unlike stoat which requires to apply to be able to contribute which is suspicious for a supposed open source software.

They’re doing it because they require a Developer Certificate of Origin from contributors in order to mitigate legal liability. Which is probably smart, it’s good to cover your bases when you take on the likes of Discord, who would love to be given an opening to sue and/or obtain a cease & desist on copyright grounds.

Probabilistic scrabble isn’t going to cure shit.

To be more exact, if probabilistic approach could have found the cure for something, it has found it by now.

Breakthroughs typically require a new way of thinking about the problem, not throwing more brute force at it.

Apple wouldn’t have survived the 90’s because, ironically, Microsoft saved them from bankruptcy.

At this point a deathblow would be a kindness for the Halo franchise.

FWIW I’ve tried all the major CLI tools for cert renewal (certbot, lego, acme.sh) and certbot was by far the easiest to use. The others were various shades of horrible – bad documentation, obscure error messages, you name it. Wish I had tried certbot first and not wasted my time.

You can find the magical incantations online and coax them to work eventually but they made me wonder if that’s the kind of tool I want to trust with my cert renewal. Also I’m starting to think it’s not a coincidence that other tools like NPM bundle certbot (as opposed to something else).

The dirs are subdirs of /srv/letsencrypt. I like to take advantage of explicit dir assignment if the software allows it, so I don’t have any surprises if the defaults change.

ROOT=/srv/letsencrypt
SECDIR="${ROOT}/secrets"
CFGDIR="${ROOT}/config"
LOGDIR="${ROOT}/logs"
TMPDIR="${ROOT}/tmp"

for DIR in "$SECDIR" "$CFGDIR" "$LOGDIR" "$TMPDIR"; do
        mkdir -p "$DIR"
done

cd "$ROOT"

... then venv activate and run venv certbot ...

Just keep in mind that HAProxy is only a proxy (technically a performance-oriented load-balancer). It’s not a web server.

I mention it because some of us also rely on our reverse proxy to serve small static webpages for various purposes (I serve a small status page generated by a cron script, for example).

I’m also using Certbot with DeSEC. I simply run it daily with anacron. If it doesn’t need to renew the certs yet it will say so and stop. That’s basically it.

I think it’s a very good idea for your LE renewal to be independent of whatever reverse proxy or web server you’re using.

Please keep in mind that Certbot is a Python app so you can manage it with venv. Here’s how I install it in a dedicated dir (let’s say /srv/letsencrypt because using /etc is not appropriate and it bugs me 😆):

#!/bin/bash
set -e
apt install python3-venv
/usr/bin/python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install --upgrade certbot certbot-dns-desec

And to update it:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
source .venv/bin/activate
python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install --upgrade certbot certbot-dns-desec

As for renewing certs (the script is longer, I’m making sure to create dirs and so on but this is the gist of it):

source .venv/bin/activate

./.venv/bin/certbot \
--config-dir "$CFGDIR" \
--logs-dir "$LOGDIR" \
--work-dir "$TMPDIR" \
--domain "${DOMAIN}" \
--domain "*.${DOMAIN}" \
--authenticator dns-desec \
--dns-desec-credentials "${SECDIR}/${DOMAIN}.ini" \
--non-interactive --agree-tos \
--email "$EMAIL" \
certonly

openssl x509 -text -in "${CFGDIR}/live/${DOMAIN}/fullchain.pem" |\
grep -e 'Not Before' -e 'Not After'

For DeSEC you need secrets/${DOMAIN}.ini to contain:

dns_desec_token = YOURTOKENHERE

Please note that DeSEC lets you restrict what the token can do, but setting the rights on the token has to be done through their API so you need a separate token for the API 😅.

To use the certs from Caddy, point it at the files under the config/live/${DOMAIN}/ dir (which are symlinks that are maintained by Certbot), NOT the ones under archive/.

tls /path/to/certbot/config/live/example.com/fullchain.pem /path/to/certbot/config/live/example.com/privkey.pem

Or, if you want to also add mTLS to the mix:

tls /path/to/certbot/config/live/example.com/fullchain.pem /path/to/certbot/config/live/example.com/privkey.pem {
    client_auth {
        mode verify_if_given # or whatever access mode you want
        trust_pool file /path/to/custom/ca.pem
    }
}

Let me know if you have questions.

you do not want a DE for your server

While that’s technically true, in some cases you might want a graphics stack after all. For example if there’s a TV nearby you can get some cool benefits from being able to output directly to it.

But I agree that starting with a desktop distro is probably not the way to achieve it.

Y’know I’ve often wondered that, but authoritarian propaganda seems to have a penchant for keeping its statements plausible. I mean they could take the piss and say it was 500% and it would be just as well. I’m guessing there’s some psychological benefit to be had from keeping it “real”, gives the rubble some kind of logic to cling to?

It does matter, just not the way you might think. Voting in dictatorships is basically a submission ritual.

You joke but behind the Iron Curtain the dictators used to win “elections” with something like 98% of votes. “See, we have some malcontents but they’re a tiny minority.” It was all doctored of course but it’s funny that they bothered to keep it believable when everybody knew the truth, both inside the country and elsewhere.

IRC supports TLS encryption. Many large networks don’t actually have it enabled or use self-signed certs because they still think it’s the 1990’s, but if you make your own server you can use TLS just fine.

If you’re satified you’re probably not missing much.

Most of the Arch-based distros have found a niche of their own and most of them try to offer varying levels of help to the user to sweeten the Spartan experience of vanilla Arch.

Some of them like Endeavour try to keep the interference minimal, they offer some presets and some theming and an installer and stop there.

Distros like Cachy and Garuda are somewhere in the middle, with some quality of life stuff such as graphical package installers, and some custom packages, and streamlined driver install.

A distro like Manjaro or SteamOS takes it to the extreme with a “mommy knows best” setup that only bears a tenuous resemblance to vanilla Arch anymore, and you have to leave it alone to work as intended.

Oh man, I had to go way down in the comments to find a Manjaro fight. I even saw a fight over Mint on my way here. Mint, ffs.

WTF I though Manjaro was the black sheep of the Arch family.

Splitter!

The main limitation in a 1U chassis is the size of the heatsink + fan. They’re typically 80x80mm width/length, and the height is very small. You get 45mm for the whole case so you have to work with a slim (15mm) 80x80 fan and a tiny heatsink that’s 10mm or so. So they have to work at 5000rpm and put out 60dB of noise but even so they’re typically only rated for 80-100W.

I other words I really don’t think it’s worth bothering for a 250W draw. If you can get a 2U space yeah, that gives you much better cooling options.

Don’t even suggest it to the datacenter people. They will laugh at you.

Ok to clarify, I mean if Occulus devs want to publish their games to Steam, they can. But Valve won’t add anybody’s games for them to Steam.

Don’t all the games have to be uploaded to Steam by their rightful developer?