An average guy's IT (mis)adventures

Several months ago I was running a "matrix-docker-ansible" playbook on OVH, but limited resources led me to take it down.

More than one time I thought about reliving that server (which I have backups of), but reading on the changes that the playbook got so far and the difficulties in running a Matrix environment without exposing web ports (80 and 443), I thought to better give up.

Yesterday I looked into Dendrite (a Matrix server written in GO), which looks a lot simpler than the whole lot the docker-ansible playbook offers, so I went ahead and installed it the manual way with nginx as reverse proxy. Easy peasy - documentation is quite good.

Today I also installed "Cinny" as a web client and I'm done for the moment... Federation works, registrations are closed (can invite friends though) and apart from RAM peaks and quite long waiting times when joining rooms (up to 2K members), the server is doing quite well: started with 700MB of RAM (at joining time) and went down to less than 300 in normal usage. CPU gets high spikes when sending messages but other than that is just a few points %. Just don't even think to join the official #matrix room or shit will happen 😀

My new Matrix username is: @roughnecks:woodpeckersnest.space, feel free to add me.

Radicale

Descrizione

Radicale è un piccolo ma potente server CalDAV (calendari, elenchi di cose da fare) e CardDAV (contatti), che:

• Condivide calendari ed elenchi di contatti tramite CalDAV, CardDAV e HTTP.
• Supporta eventi, todos, voci del diario e biglietti da visita.
• Funziona subito, senza bisogno di complicate impostazioni o configurazioni.
• Può limitare l'accesso tramite autenticazione.
• Può proteggere le connessioni con TLS.
• Funziona con molti client CalDAV e CardDAV.
• Memorizza tutti i dati sul file system in una semplice struttura di cartelle.
• Può essere esteso con plugin.
• È un software libero con licenza GPLv3.

Requisiti/Installazione

Innanzitutto, assicurarsi che python 3.5 o successivo (si consiglia python ≥ 3.6) sia installato. Sarà poi necessario un web server come Apache o nginx; in questa guida verrà usato nginx e verranno installati pacchetti presenti in Debian, anziché usare "pip".

Documentazione Ufficiale

Installazione

# apt install radicale apache2-utils python3-passlib

Configurazione

# nano /etc/radicale/config

Cambiare le linee seguenti:

 [server]
 hosts = 127.0.0.1:5232
 
 [auth]
 type = http_x_remote_user

 [rights]
 type = owner_only
 file = /etc/radicale/rights

 [storage]
 type = multifilesystem_nolock

 [logging]
 level = info
 mask_passwords = True

 [headers]
 Access-Control-Allow-Origin = *

Ora possiamo avviare il servizio:

# systemctl start radicale.service
# systemctl status radicale.service

Per leggere i log, digitare:

# journalctl -xe -u radicale.service

Quando avremo sistemato tutto e Radicale funzionerà correttamente, potremo abilitare il servizio al boot:

# systemctl enable radicale.service

Reverse proxy

Esempio di configurazione di nginx:

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    server_name cal.woodpeckersnest.space;

    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/cal.woodpeckersnest.space/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/cal.woodpeckersnest.space/privkey.pem;

        error_log /var/log/nginx/radicale.err;
        access_log /var/log/nginx/radicale.log;

        add_header "X-XSS-Protection" "0";

    location / {
        return 301  /radicale/;
    }

    location /radicale/ { # The trailing / is important!
        proxy_pass        http://localhost:5232/; # The / is important!
        proxy_set_header  X-Script-Name /radicale;
        proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header  X-Remote-User $remote_user;
        proxy_set_header  Host $http_host;
        proxy_pass_header Authorization;
        auth_basic        "Radicale - Password Required";
        auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/radicale-users;
        }
}

server {
    listen 0.0.0.0:80;
    server_name cal.woodpeckersnest.space;

    location / {
        return 301  /radicale/;
    }

    location /radicale/ {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    }
}

la riga che recita:

auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/radicale-users;

ci indica che dovremmo creare il file a quel percorso con le credenziali degli utenti che vorranno usare il servizio.

