I’ve done quite a bit of freelance work and visited various office spaces with multiple companies in a single building. It was pretty common just to call to the building reception and tell them that I’m working for this-and-that-company upcoming weekend for their network stuff and I’d need access to network cabinets and whatnot and they’d have keys ready for me with very little (if any) verification if I’m actually doing what I’m supposed to or if I am who I claim to be. Some of the locations just handed me keys with access to practically everything, including shared server rooms hosting their CCTV setup, key managing servers and all.

So, just get a name tag with a local operator logo and clothes to match and ask nicely. You’ll get access to a lot more than you think.

So it is always DNS

Based on the title alone I thought that she was a barista who poured hundreds of liters of coffee down the drain or something which might make sense. But no, just the last sip on her cup in order to prevent it from spilling in the bus or causing problems in the trash bin. Do they fine people if they accidentally drop their full cup too?

I actually did something for quite a while. Finished long overdue wiring for outdoor access point and one more camera, replaced a main switch since the old one started to behave unreliably, installed frigate (which still needs some work), cleaned up some wiring while messing around, updated a bunch of firmwares, replaced switch in garage to managed one and made some changes on my workstation and some other minor stuff.

Next would be to move cameras into their own VLAN and harden that setup a bit. And I really should get around on better backups for my VPS. But it’s a new week coming up, if the work isn’t too busy I might get something more done.

7 digits, on a very blue state, in a major city, all expenses covered and only a few months. Basically enough money for me for the rest of my life and then some to leave for my kids. Then I’ll consider being their as-white-as-we’re-made poster boy in some social media for a while.

Another happy Hetzner customer here. ~10 years so far, both for business and for personal use. 1€/month won’t happen, but they’re not that expensive either.

DNS PTR records belong to the entity who owns the IP addresses, you can’t make reverse records for arbitary addresses like you can with forward zones. I haven’t heard about any residential ISP which would give access to PTR records and even on business lines that’s usually a premium.

What you could do is to get a VPN service which gives you these options, if there is one, I don’t know. Most likely you’re looking for a VPS for that and tunnel traffic with some kind of VPN-setup to your local instance. And at that point you might as well run the whole thing on VPS unless you happen to need a ton of storage or some other reason makes pure VPS server too expensive.

Depends heavily on what you need/want. My current installation doesn’t have anything extra, mail and calendar with “standard” file storage (with sync agents on desktop/laptop) is well enough on what I use it for as my photos are in Immich instance.

Nextcloud offers practically everything you ask for besides the family tree and even that might be available as a plugin (or “App” as Nextcloud calls tem). Or if you’re willing to split photos in a different app, Immich works great.

I do it. Postfix+dovecot+spamassassin managed with ISPConfig running on a VPS. Works just fine, but my domains already have a long-ish good reputation so that may play a part on my experience. Biggest headache is to keep things running, which occasionally means jumping trough hoops microsoft(mostly) and others throw at you by flagging your server as spam for no apparent reason.

It’s quite likely that any given IP, unless you get one from shady VPS provider or something, is “clean”. And if it’s not it’s usually not that big of a deal to get it cleared from major blacklists (spamhaus, google and microsoft covers quite a lot). You just need to dig up proper forms to tell them that you’re a new owner of said IP and promise to play nice.

Same goes with domain names, but if you get a new one that’s a non-issue. Just set up SPF-records properly (and preferably DKIM/DMARC, but those aren’t strictly necessary and need a bit more than a single TXT-record) and you’re good to go.

And then you of course need to stay away from those lists. If you configure your SMTP to act as a open proxy you’ll be on every shitlist on the planet pretty quickly. So, reasonable measures against compromised account (passwords, firewalls, rate limits…) and against other threats (misconfigured/unsafe web service used for spam and stuff like that). Any of those alone are not too difficult to accomplish, but there’s quite a few things you need to get right.

I meant that I don’t know if these trash incinerators are managed properly. I’m well aware that in general there’s a crapload of unmanaged pollution and a ton of other problems around, but like every other country China is slowly improving their stuff so it’s not impossible that new plants would be up to modern standards.

It is possible to burn waste and manage the pollution in at least somewhat safe manner. Finland and Sweden do it reasonably well with high temperature furnaces and filtering the exhaust gases either with mechanical filter or trough water. That also (at least as far as I know) requires that you sort out the waste and don’t burn stuff like electronics, metals and some other crap which can be effectively recycled and manage whatever remains properly.

So, it’s possible, but I have absolutely no idea if China does that properly.

doesn’t just make it’s way back there?

Well, it kind of does, just like it did before. It’s just way too slow for us hairless monkeys to see it happening, we’re all gone well before that happens. Eventually some other lizard will crawl up to the land from the sea and maybe it’s a bit wiser than us.

Maybe easier to get anything runnin quickly. But it obfuscates a lot of things and creates additional layer of stuff which you need to then manage. Like few days ago there was discussion about how docker, by default, creates rules which bypass the “normal” INPUT rules on many (most?) implementations. And backup scenario is different, it’s not as straightforward to change configuration than with traditional daemon and it’s even more likely to accidentally delete your data as a whole.

As I already said, docker has its uses, but when you’re messing around and learning a new system you first need to learn how to manage the ropes with docker and only after that you can mess around with the actual thing you’re interested of. And also what I personally don’t really like is the mindset that you can just throw something on a docker and leave it running without any concern which is often promoted with ‘quickstart’-type documentation.

You absolutely can run services without containers and when learning and trying things out I’d say it’s even preferable. Docker is a whole another beast to manage and has a learning curve of it’s own.

Containers can of course be useful but setting everything up, configuring networking, managing possible integrations with other components (for example authentication via LDAP) it’s often simpler just to run the thing “in traditional way”. With radicale you can just ‘apt install radicale’ (or whatever you’re using) and have a go with it without extra layer of stuff you need to learn before getting something out of the thing. And even on production setups it might be preferred approach to go with ‘bare metal’, but that depends on quite a few variables.

On residential connections it’s a bit pain in the rear, but if you get VPS (or something similar) it’s perfectly manageable. You just need to maintain stuff properly, like having proper DNS records, and occasionally clear false positives from spam lists. The bigger issue is to have proper backups and precautions, I’ve hosted my own emails for over 10 years and should I lose all the data and ability to receive new messages it would be a massive personal problem.

“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

You really got to be a bootlicker to believe that our justice system isn’t available for purchase

It’s not in a sense that’s globally understood. Your Joe Average can’t just bribe their way out of anything. Political and other social cirles and generic cronyism is another matter, but even there currency is pretty often something else than money.

Oh I know, because he’s rich enough to pay off the judges

You really can’t pay off judges here. But if you can show that taking your license away would make things considerable difficult for you (like losing income) they’ll let you keep it on certain cases.