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Some news for XMPP: support MUC and anonymous login

Written by Simone

Simple instructions on how to join @wpn's XMPP server anonymously

More news on the previously announced bridge for support MUC: we got another bridge set up. This time around, IRC joins the ballet, so matterbridge is now bridging @wpn support MUC for 3 different protocols.. XMPP and MATRIX being the previous other two.

https://health.woodpeckersnest.space/

On this matter I was thinking about making a "tombstone" of the current XMPP MUC, which is called status and move to wpn - In fact that's the name of the MATRIX and IRC rooms. This is not really something I want to do soon, though, because it implies changing several things.

Last, but not least, I have also set up an anonymous VirtualHost in Prosody. You can now login to anon.woodpeckersnest.space with a disposable account (whose data gets deleted from the server as soon as the account is not connected anymore) and participate/discuss in @wpn MUCs - access to external servers is not permitted to anonymous users, for obvious security concerne.

You can follow the steps in this GIF to connect anonymously with Gajim; Dino should also support it but I don't know how it's done.. Finally if you want to join via Android, these are the instructions provided by Daniel Gultsch, from Conversations IM:

you can just add the account something@anon.woodpeckersnest.space with an empty password to #Conversations_im and it will login anonymously. Anonymous logins don't require registration. When I say 'something@anon...' you can use anything as that username. Doesn't matter (it's only used to get through the client side jid validation check)

TIP: If the server tells you can't join a MUC, make sure you have added a nickname in your profile's details (Android).

Notes

Written by Simone

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.

Revoke certificate:

certbot revoke --cert-path /etc/letsencrypt/archive/${YOUR_DOMAIN}/cert1.pem

Check certificate's expiry date:

cat /etc/letsencrypt/live/domain.tld/cert.pem | openssl x509 -noout -enddate

GIT

To reset your git repository to given commit id, do:

git reset --hard <commit-id>
git push origin master --force

Ignoring files that are already tracked

git update-index --assume-unchanged <your file here>

Delta Chat Mail sieve

require ["fileinto"];
# rule:[DeltaChat]
if header :contains "Chat-Version" "1.0"
{
	fileinto "DeltaChat";
	stop;
}

Postfix mail queue

To view postfix mail queue in case of problems and remove a particular message from it, do as follows:

# mailq

-Queue ID-  --Size-- ----Arrival Time---- -Sender/Recipient-------
6DCF32201B*    4824 Thu Oct 19 22:54:44  roughnecks@woodpeckersnest.eu
                                         debian@spacenet.it

-- 4 Kbytes in 1 Request.

# postsuper -d 6DCF32201B

postsuper: 6DCF32201B: removed
postsuper: Deleted: 1 message

To delete all emails in the queue, use this command:

# postsuper -d ALL

Check Preferred Outgoing IP (when multiple are set on <interface>)

curl ifconfig.me

The correct command to add a new Linux user (in this case without a shell)

adduser --shell /usr/sbin/nologin <username>

I always forget which command is the complete one, useradd or adduser

Downtimes

Written by Simone

It's been a few days now that I'm experiencing downtimes at night, early mornings.

When I wake up, connect to the VPS and attach to tmux, I am welcomed by these messages in console:

        Message from syslogd@pandora at Nov 3 05:37:13 ...
        kernel:[1586232.350737] Dazed and confused, but trying to continue

        Message from syslogd@pandora at Nov 3 05:37:24 ...
        kernel:[1586235.049143] Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason
        30 on CPU 1.

        Message from syslogd@pandora at Nov 3 05:37:24 ...
        kernel:[1586235.049145] Dazed and confused, but trying to continue

        Message from syslogd@pandora at Nov 3 05:37:55 ...
        kernel:[1586273.642163] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#2 stuck
        for 27s! [dockerd:526408]

        Message from syslogd@pandora at Nov 3 05:38:00 ...
        kernel:[1586278.545172] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#1 stuck
        for 24s! [systemd-journal:257]

        Message from syslogd@pandora at Nov 3 05:38:02 ...
        kernel:[1586281.187611] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#3 stuck
        for 35s! [lua5.4:1702]

There's no need to say that when this happens, the server is completely frozen and doesn't respond to anything.

I already contacted support, but they didn't investigate at all, I believe. They manually restarted my VPS once and did some pings and connection tests (VNC, SSH) afterwards.. "everything is working fine!"

This last Saturday I was up when it happened, so I did a mtr from my PC to the VPS's IP and logged it, then I sent another email with the output to support.. Still waiting for them to reply, I guess tomorrow (Monday).

Friends like lorenzo and shai are having difficulties too, with the same provider, so I'm not imagining things.

Well, that's all I got to say, will keep you posted if any news.

Night tinkering..

Written by Simone

I am most productive at night, when there is finally silence - apart from background music. The last couple hours of this Wednesday brought some nice additions to the @wpn support MUC:

  • chat is not XMPP only anymore, but it got bridged to Matrix, via "matterbridge".
  • a bot is now sending "BOFH excuses" to the chat, once a day.

XMPP MUC can be reached from: https://invite.woodpeckersnest.space/#status@chat.woodpeckersnest.space?join

Matrix room can be reached from: https://matrix.to/#/#wpn:matrix.org

Bridged chat means that everything being written in any of those rooms, gets relayed to the other by bots: there are in fact 2 bots connected to the 2 rooms, one is an XMPP bot and the other is a Matrix one, operated by "matterbridge", as I said earlier.

About "BOFH excuses", they are some fortune cookies from the relative Linux package, which are all about "Bastard Operators From Hell" excuses.. They are some short funny sentences about IT which an imaginary Operator (sysop, sysadmin, you name it) could say as excuse to justify issues.

Example?

BOFH excuse #266:
All of the packets are empty.

I have the same script running on gemini, at gemini://woodpeckersnest.space/cgi-bin/bofh

Basically it's some python spaghetti which runs the fortune command, does some formatting to the resulting text and sends it over gemini, or in the case of @wpn chat, over webhook to one other bot, which then posts its content to XMPP. It's more complicated to explain than do it 😀

P.S. @wpn support MUC is not publicly listed, so even if I'm posting links which may be used to join it, it should be treated as limited to @wpn users only.

gemlog