njt

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

I recently placed some PDF files for some nontechnical people on Dropbox. To avoid confusing them with the long complicated Dropbox URL, I even created a shortened link for them to use (think https://event.myorg.test).

Almost none of them had Dropbox accounts.

I found out later from someone that 90% of them couldn’t access the files. The link didn’t require a login but they made it look to the unsophisticated observer that you need an account to get the files. So these folks (most of them were elderly), just gave up.

njt

6 bulan yang laludiscuss

I've been self-hosting my email for a little over 2 decades.

The basic setup has more or less stayed the same, but there's some more extra components around it you have to know now (spam filtering and SPF/DKIM/DMARC come readily to mind).

To quote Michael Lucas: "everything complicated about emails revolves around spam and not getting it". I highly recommend his book, "Run Your Own Mail Server".[1]

In short, hosting your own email is not that bad at all. I strongly suspect, like many other skills, since it has atrophied with the advent of the cloud and people readily giving up to the large carriers, it has gotten the reputation of being hard, or as you said, a full time job. I don't think either of those things are true.

[1] - https://mwl.link/run-your-own-mail-server.html

njt

6 bulan yang laludiscuss

> Zojirushi water boiler

Purchased this last month and really regret not buying it years earlier (we got the 5L CV-DCC50 model).

It's amazing how we never worry about boiling water anymore (apart from large pots of water for cooking pasta or something).

Our electric water kettle sees very little use now.

njt

11 bulan yang laludiscuss

Just wanted to chime in on my beancount workflow, which you may also want to check out.

I also use vim, and I use it a bit to edit my beancount files, but I mostly use fava, a most excellent web interface for beancount. In addition to having a built in editor (which does formatting and can catch errors and show you exactly where they are), it allows you to quickly add new transactions based on old ones — the dialog box allows you to choose from previously used accounts to speed up input. It’s a lifesaver. I don’t think I would have continued using beancount long term if it wasn’t for fava.

Just about the only negative thing I can say about fava is that it does formatting slightly differently from bean-format. I actually prefer it to beancount, but there are some cases where I prefer the native formatting (like when declaring/opening accounts). So for some months, I will switch from one to another. A minor nitpick, but it’s slightly annoying.

njt

2 tahun yang laludiscuss

I've been running VPSs with them for the last 9 years. Never had a problem. And unlike Digital Ocean, they allow you to mount your own ISOs and fully support the BSDs.

Unless someone buys them out in the future and platform decay[1] happens, you can trust them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

njt

2 tahun yang laludiscuss

Totally agree.

I was there two weeks ago. The tour guide took us through a route that bypassed the longer lines and through some underground areas—culminating in an entrance that completely blew my mind. I never realized how huge the interior was until I stepped in and saw it firsthand. There are few things in my life that completely took my breath away, this ranks in the top 5 for sure.

njt

2 tahun yang laludiscuss

On a slightly related note, Michael W. Lucas[1] is working on an upcoming book entitled "Run Your Own Mail Server", that will be published shortly (there's a Kickstarter campaign as well[2]).

I attended his tutorial and talk at BSDCan[3] this year and both were excellent. I highly recommend buying the book when it comes out (or supporting the Kickstarter), it will go through all the gory details of setting up and running a mail server, and best practices, including a ton of material on SPF/DKIM/DMARC.

(P.S. I have no affiliation with the author or the book in any way.)

[1] - https://mwl.io/

[2] - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwlucas/run-your-own-ma...

[3] - https://www.bsdcan.org/2024/

njt

2 tahun yang laludiscuss

Both Subversion[1] and CVS[2] had keyword substitution, which replaced those tags with useful information like the commit id, author, date, etc.

They were very useful when you were looking at a source file, to see what version of that file you had.

Git had something similar with Git Attributes[3], but AFAIK, they were just references to blob ids, so they never really took off.

For git, I now use tags (and versioning based on tags), that more or less replaced svn/cvs keyword substitution in the git ecosystem.

[1] - https://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.advanced.props.speci...

[2] - https://www.gnu.org/software/trans-coord/manual/cvs/html_nod...

[3] - https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attribute...

njt

3 tahun yang laludiscuss

scdoc is a great tool. It's written by Drew DeVault (sourcehut) and works great, I've used it in a couple of projects.

Here's the blog entry[1] where he talks about the rationale for writing the tool.

The page mentions that it is inspired by Markdown, but is not actually Markdown because it was designed for HTML.

I'm glad to see more projects in this space.

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2018/05/13/scdoc.html

njt

3 tahun yang laludiscuss

> someone complained about NTP issues with traffic passing through TATA and they were told to make their devices stratum 0 or something

Not saying your summary of that thread is wrong, I just wanted to expand a bit to maybe clarify:

    - someone posted to NANOG about issues with their (European) servers reaching 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org
    - they noticed they were being routed through Tata (AS6453)
    - they mentioned that their other servers (e.g. in Africa) had no issues
    - they posted to NANOG to ask about this
    - they thought it was a routing or FreeBSD issue (they later posted about the issue to a FreeBSD list as well)

So AFAICT, the correct response was posted about a day and a half (~42 hours) later:

    - the NTP pool uses GeoDNS to map clients to servers
    - the OP's server IP address was incorrectly geolocated to Mauritius
    - the Mauritius zone in the pool has only one server
    - so the OP would only ever get that IP as an answer

The short-term fix was to use a different pool address (e.g. europe.pool.ntp.org), and the responder also mentioned that the NTP pool folks were working to fix the problem.

Full thread here:

    https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2023-August/222706.html

Now the interesting part of that thread was that shortly after (~4 hours) the OP posted about their problem, someone replied and recommended that they setup their own GPS-based NTP network.

From there, that sub-thread was mostly about NTP attacks and GPS security and mounting receivers on top of datacenter buildings and such.

Counting up the messages (if my mail client's threading capabilities are to be trusted), of the 94 or so total messages in the thread, 79 (84%) of the messages were in that GPS-related subthread, and only 15 messages responded to the OPs issue directly.

I didn't really see this as a failing of NANOG per-se, it's just a public mailing list and some folks went on a nerd sniping tangent (cf. XKCD #356).

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