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opinions on home email services
by Mike Peckar June 17, 2021

June 17, 2021

Hi, I've noted that many of you host your own email and file servers, and I've wanted to do this for several years, but I've been avoiding taking this on myself. This is due to the time investment (to learn tech I don't necessarily want to learn) and the added weight of responsibility for security. Quite frankly, I'm getting lazy in my old age and I'm considering a packaged solution/service like The Helm. I guess my question is, are the tech barriers to setting up a home email server really as formidable as claimed in the below justification from The Helm's web site? If a lazy guy like me sets up an email server, but then doesn't get around to applying security updates for half a year, is he just asking to be hacked? For context, I am a local Charter customer with a standard internet-only subscription. From: https://blog.thehelm.com/post/how-helm-works-part-1-networking [quoted text] For an email server to send and receive email with other servers on the internet, they need port 25 to be open. Unfortunately, ISPs in the U.S. block port 25 by default, a practice started in the 90s when home computers were hacked and turned into open relays abused for spamming. Sometimes it’s possible to get this port unblocked, but it’s not uncommon for the ISP to ask for a significantly more expensive class of service in exchange. ISPs also typically assign dynamic IPs to residential internet connections. Large email service providers block residential dynamic IPs en masse also due to the issue raised above. While it’s possible to get a static IP address from your ISP, they will charge for it and potentially require a more expensive class of service. PTR records, or reverse DNS, is also a key requirement for trustworthiness when setting up an email server. Getting this type of record with a residential internet connection can be a significant challenge and may also incur additional costs. To summarize, port blocking, dynamic IPs and challenges in establishing a PTR record all interfere with easily running an email server at home. It can cost hundreds of dollars per year and consist of a significant investment of time with your ISP to get things set up just right. After thinking about this problem and experimenting for a while, we managed to find a better way. [end quoted text] Thanks, Mike

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WLUG Meeting tomorrow! June 10th, 2021 at 7pm!
by Tim Keller June 11, 2021

June 11, 2021

Hey Everybody, We've got a WLUG meeting tomorrow June 10th, 2021 at 7pm. This will be a totally virtual meeting, but hopefully our last!! Topic: I thought I'd give a quick update on my CNC machine and my quest to have a full FOSS toolchain.. what's worked, what hasn't, etc. I expect that'll only take a couple of minutes and then we'll move on to our usual banter! Location: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA See ya there! Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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PipeWire pro audio support
by Joshua Stone June 7, 2021

June 7, 2021

Hey everyone! The PipeWire project has been an exciting project to follow, as there has been heavy development for broad audio use case coverage: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/home https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/blob/master/NEWS It seems that the developers are currently prioritizing pro-audio use cases as of late: https://twitter.com/PipewireP/status/1401885732587847680 >A little question for our pro-audio friends out there. Now that we got freewheeling and latency reporting implemented, what is at the top of your wishlist for PipeWire features? This should be quite exciting! I've tried several DAWs over the years, and admittedly they seemed to require more effort than necessary to configure correctly with the Linux audio stack. I'm hoping PipeWire will be able to resolve this weakness! What do you think could use more improvement? - Josh

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Fedora 34 updates
by THE HAMMER May 21, 2021

May 21, 2021

I just installed Fedora 34 on a "junk laptop" to play along with. Looked on line and wound up with a couple different answers, and so perhaps they are all correct. My question is when I want to update all the packages in the lap top what is the correct/best command? Also what is the difference between dnf upgrade and dnf upgrade --refresh Thanks Ron

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Carbon-neutral living
by joshua.gage.stone＠gmail.com May 14, 2021

