@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

jrenken

@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net

Mastodon Sandwich maker. Site Reliability Engineer at Let's Encrypt. Retired attorney. Disclaimer maintainer.

Opinions are my own. Please don't take legal advice from the Internet!

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

piofthings, to random
@piofthings@mastodon.social avatar

So I stuck cloudflare in front of all my sites and I am feeling terribly icky about it, because I seem to have lost control of my https certificates. Wonder if Letsencrypt will ever work again because I stupidly set https only and I can't find where to disable the setting. Oh well, Mastodon, let's see if you can ddos me.
https://piofthings.net/blog

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@piofthings Not to worry, Let’s Encrypt should keep working. Our validation doesn’t recognize HSTS, in order to avoid this chicken-and-egg problem.

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

please tell me the most obscure joke you know

(feel free to explain or not explain it, depending on what you find more amusing to think of me reading it)

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@whitequark
A linguist once thought it a farce
That memory space was so sparse
One day they increased it
Said he, as he seized it,
“At last, enough core for the parse.”

reassuringurl, to random
@reassuringurl@hachyderm.io avatar

what's everyone using for web hosting these days? I have some dumb game projects I need a VPS for and would like to spend very little. any suggestions?

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@reassuringurl For stuff that won’t fit on my @sandwich colo infra, I prefer: mostly Vultr; for EU presence, CloudSigma; for cheap DDoS protection, OVH.

april, to random
@april@macaw.social avatar

TIL of the bad.horse traceroute

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@april I’m glad you enjoyed it. 😁 I really need to rewrite the backend soon to be compatible with modern kernels.

NinjaDebugger, to random
@NinjaDebugger@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@jrenken Looks like sandwich webmail went down, just after 6:30 AM Central.

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@NinjaDebugger Fixed, sorry about that! You can thank Anthropic’s ClaudeBot for scraping multiple sites so aggressively that it filled MySQL’s max connections.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

What is the best solution for getting a consistently up-to-date version of node on an Ubuntu server?

In the past I have been very happy with nvm in the "I am a developer installing a copy of node just for invoking in my user account" but now I'm discovering nvm… only works in that configuration, and considers "multiple users" as permanently outside the scope of what they will intentionally support. This is awkward in a server configuration.

https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm/issues/1533#issuecomment-424924488

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@mcc I second other folks’ recommendation of NodeSource but caveat: make sure to subscribe/watch for announcements. They sometimes stop version support or move a repo, but leave the old un-updated repo around as if it’s healthy.

Sharksonaplane, to random
@Sharksonaplane@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

Kind of wish when you blocked someone, the little "make a personal note about this profile" window would pop up so you can remember what the reason was later. This grump isn't just about fedi for once because afaik no social media has cracked this, and I'm not techy enough to know if it's an easy fix or not.

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@Sharksonaplane Mods have this! It would be great for everyone.

NinjaDebugger, to random
@NinjaDebugger@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@jrenken Sammich webmail seems to be down.

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@NinjaDebugger Fixed - sorry about that, and thanks for the ping!

jrenken, to random
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

I'm so out of touch with modern anime that a cosplay masquerade ball is just a nani soirée.

Sharksonaplane, to random
@Sharksonaplane@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

I've RTed several similar sentiments but I just want to say specifically that I really appreciate my old friend and instance admin @jrenken for knowing his shit so well that while I obviously believe and know of the spam issues going on from other people sharing their experiences, I've been fortunate not to see it myself so far.
(I also haven't been online much so that also helped. But our admin still rocks!)

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@Sharksonaplane Aw, thank you! TBQH, we've just been very lucky; I haven't yet had to do much. More skilled and dedicated instance admins than me have spent their entire long weekends, and more, on this.

jrenken, to random
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

will suspend federation with qoto.org on Monday, due to a harassment campaign by its admin. I'm posting this advance notice because our instances have some mutual follow(er)s; unfortunately, the suspension will break those connections. I regret the inconvenience.

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@NinjaDebugger Hmm, there may be a more elegant way to do it, but the simple way is to search through here real quick: https://mastodon.sandwich.net/relationships

rtyler, to random
@rtyler@hacky.town avatar

Once upon a time I was developing a concept which was basically NPR for open source project infrastructure.

