Archive of 2025 | An average guy's IT (mis)adventures

August 2025

All blogs look alike

All blogs look alike Static site generators often converge to similar looking results because they share design patterns, tooling, and default themes. -- chatgpt "Visuals are not so important" - you may argue. I cannot agree, because when I am about to read someone else work which gives me the impression to be the same style of the previous 5 person's blogs I read, well.. it feels like there is no effort behind creating your own space. And that "impression" is basically given by "wall of white text on grey background, with some headers to divide content". And i know that because even after having chosen a theme for my personal site, powered by hugo, I now see it as a mere copy/paste and I don't like it very much anymore. Mine has no blog posts, just static pages, but I'll think about moving away from hugo, zola, jekyll etc, or try to - at least - restyle it. ATM I only changed some colors and maybe a few other insignificant particulars, because having it…

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July 2025

Permanent link to “@wpn social space launched 🎊”
CardDAV group sync

I opened this issue on RCMCardDAV GitHub repo thinking it was a bug of them, while it turned out it was just ignorance (on my side). TL;DR: To make a long story short, if you want to sync groups of contacts, using a CardDAV address book, make sure that every client/sync application is using the same format to store groups. This applies to e.g. roundcube, with the plugin of this post's link, DAVx^5 sync app, and generally each client which supports CardDAV. rcmcarddav settings in roundcube DAVx^5 settings (it's in Italian, sorry. The difference between group types is the same as above though) Before setting DAVx^5 to the correct option, groups created on roundcube won't sync correctly to my phone, while the other way around worked fine.

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June 2025

ntfy service

ntfy service ntfy ntfy lets you send push notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, using simple HTTP PUT or POST requests. I use it to notify myself when scripts fail, or long-running commands complete. With the newly installed “ntfy” service, You, as a @wpn user, have access to any topic you may need, with read and write permissions. I am going to send an email to each (shell/email) user account soon, with credentials. “xmpp” users feel free to request access to me, personally or by writing a message here. For all other interested people, we have set a public topic up, which you can subscribe to, if you like, to be notified about @wpn services status: wpn-status, precisely 😀 and also another topic, to follow xmpp-it services status: xmpp-it-net What can I do with it? Usage examples are all explained in the doc. In short, you currently can: Send only text (anyone said emotes!?) Send text and attachments (like images) Send a notification to an…

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Permanent link to “email autoconfiguration with connected services”
event-driven…

The past 2 weeks I spent some time configuring tailscale: think of it as your own personal, invisible, and very secure "home-lab" on the internet where only your trusted devices can connect and share information. But, since it uses wireguard under the hood, and I had already set it up on my VPS - see post1 and post2 - I thought! “Why can't I just do this myself, without relying on a third-party service?” So, first of all I did a quick test, by sending some text to a “termbin” service (it's like a pastebin but for shells) I run on my VPS. I set it to listen only on the wireguard interface, then activate the wireguard tunnel on my desktop PC at home, opened a shell and sent the following: echo “termbin test” | nc 172.16.100.1 9999 It worked like a charm, so I immediately started thinking about the whole home-lab thing. And here I am, connected and happy. ..read more

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May 2025

rsnapshot Debian…

**rsnapshot** is a filesystem backup utility for Unix-like systems that uses rsync and hard links to efficiently create incremental snapshots. It stores backups in dated directories, minimizing disk usage by linking unchanged files. Designed for automation, it supports local and remote backups via SSH. apt install rsnapshot /etc/rsnapshot.conf config_version 1.2 # executables paths on your system cmd_cp /bin/cp cmd_rm /bin/rm cmd_rsync /usr/bin/rsync cmd_ssh /usr/bin/ssh cmd_du /usr/bin/du # type and number of snapshots to execute retain alpha 7 #7 snaps, one per day retain beta 2 #2 snaps, one per week retain gamma 1 #1 snap montly verbose 2 loglevel 3 logfile /var/log/rsnapshot.log lockfile /home/roughnecks/rsnapshot.pid # where to save your snapshots snapshot_root /mnt/backup/ # rsnapshot won't create the "root" folder of your backups. Create it yourself no_create_root 1 # global short rsync args (feel free to adjust) rsync_short_args -avz # uses hard links (keep this…

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XBackBone Android…

Mostly a personal reminder about this cool way to share files on an XBackBone instance, like sharer github issue App Download the .txt attachment. Edit the example TXT, add your token to "TOKEN HERE" and your domain to "DOMAIN.HERE". Rename it to .json extension. Download the app. Open it and click the dots on the upper right. Select "Import / Export". Select import from file, and select the JSON file.

