Good day everyone!

This weekend I've been restructuring "woodpeckersnest's" homepage.

The move was pretty huge since I went from a static #HTML plus some #JS site to homarr; it's taking quite a lot of RAM to run now, but the outcome is nice and I like it better than the old style - on mobile, at least on my crap smartphone, doesn't look very good, it needs quite a lot of pixels to perform alright (I hate phones btw, so it's still good for me).

Everything is WIP, but you can take a look at it anyway: https://woodpeckersnest.space

Please let me know if you find anything broken or not working properly. 😍

P.S. I have also upgraded our DeltaChat "chatmail" instance to latest and greatest 1.4.1 release - Thanks Federico for the hosting and Andrea for translations.

Come join us at https://chatmail.woodpeckersnest.space/

Beszel Setup

Interesting project at https://github.com/henrygd/beszel

Collects resource statistics from one or more systems, display CPU/RAM/DISK/NET/DOCKER information and be alerted in case "event" happens.

These days I set up beszel HUB on my VPS and beszel-agent on the same VPS, on our chatmail server and even on my desktop PC at home on WSL2: so now I'm monitoring 3 systems from a web interface and I'm being notified if one of them becomes unreachable or has exceeded %resources for every type of monitor.

This is my compose.yaml for the HUB and agent on "woodpeckersnest.eu":

services:
  beszel:
    image: 'henrygd/beszel'
    container_name: 'beszel'
    networks:
      beszel:
        ipv4_address: 172.30.0.2
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - '8090:8090'
    volumes:
      - beszel_data:/beszel_data
    environment:
      DISABLE_PASSWORD_AUTH: false

  beszel-agent:
    image: "henrygd/beszel-agent"
    container_name: "beszel-agent"
    networks:
      beszel:
        ipv4_address: 172.30.0.3
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
    environment:
      PORT: 45876
      KEY: "SECRET"
      FILESYSTEM: /dev/sda3
      
networks:
  beszel:
    name: "beszel"
    external: true

volumes:
   beszel_data:
       external: true
       name: "beszel_data"

I created a named docker volume and a custom network beforehand:

docker volume create --name beszel_data

docker network create --subnet=172.30.0.0/16 --gateway=172.30.0.1 beszel

I didn't want to run the agent with network_mode: host, so here's a bridged setup. Network stats on my VPS won't be relevant, since the only net beszel can monitor is the docker bridged one, but I don't care very much.

For chatmail and home desktop I'm running the binary agent, respectively in a systemd unit for chatmail and with a bash script for my PC.

The systemd unit looks like this:

# /etc/systemd/system/beszel-agent.service
[Unit]
Description=Beszel Agent Service
After=network.target

[Service]
Environment="PORT=45876"
Environment="KEY=SECRET"
ExecStart=/home/chatmail/bin/beszel-agent
User=chatmail
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The HUB has also got (automatic) backups, locally or on S3 - I tested both without issues. Beszel (both HUB and agent) take almost no CPU/RAM to do their job and stats are easy to read. Even the management tool is quite straightforward and has got the basic stuff right - I skipped OAUTH entirely though, while managing users manually.

Still young project but already recommended 😍

If you're interested in setting this up on WSL2, here I opened a discussion about this topic.. No need to repeat myself 😀

shout-out to "mforester@rollenspiel.social" who posted about beszel on the fediverse and gave me the idea to try it.

Thunderbird filelink with self-hosted webdav

Me and friends on xmpp:lozibaldone@conference.xmpp-it.net?join had a discussion about big attachments in Thunderbird and one person ("idice"), which I thank, suggested to use (long forgotten by me) Thunderbird's "filelink" functionality.

filelink lets you upload your big attachments to the cloud and send a link to download them, to your email contact. For it to work, you have to download an extension for Thunderbird and choose a cloud instance.

There are a few in the community, ranging from Dropbox, to Nectcloud and webdav. I chose webdav, because I already have a docker container with a running instance.

The tricky part in setting the extension up and working with my server was to have a private and a public URLs: you have credentials for webdav, so the private one is easily accomplished, while I had never thought about having a public site to share stuff without authentication; and in the end it was really straightforward.

What I did was basically: mount a volume in docker where I want to publish stuff to be shared. So at first when uploading I'm asked for credentials and everything just works.. files go to the volume.

Then, to have people access those files, I simlinked (ln -s) the docker volume dir to a path under my main site's virtualhost in nginx. Like:

My site is in /var/www/html/, so I changed dir to that location and:

ln -s /path/to/public-docker-volume/ public

Now I have a /public/ dir in my website with all the files that I publish in webdav and since index is off in nginx, you can't just browse it - you have to know the exact file name to access it.

And that's it.

Now for the Thunderbird setup, I'll show a few shots. For starters, this is the extension I used: https://addons.thunderbird.net/it/thunderbird/addon/filelink-provider-for-webdav/

This is the "attachments" settings in Thunderbird, the only place where you configure the extension:

As you can see it asks for a private and a public URLs, as explained before.

When you compose a new message, go to the attachments menu as always and you'll find a new item, called Filelink - WebDAV:

Click it and select your attachment from disk. It will ask for a username and password (those you set up for webdav in docker) and will begin uploading the file.

Then you'll see the message being populated like this:

It says:

I have linked 1 file to this email:

• mibunny.png

  Size: 408 KB

  Link: the link

If you keep uploading files, the number in the first row will be automatically incremented and there will be another file section with new info about it.

And.. we're done!? 😀

If you got any question, leave a comment down below.