By operating infra and selling it back to foundations and companies, actual people could be employed to run this stuff at scale.

That could also fund free tier services for the long tail of small projects.

Or we could stick to our current model of burnt out infra maintainers, foundations paying small potatoes to contractors, and rapidly evaporating free cloud credits.

That's cool too

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@rtyler Yes! I would absolutely love to have a cloud provider that’s organized as a co-operative.

jrenken, to random
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

I am limiting federation between and mastodon.world for the next 7 days, as they have not been suspending CSAM-themed spam accounts timely or effectively. @mwadmin

NinjaDebugger, to random
@NinjaDebugger@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@jrenken any particular reason I'm suddenly seeing "Preview not available, click to open" on 99% of images in my feed?

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@NinjaDebugger Looks like Sidekiq got too busy and fell over. Should be fixed, and I'll look into a long-term solution. Thanks for the ping!

karlauerbach, to random
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

Just had one of our web servers blocked by proofpoint.com.

Why? They didn't say, they did not even inform us.

We don't spam, nor has this machine been taken over (at least not that we are aware.)

This is, to my legal mind, a form of business defamation.

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@karlauerbach Please no. Please don’t throw that around lightly out of frustration. Defamation is not a good match for blocklists, which are IMO (among many other arguments) profoundly well-suited to qualified privilege, unless operated in bad faith.

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@karlauerbach I sympathize with your problem statement, even as I disagree with your conclusion. I've jumped through many hoops with Microsoft's aggressive email blocking, and my job's infra is often blocked when people fail Malware Behaviour 101.

But this space is SO adversarial. Attack infra is enormous and constantly in flux. Blocking new infra is time-critical. Attackers will maximally lie to, delay, manipulate, and DoS any mechanism exposed to them. (1/2)

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@karlauerbach For these reasons, though appeals could & should be better, I sympathize with the list operators too.

I delegate decisions to blocklist operators, knowing there will be false positives, because the alternative is unthinkable. I don't want to see the door opened any further to SLAPP suits by spammers and "how dare you call our search hijacker a Potentially Unwanted Program, we provide valuable offers."

That said, @jonathanezor has written on this and seems to agree with you. (2/2)

Tarah, to random

Dear Internet: are there good attorneys who have built a practice around assisting student loan victims when they can’t get straight answers from their debt holders?

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@Tarah Yes! I would start by looking for graduates of Joshua Cohen's workshop: https://thestudentloanlawyer.com/workshop-graduates/

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@Tarah Which state(s)? I retired from law practice a few years ago, but might still know someone (at least by reputation).

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@Tarah Hmm, I don't know anyone on the WA list myself, but @Vrimj might.

jrenken, to random
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

update: We're now running FediFetcher (https://github.com/nanos/FediFetcher) and have joined some relays, so you'll hopefully be seeing more context, from a broader section of the fediverse, in posts' replies.

NinjaDebugger, to random
@NinjaDebugger@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

It seems like my masto server has preemptively defederated threads, and this is why @jrenken is one of my favorite people.

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@NinjaDebugger It's a server-wide setting, and I found this to be a pretty good explanation: https://hub.sunny.garden/2023/06/28/what-does-authorized_fetch-actually-do/ I'd consider it but the tradeoffs don't currently seem appealing.

jrenken,
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

@NinjaDebugger Yeah, a lot of the issues around this part of the Threads controversy go back to the debates around searching/indexing on the fediverse. And my feelings about that are that no war against Web scrapers is winnable, however noble.

jrenken, to random
@jrenken@mastodon.sandwich.net avatar

Congrats to Western Digital for somehow making SSDs that are less reliable than HDDs, and diagnostic utilities that borrow all the worst parts of Linux UI programming but don't run on Linux.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • provamag3
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • cisconetworking
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • Durango
  • thenastyranch
  • Youngstown
  • rosin
  • slotface
  • mdbf
  • khanakhh
  • tacticalgear
  • JUstTest
  • everett
  • modclub
  • Leos
  • cubers
  • ngwrru68w68
  • ethstaker
  • osvaldo12
  • GTA5RPClips
  • anitta
  • megavids
  • normalnudes
  • tester
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •