💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20210806 captured on 2023-01-29 at 03:54:12.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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I have been renovating our old house (1920s? 1930s? I don't know, but it originally had knob and tube wiring) for 13 years. I'm on the last room. The electrical, drywall, painting, and flooring are all done. Just the moldings are left to put in. It's been a long process and it will be so nice to be finished. I don't think I'd ever advise anyone to buy an old house unless they wanted to learn a lot and experience their fair share of fear and panic in the process. Have you ever had a bizarre idea that turned out to be really useful? I just did. I wanted to set up a private email server, with no 'federation'. The users would only be able to send and receive emails on that server. Part of the purpose was to use it with Delta Chat. Well, I started experimenting. First I set up email for local accounts using opensmtpd (thanks for the recommendation KatolaZ), so that users who could SSH into the server could email one another. Then I added IMAP with dovecot and altered the opensmtpd config to allow external access. At this point, I hadn't set up TLS. It was the equivalent of a 1997 mail server, sending everything unencrypted in plain text, but only on my LAN. Stay with me here. Then a bright shining realization occurred. I doubt that I'm the only person in the world who uses their work email extensively for file transfer. I email ideas and files to myself all the time. Well, I like vintage tech, especially my BlackBerry Bold 9900. It has a very outdated email client (Logicmail). When I set up that LAN-only, unencrypted email system, I realized that it was the perfect setup to transfer files, notes, etc., quickly to the Bold. So while I'll ultimately set up TLS and authentication for access to the email server from outside my LAN, I'm going to leave ports 25 and 143 open on the LAN, so I can send notes and files quickly and easily to my Bold, Lifedrive, Jornada and any other antiquated tech with an email client that I own. Personal, unfederated email servers -- so useful! ------------ It's been so nice to see a lot of the old regulars (Jynx, sloum, Slugmax, and tfurrows among others) posting on gopher recently. Perhaps my "Ghost Town" phlog entry was premature. ------------ I'm glad I don't have to travel like Jynx. One or two flights a year is plenty for me. Oddly, I've only ever had to deal with one substantial delay and the airline (Westjet) paid for a hotel room. That was nice, but the whole thing was quite inconvenient. After a lot of anxiety and a two-hour post-flight drive, I got to work the next day about five minutes late.