Il comando per fare ciò è "htpasswd"

$ htpasswd -c /etc/nginx/radicale-users <nome_utente>

Una volta battuto enter vi verrà chiesta la password per l'utente <nome_utente> che avrete scelto ed il tutto verrà salvato nel file "/etc/nginx/radicale-users". Riavviate nginx per terminare.

Come potete vedere dal file di configurazione nginx, avrete bisogno di un sottodominio DNS e del relativo certificato (tutto ciò non è scopo di questa guida).

Abbiamo terminato: connettetevi al vostro sottodominio e dovreste poter accedere alla pagina di login di Radicale. Seguendo il file di configurazione nginx, per il mio caso il link sarà il seguente:

https://cal.woodpeckersnest.space/

Thanks to Zash and Jcbrand in the "Converse" MUC and a bit of hacking I was able to set up a few community plugins for my conversejs install as a prosody module.

Here's the configuration in /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua:

conversejs_resources = "/usr/local/lib/prosody/modules/mod_conversejs/dist"
conversejs_tags = {
        -- Load favicon
        [[<link rel="shortcut icon" href="https://woodpeckersnest.space/images/converse-js.ico">]];
        -- Load libsignal-protocol.js for OMEMO support (GPLv3; be aware of licence implications)
        [[<script src="https://cdn.conversejs.org/3rdparty/libsignal-protocol.min.js"></script>]];
        -- Load community plugins
        [[<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen" href="conversejs/dist/plugins/search/search.css" />]];
        [[<script src="conversejs/dist/plugins/actions/actions.js"></script>]];
        [[<script src="conversejs/dist/plugins/search/search.js"></script>]];
        [[<script src="conversejs/dist/plugins/search/jspdf.debug.js"></script>]];
        [[<script src="conversejs/dist/plugins/search/jspdf.plugin.autotable.js"></script>]];
        [[<script src="conversejs/dist/plugins/toolbar-utilities/toolbar-utilities.js"></script>]];
        [[<script src="conversejs/dist/plugins/screencast/screencast.js"></script>]];
}

conversejs_options = {
        locked_domain = "woodpeckersnest.space";
        auto_focus = true;
        view_mode = "fullscreen";
        allow_registration = false;
        auto_reconnect = true;
        reuse_scram_keys = true;
        muc_clear_messages_on_leave = true;
        clear_cache_on_logout = false;
        play_sounds = true;
        whitelisted_plugins = {"actions", "search", "toolbar-utilities", "screencast"};
}

You'll have to copy the plugins directories (actions, search etc..) in this path:

/usr/local/lib/prosody/modules/mod_conversejs/dist/plugins/

Then reload configuration and conversejs module or restart prosody.

Already found a bug in "toolbar-utilities" and haven't still had a chance to try the screencast plugin, but they look good for the most part.

Maybe I will add Jitsi Meet or Voice Chat at some point.. Not now though. ¹

EDIT: screencast is working alright, but not in the way you'd expect it. It's not a live streaming, instead it's a recording of your screen which gets uploaded once you stop the cast.. I wouldn't say it's perfect but not even bad.

¹ I've added them 😛

I was enabling Exim on my IONOS VPS to deliver email through a smarthost and encountered the error message in this post's title (unable to send to Gmail users.. It's always them!)

After fiddling a while with DMARK and SPF I reconfigured Exim itself to rewrite sender address, so that emails coming from "spacenest.it" (IONOS domain) were sent as coming from "woodpeckersnest.eu", the smarthost and real email server.

Everything is done via this command:

# dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

And the resulting configuration in /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf is:

dc_eximconfig_configtype='smarthost'
dc_other_hostnames='cassandra.spacenest.it;spacenest.it'
dc_local_interfaces='127.0.0.1'
dc_readhost='woodpeckersnest.eu'
dc_relay_domains=''
dc_minimaldns='false'
dc_relay_nets=''
dc_smarthost='pandora.woodpeckersnest.space::587'
CFILEMODE='644'
dc_use_split_config='false'
dc_hide_mailname='true'
dc_mailname_in_oh='true'
dc_localdelivery='mail_spool'

On OVH's postfix I just had to modify this line in /etc/postfix/main.cf:

mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 [::ffff:127.0.0.0]/104 [::1]/128 94.143.138.27/32

where that last IP is the IP Address of my IONOS server.