If you’re self-hosting Mail-in-a-Box (MIAB) in a Proxmox LXC container like I am, and suddenly your server can’t send emails to any provider (ProtonMail, Gmail, Outlook—all timing out with “Connection timed out” in postfix logs), this post is for you. It took some tcpdump detective work, but we nailed it. Spoiler: it was a sneaky private IP NAT block on outbound port 25.
My postfix/smtp logs looked like this:
Long time, no chat!
This is my NAS: a Synology DS220j. It has 512MB of RAM, a 4-core 1.4 GHz ARM CPU, no Docker, no Plex, and it can take 15–20 minutes just to open an app in the web GUI. I’ve had it since around 2018, I think. Inside are two HDDs in a JBOD configuration with no RAID.
A few days ago, I got a message saying it was way out of date and needed to be updated. The update removed the video streaming functionality that I actually used. On the bright side, it’s been pretty much flawless for NFS and SMB mounts (which I use a lot), as well as iSCSI.
Note: I don’t know if I’ll do this, but it is something that I am passionate about and have a lot of experience with. The outline also still needs some tweaking.
Last February, I finally got a job. Without going into a lot of detail, I got it by leveraging some contacts that I had where I used to live in NC. The number of interviews that I had from applying for jobs in LinkedIn, Indeed, and direct applying was absolutely tiny. Of course, as soon as I started doing the series of interviews for this job, I got calls for four more interviews, because that’s just how things work. I make it a rule to never speak about a current job, just that I have one. If you really want to, you can find me in LinkedIn and see who I’m working for.
Project Page: https://github.com/cosmos72/twin
So, picture this: A window manager that is 100% text user interface (TUI). It’s simple and to the point. You open a terminal in Linux or maybe you are working on headless system with no GUI. You use /usr/bin/twin and now you can open multiple terminals in one terminal without the weird shortcuts of Screen or Tmux. It works like every other GUI environment and has the feel of early 90’s MSDOS.
I think it’s far past time for Linux distributions to really rework how they handle dependencies. I remember installing a graphical tool not long ago that had to dependancy of a dependancy that required emacs. I love emacs, but this is beyond silly. I think there should be a way to map out applications and their dependancies and draw a line between a tool not being able to work altogether and some edge case utility that the software provides that requires the dependancy.
A couple of weeks ago I had an interview with that company that I really wanted to work for. I won’t say who it was. I’ll just say that it would have been an ideal position for me. In order to prepare, I wrote a list of talking points that I anticipated could be discussed during the interview and I had them ready. Since this was an online interview, I had the privilege to have this with me. If this were a face to face interview, I would have just memorized them beforehand to the best of my ability. Since I suspect that I didn’t get the job, you might wonder if this exercise worth doing, I think think it is. It helped me to focus on what I wanted to say and not go off on weird tangents (like I sometimes do).
When I was reviewing OSINT tools from the Intel Techniques course, I wondered if there is a better way to keep track of what’s going on with a specific website. You could screenshot that website multiple times per day, every day, but that could be tiresome and potentially rate-limited.
It occurred to me that many times a website will tell you when it’s updated via an RSS feed. Any RSS feed reader will read the feed and output it to the display, but can I use that feed to download the entire page where the feed is linked to without needing to visit the page directly? The answer, of course, is yes, but the problem is that there isn’t already a tool that does that. That’s why I wrote RSS Saver. Here’s how it works:
Babylon Bee
110 Front Street, Suite 300
Jupiter, FL 33458
Dear Babylon Bee,
I am writing to you in response to the job opening on X entitled: Satire Validator. I, in fact, have no sense of humor and therefore would be perfect for this position. When I was a child growing up on the mean streets of Marion, Illinois; I was often seen as different from my siblings and my peers. They wanted ice cream from the Dairy Queen after church, I wanted a cold shower. They wanted a Nintendo, I wanted a dictionary. They wanted hugs and kisses, I simply desired a stern talking to.
So, I’m on the job hunt again and looking at moving again. This was supposed to have happened almost 2 years ago but life threw me a curve ball. I will be moving from Prague to the US but first I need a job.
Finding a new job is quite frankly scary because you’re putting yourself out there and you don’t know what to expect. On top of it all is moving back to the US with my wife who will be living on a green card. It’s going to be even harder for her.