May 14, 2021

Hey everyone! Thanks for another night full of discussion covering many interesting topics! I'm interested to learn more about everyone's longterm plans for carbon-neutral/carbon-negative living! My wife and I have been researching on this topic for some time as we believe there are numerous benefits in reducing energy requirements, and we hope that when it comes time to become home owners we'll be able to start from the ground up with this type of living ingrained in our household! It turns out that there's a *lot* of room for improvement in energy efficiency, and by extension, carbon reduction. While I think transition to green energy is immensely important as a longterm plan, I also think it's important for us to evaluate ways to reduce our carbon footprint as individuals Examples include: - Switching to induction stoves which are more efficient and safer than traditional electric stoves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pftcQ6NGPfc - Switching to heat pump dryers for reducing energy usage with the added bonus of eliminating the need for vents https://www.energystar.gov/products/heat_pump_dryer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh-j0sWBEJA - Switching to heat pump water heaters https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/heat-pump-water-heaters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omivdhxdGv0 - Switching to air-source/ground-source heat pumps to replacing gas/oil/electric heating for hot water and heating https://www.energystar.gov/products/heating_cooling/heat_pumps_geothermal https://www.energystar.gov/products/heating_cooling/heat_pumps_air_source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zrx-b2sLUs I think heat pump technology could be very promising for a wide number of applications, as it turns out that the most efficient way to work with heat is to simply *move* it around, rather than generate more heat through gas, oil, etc. With climate change and global warming being an existential threat, the last thing we want to do is add more heat to the problem! A more ambitious longterm goal my wife and I have is that we would like to someday have a house built to Passive House standards, which is said to reduce home heating requirements by up to 90%: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=secB3R0sIYU https://phmass.org/ https://www.buildwithrise.com/stories/texas-passive-house-weathered-the-202… https://zeroenergy.com/portfolio/all-projects https://zeroenergyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/RPA_Scranton_Passi… https://www.phius.org/home-page Something I find especially interesting about Passive Houses is that they're often able to achieve net positive energy production and EV charging with even a modust solar panel installation. This means they can give back to the power grid with fewer panels compared to other houses built to code, reducing the total environmental impact from solar panel manufacturing. Of course, there's a high upfront monetary cost to transitioning to eco-friendly living, but at least there are programs in place to help: https://www.masssave.com/ https://multifamily.fanniemae.com/financing-options/specialty-financing/gre… Hope to hear everyone's thoughts! - Josh

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Reminder: WLUG Meeting tonight! May 13th 2021 at 7pm!
by Tim Keller May 13, 2021

May 13, 2021

This is a reminder that we've got a meeting today at 7pm! In the usual location: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA Topics tonight will likely include the UMN debacle, the encoder/decoder vulnerability stuff, probably some other Linux related stuff! I'd also like to talk about meeting in person. If it's something that people are down for (I know Maddog is!) I'll reach out to Technopia and see what their rules are. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Reminder! Meeting Next Week on May 13th 2021!
by Tim Keller May 7, 2021

May 7, 2021

Hey Gang! We've got a meeting on May 13th! For topics, there's a whole lot to talk about! Obviously the UMN stuff, as well as the x86 decoder fun. I think it's worth revisiting having in person meetings.. At some point here in the near future a majority of us are going to be vaccinated. I'll reach out to Kevin (if he's not already reading this!) and see what Technopia's policies are going to be. Whatever we do, I think we've all agreed it makes sense to keep the virtual component going as well. To that point, I'll be getting my second shot on Tuesday so I might be not feeling great, we'll see. What do people think? Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Fedora 34 is officially out today
by joshua.gage.stone＠gmail.com April 27, 2021

April 27, 2021

Hey everyone! Fedora 34 is officially out today, and it has a number of new features! Features include: - Updating to Gnome 40 (https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/40.0/) - Switching from Pulseaudio to Pipewire (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ#how-is-pipewir…) - Switching from earlyoomd to systemd-oomd for handling out-of-memory situations - Enabled transparent zstd compression in btrfs (https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-workstation-34-feature-focus-btrfs-transp…) - Enabling Harfbuzz in FreeType for improved font rendering - KDE using Wayland by default instead of X11 https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-in-fedora-workstation-34/ You can try it out today here: https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/ Or try the various different spins here: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/34/ - Josh

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Zeek - from yesterday's meeting
by John Stoffel April 13, 2021

April 13, 2021

Guys, I'm looking into Zeek and unfortunately I don't have a second ethernet port on my main system, so it's not clear how I'd run a span port off my main switch to grab traffic. What hardware do people recommend for a zeek data collection node? I guess I could spin up my old WRAP board (http://www.pcengines.ch) which I used as my main router for years before I replaced it recently. But it's not super fast. It's got three 1gb ports, and 4gb of RAM with a 1Ghz single core AMD CPU. So it might do the job, esp since I can install Debian Buster on there without too much trouble. Sweet! John

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Reminder! We've got a meeting this Thursday (April 8th, 2021!)
by Tim Keller April 5, 2021

April 5, 2021

Hey Everybody, This is a reminder that we have a meeting on April 8th, 2021. Same bat time, same bat channel Date: April 8th, 2021 7pm: Jitsi @ https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA Topic: As of yet, there's no topic for the meeting, however, there's a ton to talk about none the less! The PHP git server hack, the OpenSSL vulnerabilities, turns out the spectre mitigations can be mitigated? I'm sure more stuff will come up as well.. As usual drinks and refreshments aren't being provided as this is a virtual meeting.. But soon.. so soon I hope we'll all be able to get together safely. Thanks for being patient and coming to the meetings, I appreciate it. Tim.

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