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Openvpn / pihole - change administration link
  • One way is to run Pi-hole’s admin interface on a different port. That’s configured in:

    /etc/lighttpd/external.conf
    

    Set:

    server.port := 8000
    

    Then your URL is http://IP:8000/admin

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    How to get servers to re-federate/re-subscribe after a time offline?
  • I worked out this was odd behavior on my OPNSense firewall NAT rules.

    For some reason some syncing worked (eg. beehaw.org) but new connections failed. I'm not sure why. Maybe established sessions were kept alive.

    Those rules haven't changed in months and months, so I'll chalk that up to "weirdness".

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    How to get servers to re-federate/re-subscribe after a time offline?
  • I thought that, and in the past I’ve been off for a day or two and always caught up.

    This time I haven’t and it’s been a week or two since coming back online.

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  • How to get servers to re-federate/re-subscribe after a time offline?

    Hey all,

    My personal home-hosted server ran out of disk space and so went offline while I was away and I didn't notice it for a week or two.

    This meant that federation requests (or subscriptions requests) went offline and now most of the servers I'm federated with are lagging. I'm only getting updates from a couple.

    Is there a way to trigger federated servers back to life so I get the subscription updates? Federation does seem to be working, given some servers seem to federate fine and this post was via federation and has worked.

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    Jump
    how to find a good USB cable?
  • This is more complex than you'd think because the USB spec has changed many times over the years, with updates in the connectors used, along with other sub-category changes to cables too. So there's USB versions 1, 2, 3, and 4 (and sub-versions too), along with different types of connector, eg. USB-A comes in regular and V3 (blue inside), and USB-C which is the later. Newer specs can transfer much larger amounts of data. Power Delivery (PD) is another sub-set of specification, which currently allows up to 240W of power with USB4, that's a lot, enough to charge multiple laptops at once, vastly more then the 2.5W allowed for USB 3. For more confusion there is also USB Power Delivery Programmable Power Supply, which is a sub-set to help devices negotiate charging speeds.

    Another challenge - USB-C connectors can also support Thunderbolt, which gives it a whole other set of capabilities. This depends on both the cable and the port.

    This explains that mess that is USB-C: https://www.androidauthority.com/state-of-usb-c-870996/

    Key part:

    The latest USB data speed protocols are split into several standards. There are legacy USB 1.0 and 2.0, USB 3.0, USB 3.1, USB 3.2, and the latest USB 4.0, all of which can be supported over USB-C. Confusing enough, but these have since been revised and updated to include various sub-standards, which have encompassed USB 3.1 Gen 1, USB 3.1 Gen 2, and USB 3.2 Gen 2, along with the more recent USB 3.2 Gen 1×1, USB 3.2 Gen 1×2, and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 revisions. Good luck deciphering the differences without a handbook. Hopefully, the graph below helps.

    You'd hope USB4 fixes it, but no. USB4 already boasts Gen 2×1, Gen 2×2, Gen 3×1, Gen 3×2, and Gen 4 variations, with data speeds ranging from 10 to 80 Gbps.

    Cable lengths can also have an impact. The spec only allows for a specific length after which you need active cables, which include chips in them to strengthen the signal.

    Several years ago a Google engineer started buying USB-C cables from Amazon and reviewing them in a lot of detail: https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFLICGQRF6BRJGH2RRD4VGMB47ZA

    If you read some you'll see there are plenty of manufacturers who just don't even stick by the rules, so it's not always clear what you'll actually get. It doesn't help either that some products also don't play by the rules and have custom sockets that need specific vendor cables. I've had keyboards, for example, that only work with their specific vendor cables, not general USB-C ones.

    This means you need to stick to a reputable set of brands, or the cables that came with the product. Decide if you need to charge something serious with it - eg. laptop, vs just a phone, watch, or small device, or whether you need data connectivity.

    As another poster mentioned, just buy Anker, they're well made come with a reputable warranty, and aren't actually that expensive. Don't buy the cables you find by the supermarket/CVS checkout, or some ultra-cheap site. They might work, they might not.

    Oh, and the Google engineer had his laptop fried by bad cables: https://www.engadget.com/2016-02-03-benson-leung-chromebook-pixel-usb-type-c-test.html

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  • Can't subscribe to a local community

    Hey,

    On my local lemmy I noticed that after trying out Tailscale I borked my federation connectivity (at least I think that was it).

    I've rolled back changes, but noticed that most of my federation updates aren't flowing, and I can't even subscribe to a local community.

    However, I can subscribe to a remote one, but only one of quite a few I was previously connected to.

    No errors in the logs, and everything seems to be working otherwise.

    Any ideas of where to search?

