An average guy's IT (mis)adventures

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

prosodyctl shell

Launch the shell:

# prosodyctl shell

Delete pubsub node (the ">" sign at the beginning is important and also dangerous, as it lets you do anything!):

>prosody.hosts["pubsub.example.tld"].modules.pubsub.service:delete("blog", true)

Delete ALL pubsub nodes

>local service = prosody.hosts["pubsub.example.tld"].modules.pubsub.service; for node in pairs(select(2, assert(service:get_nodes(true)))) do service:delete(node, true); end

Check subscription by user:

>prosody.hosts["pubsub.example.tld"].modules.pubsub.service.subscriptions["user@example.tld"]

Change affiliation on pubsub nodes (make user owner):

>prosody.hosts["pubsub.example.tld"].modules.pubsub.service:set_affiliation("blog",true,"user@example.tld","owner")

Unsubscribe from node

>prosody.hosts["pubsub.example.tld"].modules.pubsub.service:remove_subscription("blog",true,"user@example.tld")

Subscribe to node

>prosody.hosts["pubsub.example.tld"].modules.pubsub.service:add_subscription("blog",true,"user@example.tld")

prosodyctl commands

Asking for help:

# prosodyctl shell help

List registered users:

# prosodyctl shell user list example.tld

List existing MUCs:

# prosodyctl shell muc list [component name]

Activate a component:

# prosodyctl shell host activate some.component.example.tld

Generate Invites: create a new invite using an ad-hoc command in an XMPP client connected to your admin account, or use the command line:

# prosodyctl mod_invites generate example.tld

Reset forgot passsword: "doesn't seem to work - see below"

# prosodyctl mod_invites generate example.tld --reset <USERNAME>

Automatic Certificates Import: prosodyctl has the ability to import and activate certificates in one command:

# prosodyctl --root cert import HOSTNAME /path/to/certificates

Certificates and their keys are copied to /etc/prosody/certs (can be changed with the certificates option) and then it signals Prosody to reload itself. –root lets prosodyctl write to paths that may not be writable by the prosody user, as is common with /etc/prosody. Multiple hostnames and paths can be given, as long as the hostnames are given before the paths.

This command can be put in cron or passed as a callback to automated certificate renewal programs such as certbot or other Let's Encrypt clients.

Import All:

# prosodyctl --root cert import /etc/letsencrypt/live

Reset forgot password

# prosodyctl install --server=https://modules.prosody.im/rocks/ mod_password_reset

Reload prosody configuration then use ad-hoc commands to generate a reset link for given JID

I was running 2 separate apps for shell/XMPP account registration at @wpn, so far..

This night I made some changes to the original code (provided by Schimon) and I got just one app with account choice - meaning that you must choose what account type you want in the form. Shell accounts are for friends only, as it's always been.

As a consequence of that, I shut down the old address for XMPP account onboarding and left only the main one, which is:

https://hello.woodpeckersnest.space/

gemlog

I'm always a bit busy when it comes to pandora (the VPS running WPN: woodpeckersnest.space/eu). I like experimenting new things, fixing/improving existing things.. I cannot stay still 😀

After migrating the homepage to homarr - which took really no time for the initial setup, but a lot of work afterward to fix layouts for mobile devices and non-full-hd screens for desktop PCs - I started messing up with a brand new toy: gemini!!

Not even a week since I installed molly-brown, the actual gemini server, to today, I can count lots of improvements..

• Installed terminal gemini browser client amfora for wpn's shell users and also gtl, a tinylog reader, always for the shell.
• Configured a local tinylog which groups together all wpn's capsuleer tinylogs, so it's easy to follow all of the local server users in one single place; the log is generated by gtl itself, refreshed and published every 5 minutes: can't miss a thing!
• Initially configured gemlog mentions starting from a script by @bacardi55, who is the author of many gemini-related things, like the before mentioned gtl software. When I realized it lacked multi-capsules support, I started modifying it and came up with some spaghetti code, which is working surprisingly well and it was deployed earlier today.

gemini@wpn

Onboarding on WPN didn't go as well as I thought, but at least the first user (hey, Mario, I'm looking at you! :) registered and, I believe, everything is working fine for them! On this topic, the onboarding page was migrated from PHP and Email to Python and XMPP, thanks to my friend Schimon! He also kept the UI pretty much intact, so I think most people who looked at it before and after, wouldn't even notice the changes under the hood.

https://hello.woodpeckersnest.space/

Something else I've been doing was setting up: https://invite.woodpeckersnest.space/

which is a landing page to allow people to join an XMPP MUC or add an XMPP contact from a web interface, which will also guide them in choosing a client for their platform. It's rather simple but very useful at the same time.

