5-300, a five disk JBOD array that has Windows based software RAID support, but, being Just A Bunch of Disks, can be set up with other on-disk RAID architectures, so, as a Linux user, there were a couple of immediate choices: ZFS, or BTRFS. ZFS is an enterprise level filesystem that was originally developed by Sun (RIP) but was ported to Linux when Sun’s BSD based OS Solaris was open sourced before the Oracle takeover and was forked as OpenZFS. ZFS itself is a great filesystem, but at the time (2016) OpenZFS development had slowed and it’s not really a good fit for the kind of low powered machine that goes with a home setup (I think I set it up on an Acer Revo at first).
BTRFS, on the other hand, is in the Linux kernel, so if something runs the kernel, it should work, and just needs the btrfs-tools package to manage it, so it can be configured and moved around if necessary.
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 be a business of some kind.
I first looked at Mastodon when it was announced back in 2016 or so, when it was becoming apparent when Twitter was getting gamed, and put up an instance on a VM, but the discovery process wasn’t there and it was hard to find people and I took it down again. I made a mental note to watch ActivityPub and developments around it. I joined mastodon.social (and chaos.social, which is the opposite) when the toxicity in Twitter was starting to become the norm but didn’t find it compelling, but still kept an eye on what was going on.
When That Guy squandered enough money to end world hunger on being That Guy on Twitter every day, enough was enough. I had a couple of underused servers so threw up a instance, invited people to see what the fuss was about and imported my followers as everyone was doing the same.
Now it’s just short of a year later and I’ve closed that server. I’m running one for myself. set up in a better way, and of the people I invited, one has stayed on Mastodon.
Over the last year I’ve realised a few things:
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 supported software.
The pricing model changed in February 1995 and the company had a visit from a sales person at Netscape’s UK office, who presented them with a bill for the retail price of the number of copies of the browser they had distributed.
A deal was negotiated based on that (it might have been zero, I never found out the details) and the pricing policy changed within a year, quite possibly because they’d had the same response in many ISPs.
Netscape’s position as most popular web browser lasted as long as it took for Microsoft to license the same code base (Mosaic, licensed from Spyglass, who had in turn licensed the code from the University of Illinois) and improve on it and include it with Windows. Their other corporate products, Web Server, Identity Server, etc which were pretty good at the end of the 90s, also got passed around various companies and survive as open source versions that are arguably more successful than their commercial antecedents.
That could have been Mark Andreesen’s legacy, but it was all born out of a want to get rich, and as he’s got older, he’s gone the same way as so many of the early tech bros, and like many of them, not actually doing anything useful as a means. This piece puts it in a much better way.
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 and other apps that can share images and other larger media files, it supports saving attachments to S3-compatible cloud storage. However, this isn’t well documented so far, so here’s a few notes on getting it to work, specifically with iDrive E2, a low cost E2 storage provider.
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, but I haven’t found a resource that covers it, so here are my notes.
Dedicated servers at OVH are allocated a /64 IPV6 range. The gateway is the last address in the range, which is slightly more eye crossing than with IPV4, but ends in FF:FF:FF:FF. However, in EL8 (and in Debian-derived distros to my knowledge), ifup doesn’t add a default gateway if it can’t ping the address, and it can’t ping the address because it needs a default gateway. This also applies to IPV4 in OVH’s network, which is a pain for automatic provisioning.
The network-scripts system is remarkably flexible, and wrangling it is a dying art, but the key here is the ifup-post script. This runs after ifcfg-<device> and goes through a sequence of the other scripts in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts- you can see which ones if you look at the code.
One of these is route6-<device> and this is where you add your default route so it’s added after the initial network config. In OVH images it is disabled, and perhaps confusingly, includes a list of static routes generated by cloud-init. Rename that one, and using your editor of choice (vim, you animals), open a new file vi route6-eno1 (for example) and enter your gateway and default route like this:
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 who liked his gadgets - Macintoshes, synths and left-handed Casio guitars appeared in the first Dirk Gently novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and, with The Book in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy he, at the very least, created the idea of a portable device that knew everything.
When the commercial Internet started, Adams got involved in games, co-founding The Digital Village, developers of the game Starship Titanic, who then started h2g2, a collaborative dictionary project described as the Earth edition of the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.
In his article My Vision for H2G2, written in 2000, he wrote this:
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 day, the laptop had the wrong kind of drop, which has cracked the touchscreen in the corner. This hasn’t affected the display at all but has messed up the touchscreen input so that it keeps getting random signals that trigger events, which was sufficiently intrusive to need to turn off the touchscreen
The Apple TV series Mythic Quest had an episode in which the game found it had an extreme right wing problem. Their solution was to corral the right wingers in a server where they could shout at each other and fight as much as they wanted without bothering other players.
The Fediverse, running, as it does, largely on free software, came about in part due to Twitter and other platforms’ unwillingness or inability to deal with an extreme right wing problem. However, as it’s free and open source software, the bad actors were also free to create their own instances and interact. The response was filtering, blocking and defederation.
I got my first Android phone, a Moto Droid, in 2010. It’s wasn’t my first smartphone as that had been a quest with varying degrees of success for years (I still miss the Nokia E series keyboard phones a bit).
Among the things installed on it was Facebook. Even then I was suitably suspicious so wanted to remove it, except I couldn’t without rooting as it was a system app, and this was the awful wrapper-around-the-website version. However, being a system app, it still had full access to your phone. Which was nice.