    Activity updates from logs:

    lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:07:35.820559Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 41, running: 0, retries: 0, dead: 0, complete: 0 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:07:35.820579Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 42, running: 0, retries: 0, dead: 0, complete: 0 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:07:35.820602Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 43, running: 0, retries: 0, dead: 0, complete: 0 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:07:35.820622Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 44, running: 0, retries: 0, dead: 0, complete: 0 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:07:35.820653Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 45, running: 0, retries: 0, dead: 0, complete: 0 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:07:35.820674Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 46, running: 0, retries: 0, dead: 0, complete: 0 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:07:35.820696Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 47, running: 0, retries: 0, dead: 0, complete: 0 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:07:35.820717Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 48, running: 0, retries: 0, dead: 0, complete: 0 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:07:35.820738Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 49, running: 0, retries: 0, dead: 0, complete: 0 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:09:26.317267Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 1, running: 0, retries: 14, dead: 0, complete: 35 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:09:27.658199Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 1, running: 0, retries: 14, dead: 0, complete: 36 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:09:29.009600Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 1, running: 0, retries: 14, dead: 0, complete: 37 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:09:29.899976Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 1, running: 0, retries: 14, dead: 0, complete: 38 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:10:00.253091Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 1, running: 0, retries: 14, dead: 0, complete: 39 lemmy_1 | 2023-09-11T22:10:02.139038Z INFO send:send_lemmy_activity: activitypub_federation::activity_queue: Activity queue stats: pending: 1, running: 0, retries: 14, dead: 0, complete: 40

    That pending: 1 never clears. Not sure how to identify it.

    This was posted through federation, from my local instance - so, obviously bits and pieces are working just fine.

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    Jump
    Dishwasher Recommendations
  • Last time my dishwasher died I just had to take it had and clean the pump underneath. Basically the connections apart under and had to just scrub them out. One tiny bit of plastic was gumming it up, causing some checks to fail. Stopped it running.

    They’re surprisingly simple machines.

    For Samsung I always buy the extended warranty. For our washer and dryer Assurion must have spent a fortune keeping them running. A lot more than I ever did to guy them. They’re only 8 years old too. It’s sad, but for Samsung they work nicely but fail frequently,

    For your next one but Bosche. They’re all good, get a base model and it’ll clean well and reliably.

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  • Jump
    What do you think about beeper?
  • Given this is !privacy and the advertise as front page features both “works will all your messaging apps” and “end to end encryption”, it seems important to flag currently those aren’t mutually compatible.

    It’s not their fault the apps don’t have e2e APIs, it’s a tough problem, but the secrecy and privacy guarantee is just “trust us to stick to our policy”. And they’re a start-up, tooling isn’t perfect (or even exist), mistakes happen, etc

    Their self-hosting looks interesting, but then it said to use your own clients too, which took the fun out of that.

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  • Jump
    What do you think about beeper?
  • “For example, if you send a message from Beeper to a friend on WhatsApp, the message is encrypted on your Beeper client, sent to the Beeper web service, which decrypts and re-encrypts the message with WhatsApp's proprietary encryption protocol.”

    So, not really end to end for most common use-cases.

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  • Jump
    Run Linux like original Unix
  • I agree, that would be more authentic. Or rig up an actual line printer.

    But I think the fuzzy old terminal emulator at full screen gives you a more accurate view of an old curved, flickery, low-res screen.

    Event a TTY on a modern screen is going to be higher res (far more than 80x24), nice crisp fonts, colors, etc.

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  • Jump
    Q: Lemmy and Mastodon instances behind existing reverse proxy
  • Depends a lot on your existing reverse proxy.

    You can read the nginx config that the defaults include and it’s some basic rules to route incoming requests to either lemmy or lemmy-ui. If your existing reverse proxy is nginx you could just incorporate the rules in there.

    It also depends on why you need it behind the existing proxy, and how you’ll choose to route your traffic, and where you traffic is coming from in general.

    I’d start with taking a look at the default nginx config to see if you can move those rules to your existing reverse proxy, or just forward everything coming in that’s for lemmy straight to the lemmy reverse proxy, although that might be more complicated in correctly preserving the incoming requests.

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  • Jump
    What's your uptime record?
  • Many years ago working for a monitoring software company someone had found a bug in the uptime monitoring rules where they reset after a year.

    It was patched and I upgraded one client and their whole Solaris plant immediately went red and alerted. They told me to double it to two years and some stuff was still alerting.

    They just said they’d try to get around to rebooting it, but it was all stable.

    Everywhere else I’ve worked enforces regular reboots.

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  • Jump
    Email self-hosting
  • If you want a reliable provider try Fastmail. Used them for years, very rare outages. I have my local postfix set to relay to them for locally sent mail. Great web UI.

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  • Jump
    Hillsborough, Clearwater police monitoring private security cameras
  • I really don’t like the “but otherwise we’d need a warrant” approach.

    Yes, of course you should need a warrant. That’s the bit that’s the safeguard and actually is the checks and balance against abuse. It’s not a problem to be optimized away.

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  • Jump
    Why does smoked salmon look 'raw'? And why does it taste so different from a cooked fillet?
  • Traditional lox is just brined in salt, no smoking.

    Gravadlax is brined in salt and sugar with spices.

    Smoked salmon is just smoked salmon, like nova, in the US.

    Due to customer preference and lack of knowledge, most want smoked salmon when they ask for lox, so are sold lox.

    See: https://forward.com/news/7669/the-raw-truth-about-lox/

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  • Jump
    How do I manage my inbox?
  • I’ve done this for years, but also:

    • anything automated goes straight to specific folders for those categories. Very quickly identify stuff that’s noise and put in rules to move it out of your inbox. Sure some stuff you might need, but anything that’s corporate spam needs automating away.
    • use (and create if necessary) the right mail groups so your whole team, project partners, whoever see the right emails and ask people to use them.
    • add a VIP rule to highlight emails from the boss, VP, anyone you know you want to read right away
    • be clear with people on how to reach you. If you prefer Slack for immediate stuff, tell people. It’s fine to be clear that email is for less immediate consumption, or non-conversational stuff. Slack is far better for collab.
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