The chatmail server was upgraded (more or less) at the beginning of August and running smoothly so far; it got some cool new improvements like automatic account deletion after #amount of days from last login and lots of fixes. Total number of registered accounts, so far, is 117.

https://chatmail.woodpeckersnest.space/

Services which I dismissed include:

• Jitsi Meet (wasn't really using it and it was wasting quite a lot of resources just to be running)
• Isso comments service, which powered the old homepage contact section and also a shaarli instance, which is still running but it's more a private thing, rather than a public one.

One more proposition: from now on, I will be publishing these (B)log posts in both protocols, HTTP here as you're reading and gemini on roughnecks' gemlog. I will be probably publishing less often than usual though, at least in this format, and send more status updates through the tinylog on WPN, the microlog at Station and my fediverse account.

In the next days I will be monitoring how everything goes and relax a bit, if I manage.. Today I didn't feel so good after a few stressful days, too much computing and too less sleep hours - it's 01:40 AM right now, so yeah, tomorrow will be another of “those” days, I guess.

gemlog

Here are a few tweaks that make my "converse.js" experience better:

Remove link from banner: I accidentally used to click that and be teleported to converse.js official webclient, so I thought it could be misleading for unaware users using my locally hosted version of the software.

Search and replace/remove the href bit in converse.min.js, under the dist directory:

<a class="brand-heading" href="https://conversejs.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener">

In the "converse.min.css" file, search for this string and fill it with the following code to have unread MUCs underlined and colored in red:

.list-item.unread-msgs

.list-item.unread-msgs{font-weight:700; text-decoration: underline red;}

Fix color for toolbar-utilities when in 1:1 chats: find this line in "converse.min.css"

.fas:hover svg{fill:var(--chat-head-color)}

and replace with:

.fas:hover svg{fill:var(--chat-toolbar-btn-color)}

Raise minimum chat text area: find this bit in "converse.min.css"

min-height:var(--chat-textarea-height);

and replace with custom value in pixels, e.g.

min-height:120px;

Set a smaller line height for chats list: find the first occurrence of this code in "converse.min.css"

.conversejs .items-list .list-item

and continue until you find:

height:2.5em

substitute it with something like height:2.0em

Removing a space in quoted reply for "actions" plugin: find the following string in your conversejs/dist/plugins/actions/action.js

return ">" + nick + ' : '

remove the offending space

return ">" + nick + ': '

Changing from :smiley: to :thumbsup: emoji for the "Like" actions plugin function: find the following string in your conversejs/dist/plugins/actions/action.js

actions_reactions: [
                                    {name: 'like', label: 'Like', emoji: ':smiley:', icon_class: 'fa fa-check'},

and replace with:

actions_reactions: [
                                    {name: 'like', label: 'Like', emoji: ':thumbsup:', icon_class: 'fa fa-check'},

Fix background-color for screencast plugin icon: replace the class in row #25 in screencast.js

<button class="plugin-screencast"

<button class="btn"

E' attiva da poche ore la nuova community Italiana XMPP-IT.net. Alcuni riferimenti:

• sito web: https://www.xmpp-it.net/
• MUC: xmpp-it
• server Gitea: https://git.xmpp-it.net/

Venite a trovarci se conoscete di già XMPP ma soprattutto se non lo conoscete ancora: creare un account è facile e sicuro e se avete qualsiasi dubbio scrivete pure un'email ad "admin@xmpp-it.net" o lasciate un commento nel sito!

In XMPP you can have "hats"! A hat is basically a label next to your nickname which can show maybe a role you have in a particolar MUC (e.g. "teacher" for a class, "manager" for an office, or "developer" for a software project and so on..). The relative XEP is https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0317.html

The only client where this XEP seems to be manageable, is conversejs: https://m.conversejs.org/docs/html/configuration.html#muc-hats but Cheogram can show hats as well in the participant list.

There are a couple modules needed in prosody and you can install them like so:

prosodyctl install --server=https://modules.prosody.im/rocks/ mod_muc_hats_api
prosodyctl install --server=https://modules.prosody.im/rocks/ mod_muc_hats_adhoc

This is the adhoc command in conversejs to set a hat:

You need to specify a user JID, a room JID (on your server), a Hat title (the actual label you want to be shown) and a Hat URI (a machine-readable unique identifier, like 1111-2222-abcd - this is something you make up yourself)

And this is the final outcome