Thank you for the update!

I don’t see why we should restrict “regional” communities. Maybe when Lemmy gets bigger this can be done, but now, if creating more regional-specific communities bring more people to the Fediverse, I don’t see a problem. Surely you can enforce moderation standards if required?

There may be factors about solarpunk that for some reason only apply to regions, and supporting other languages might not be a bad idea surely? Ideas and good articles will bleed through to other communities eventually, surely?

hahaha! I just saw the story about it: https://www.boredpanda.com/obi-wan-kenobi-jesus-portrait-mormon-parents-prank/

“This is awful, but what can we do?”

er, I can think of a simple thing to do about it…

They could have been a bit more forceful in their response to a stupid idea…

I run OpenFire (https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/) as my server. Upgrades are easy, and I like the 2000-era interface as it doesn’t take up much room, but if I was starting from scratch again, maybe I would try a different server, as the way it deals with Lets Encrypt certs is a bit annoying when it’s time to renew - this could be user error, but it’s not obvious.

ejabberd having it’s built-in “certbot” equivalent sounds great!

I use Monocles (Android) and Dino (Linux) clients, and it’s pretty stable. Monocles also allows some server commands from the client, which is pretty cool. Sorting out TURN was a faff, but it doesn’t help that my server is behind 1:1 NAT I guess :/

Still, now that is sorted, it’s great :) I just need to find out a way of enticing my friends to use this instead of WhatsApp etc <sigh>

https://woof.tech/@Purple/115344050312673769 has some installed if you have questions, although they are in .nl rather than .de

Stability, good user interface. While I am technical and enjoy playing with bleeding edge stuff, it is a struggle to get “normies” to join yet another chat system if they aren’t as easy to use or reliable as signal/whatsapp. audio/video calls are also critical for most people I expect, if you want people to use it as a proper alternative.

My other half and I use monocles (used conversations originally, but had some slight annoyances). Both have a very nice interface, and are usually reliable. Now and again one of us doesn’t receive the others’ message, and I have no idea why, and it is it difficult to diagnose.

I only recently got my XMPP server to work through NAT properly for A/V calls, which took me ages to sort out, and the errors in the monocles interface were not helpful in diagnosing the problem.

Sometimes (rarely) monocles doesn’t reconnect properly and one of us doesn’t realise for a while, and then we get a flurry of messages once we reconnect. An easy way of telling when it’s not connected would be good - the little icon monocles has isn’t that obvious (esp now that android only allows white notification icons, which is really lame). Other chat systems seem to be more reliable in this regard.

I’m not sure if any of this helps, but best wishes with your project!

monocles will use stickers, and even (kinda) can import signal ones - I imported the mastodon ones recently, and they worked. Not tried any others.

yeah, welcome to the new order :(

ntfy is great!

Also i know some basics on raid but I’ve only ever messed with raid0 with usb drives on a pi. I have 8 bays but 2 are currently vacant. What is the process of just adding an extra drive to a raid, or replacing one that already exists?

It depends on your RAID controller (or software RAID). I use hardware RAID (on Dell and HP servers) as it’s easy and a known technology, although these days people seem to be anti-HW RAID a bit.

When replacing a drive, you just eject the old drive, wait a few seconds put the new drive in, and most HW RAID controllers will start automatically rebuilding the array. Make sure your controller and drive bays support “hot swap” first! With HW RAID, replacing drives is great, because you can increase the capacity over time, because you can replace each drive with a bigger model, and once the last drive has been swapped over, you can expand the array and start using the extra capacity without having to move data around. With HW raid, most servers have an “Out-Of-Band” system (iLO, iDRAC, IPMI) which you can configure to alert you if a drive has died (or is about to die).

I would recommend keeping at least 1 spare of the same model HD of whatever you use, just in case.

I got burned by having a WD drive fail, and WD were being assholes about sending me a replacement (it was under warranty). Before I got the replacement, another drive started dying, and I couldn’t afford to buy another drive. In the end I lost 12TB of data 😭

And re the above - “RAID is not a backup” :) plan accordingly…

For software RAID, most Linux OSes support it automatically. I only use it as it’s easy to expand partitions (most of my Linux machines are VMs on a system with HW RAID).

This might be a useful article https://www.howtogeek.com/40702/how-to-manage-and-use-lvm-logical-volume-management-in-ubuntu/ (with a link to a previous one which is an introduction), which explains a bit about SW RAID.

I rate OPNsense. I’ve not tried pfsense, but I use Enterprise-level firewalls daily. When you’re used to Palo Alto, Cisco or CheckPoint firewalls, it is a lot harder to use, and the interface isn’t great, and had fewer features, but for free (and cheap support if you need it), it’s pretty amazing. Upgrading to new versions is seamless, and once when something happened and it broken, I reinstalled it from the .ISO, uploaded my backed up .xml config file, and it was back to normal. It’s more than adequate to use for my home internet connection and all the services I run in my DMZ etc.

High Availability Boobs!

Thank you :)

I hope so - we have lots of rabbits to look after!

It’s a great series!

Looking at nature in our garden, helping my other half grow vegetables and herbs (not enough to ever be self-sufficient, but it feels nice to eat the results). Trying generate as much solar power as possible (which again, isn’t enough to be off-grid, but enough for an emergency). Watching our rabbits grow and interact with each other ❤️ Finding interesting people on the fediverse, and trying to get other people to try it (which isn’t very effective at the moment!)

Edit: We are watching Clarksons’ Farm, which is entertaining, but also raises important points about our food system.

Yes!

I recently installed @q4os@floss.social on an old laptop that could only run a 32bit OS and a max of 4GB RA, and it’s great. It has up to date packages for Firefox, LibreOffice, Dino (for XMPP), VLC etc

It isn’t my main computer, but it totally could be!

This had potential: https://github.com/adulau/Forban, and i tried it at a hacker festival soon after it was released, but sadly it is rather rudimentary and hasn’t been updated in over a decade, which is a real shame. I did try and contact the developer years ago with some bug reports, but heard nothing 😢

Secure connection failed :(

Yes, quite: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/23785/what-did-richelieu-mean-by-his-six-lines-quote