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self hosting is a…

I've had my hands full in the last few weeks.. let's see what's new for @wpn First of all, I removed some #DNS records (and related services), namely: laltrowiki (our (me and old friends) wiki didn't really fit with @wpn - I'm keeping it for myself) trilium (note-taking app which I kept on @wpn, but was only personal.. Now it's hosted at home) grocy (pantry/shopping aid app, same as trilium above) Have upgraded plugins for roundcube #webmail and FreshRSS, #RSS reader. Main services are always up-to-date, while these were some additions due from time to time. Have done some tinkering with this blog's and xmpp-it homepage's #sqlite DBs: if you're interested, follow here Have installed and then removed 2 #gemini to #html #proxies, because I believe the one I've been (and still am) using so far, is the best one. I also tweaked its stylesheet a bit. The two proxies I tried are september and kineto, while the one currently in use is loxy I have first upgraded uptime-kuma to V2 Beta but then…

Permanent link to “self hosting is a serious matter - but fun”

April 2025

Permanent link to “@wpn fedi instance updated”
Pimped up!

It's officially pimped!! Can't believe the time I spent fixing "homarr" progressive layout, almost breaking at each smallest change. New @wpn's home is running "glance" and the whole site is just 1 .yml file, plus some custom CSS rules and assets (images). Took me ~2 evenings to set it up and it's looking quite good, in my opinion. It's light (actually it's dark-only 😀 ), fast, fully featured. Unfortunately, you always have to touch it first hand to understand the wrong choices and remedy them; better late than never though!

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aerc console email…

Hello, this is going to be a little how-to configure aerc (a console mail client) in your @wpn shell - applies to other shells / mail servers as well, but it will be tailored for @wpn users. aerc configuration is interactive as soon as you start it for the first time, but it will store your mail password in clear text inside ~/.config/aerc/accounts.conf file. We want instead to use the standard Unix password manager, pass, to encrypt it. First you need a GPG key, which will be used to encrypt imap/smtp passwords. There are 2 ways: Import an existing private key Create a new keypair on @wpn and use that Let's start: $ gpg-connect-agent /bye # initializes the gpg-agent If you see the following lines (you should), everything is good. gpg-connect-agent: no running gpg-agent - starting '/usr/bin/gpg-agent' gpg-connect-agent: waiting for the agent to come up ... (5s) gpg-connect-agent: connection to agent established GOTO 1) to import an existing key GOTO 2) to create a new key GOTO 3) when…

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March 2025

Late March News

Hello! Last "real" post was about 2 months ago.. I got busy with stuff at home but also made a lot of adjustments here and there at @wpn. Let me list the most important ones: Set up shell and email users' homes backup: archives are still stored on the VPS for the time being, till when I'll find another proper backup location. Cleaned up /var/www/ and nginx virtualhosts; also removed "Shaarli", since I wasn't really using it anymore. Added a new board on the main site for BitTorrent, reachable here Upgraded XMPP Prosody server to 13.0.0 and isolated anon webchat even more, so that those users won't be able to connect to Biboumi IRC gateway. Upgraded all #slixmpp powered bots to 1.10, released only yesterday Formatted (again) the 2 pdf files regarding @wpn's Term of Use and Privacy Notice (no rules updates though) I think that's about it.. probably 😀 I'm definitely forgetting something. Some other news: a few new users joined XMPP and more than a few logged…

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Notes

I'll update this post whenever I see fits, A.K.A. when I have other bits of information which don't require a whole post. Operations on files and directories Move files to the current/parent directory in Linux Current dir find . -type f -exec mv {} . \; Parent dir find . -type f -exec mv {} .. \; Recursive chmod on files and dirs To change all the directories to 755 (-rwxr-xr-x): find /var/www/blog -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \; To change all the files to 644 (-rw-r--r--): find /var/www/blog -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \; Certbot Certbot cli /etc/letsencrypt/cli.ini When renewing, use the same private key as the existing certificate. (default: False): reuse-key = True Common commands Register single domain: certbot certonly --standalone -d domain.tld --dry-run Remove “–dry-run” when ok. Renew single domain: certbot renew --cert-name domain.tld --dry-run Remove “–dry-run” when ok. Delete single domain: certbot delete --cert-name domain.tld Cannot use "--dry-run" in this case…

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February 2025

Permanent link to “More stickers.. and pins!!”

January 2025

Busy Days, Exciting…

Busy Days, Exciting Progress 🚀 It’s been a couple working months, busy and sometimes hard but in the best way possible! For starters, today the "GD" website went officially online, after we completed its migration from ZOPE to Wordpress and I couldn't be happier 😉 Another thrilling update is with COMMutiny, our social network project. The converse.js anonymous chat, originally set up for @wpn’s support room, has now found its own space within COMMutiny. This is a big step forward, and we’re inviting everyone interested in #XMPP, gaming, and social networks to join the conversation, anonymously or not. On top of that, we’ve launched a brand-new freelance website, powered by Hugo. It’s sleek, fast, and everything we hoped it would be — hooray for #Hugo! If you’re passionate about decentralized communication, gaming communities, or just want to connect with like-minded folks, we’d love to see you in COMMutiny! See you soon 👋

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Permanent link to “Anonymous (Support) WebChat”