Alright, folks, this is the October nineteenth, 2023 meeting of the St. Louis Linux users group.
And Gary managed to. Pnwinkle Ken Johnson to present a whole bunch of short snippets based on many many years of system and work so are you gonna do something Spanish?
We turn it over to Ken right away.
Now, let's go through here and this real quickly about us, sentence or 2. This screening is usually 8 days after the slug general meeting and it may either be the second or third Thursday of the month and it was found as a special interest group.
The slug and It's supported by slug email and the web support. All of our meetings are free and open and public.
There's no individual. All of our meetings are free and open and public. There's no individual meeting.
Membership fee. First. Arrival time from 6 to 6 30 is for people to test the chat.
And their microphones and sound and screen sharing and all that. The meeting. We try to start at 6 30.
With introductions announcements in the call for help so forth. Then we go into the at some point go into the actual presentation, which hopefully has something really nice to learn about after the meeting discussions can continue.
We don't have to shut down the meeting right away and people can also come later on on our mailing list and people can also come later on on our mailing list and ask questions.
This is a recorded session. That'll be available a few days. Up on our site.
James Conroy is the chairman. Gary C. MC and he's Not here Lee, you're the host and you might say a sentence or 2 about yourself.
And your omni-tech.
I wear a keep and I like hot tubs.
There you go. And I'm Stan Reichardt and I do the production on a lot of this behind the scenes button pushing and so forth.
Tonight's speaker is going to be Ken Johnson. This topic is gonna, well, he's gonna have a mix of technical topics.
For announcements, just a reminder from folks that day daylight savings time in Sunday, 5 November.
This has been this cybersecurity awareness month. The question is, what have you done?
Our plan on doing about it?
And yeah. And we could go in, to our next up, our call for help session.
And maybe something, a few more things after that, then the presentation. Anybody have? A question or a call for help? There's a real problem.
They would like to throw at the group and maybe get some some ideas on how to fix it
The floor is open.
This is Ken Johnson.
Yes, Ken.
I would like. A. I would like a suggestion for a L cost.
Minimal configuration for someone who's familiar with it being with, Debian Linux.
System that will. Splay a static web page.
You mean like a kiosk thing? .
Basically, yeah, I. I would like to display a particular web page that's all I need to have this system do.
You know, the thoughts that came to my mind was to Trying to find a low cost raspberry pi system
And, you know, ideally. You know, I would like to have this be as. Turnkey is possible so it'd be nicer not to need to assemble the board in the case in the power supply and what not.
So any suggestions?
Well, if you wanna pie, I've got plenty of I'm laying around here just put it in the case and hanging on HDMI cable and plug it in a wall.
Now does this need to be up on the internet or does it need just to be a kiosk summer?
No, no, it's going to be. Only connected to a customer's internal network.
What about any interaction or is it just? Display page.
Okay.
Just display a page. There's there'll be a way for that page to get updated. But that doesn't have anything to do with.
You know, it's display. So obviously I'll have to set it up so that I can.
SSH into it, but you know. That's understand how to do that.
Sure. Yeah, Pi is excellent solution. You talk in Wi-Fi or wire.
Is your network connection Wi-Fi or cable?
You know, it could probably go either way.
Okay, cable would be the best in which case you can get by with a pie too
And, Probably take a, well, let's see, you'll have to run X on it, so.
Yeah, 3 probably be better.
You'll need X in a browser.
Oh!
Yeah, no big deal. Your biggest cost can be whatever monitor you want.
It turns out the monitor is something my customer already has.
Hey, Okay.
Yes. Yeah. Basically, the monitor is their old conference room monitor. I recently spec, you know, a replacement for that, which is so far working out really, really well.
But the lead project manager.
Would like to have. A continually displaying.
Status of some.
Some really basic project that project metrics.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I mean.
I mean, we're, you know, really basic. Stuff, you know, nothing complicated, just really basic stuff.
And
Just pull a web page on or set the refresh for 10 s or 30 s, whatever you want.
In this case, you know, an hour and a half would probably be plenty.
All right, who's talking?
Bye. Bye. Okay. Yes.
It looks like Gary's on the phone.
Yeah, he appears to be muted.
Okay. No, that was probably, Ed. You did in here.
I don't know.
Hello, that sounds like his reader that he uses.
Oh
No, don't see.
Yeah, Ken, Pi'd be great. Perfect. I can probably pick one out of the out of the bin here or you pick a case and.
Add a couple of cables and build an SD for and you're ready to go.
The other good thing about raspberry pies is they have HDMI, what's it, CEC or something?
So when the PI boots up, if it's connected to the TV, it'll turn the TV on like when the pie boots up.
So if you wanted to get fancy with some like reboot script or somehow that like would power it on whenever the business opens.
And then, I mean, somebody would have to remember to go turn the TV off at the end of the day, but.
You're probably gonna turn on by itself.
Oh, and worry too much about turning them off. I never turn my monitors off and they've been on for years.
Yeah, but you actually use them. This is something hanging on the wall. People don't even look at.
Okay.
Well, we'll hope that they'll look at it occasionally. It's going to be right above the refrigerator.
That's a good place for it.
Hey.
Right. Sean, what? Sean, what what pie has that kind of capability?
I know for sure the floor does positive. I'm pretty sure the 3 had it as well, but that's my memory gets a little bit fuzzy going that far back but yeah the 4 definitely does you know How I know is I have mine to reboot like at 3 am whenever there's like a kernel update and so I'll wake up at 5 am with my TV just shining bright right as hell in the
morning.
Yeah.
Alright, I think we should consider my question answered.
Excellent.
Thank you all.
Hey, where are we?
So did we lose Gary? Roses.
Yeah, essentially He can't even hear us right now. And well, I, he. Speakers aren't working.
He's, is, a microphone works now, but not his speakers. He can't even hear us.
No, like I said, he should vice a real computer or maybe somebody talking into buying a Raspberry Pi 5 and he could use that.
Yeah.
Or even a 4 or a 2.
Yeah, you could do that with a 2.
No.
Yeah Yeah, I don't know. His problem is he's been embedded in the dam.
Apple community for so long, he doesn't know how to do anything. He's right now he's working on a Chromebook.
And I don't remember enough about Chromebooks or how they've changed to be of any help to him.
Okay.
At all.
Yes.
Yeah, we can't even call it on his phone to at least get for the audio, right?
I don't know, I'm already confused.
Well come up with a come up with a page and flash it on a screen. You know, Gary, call us.
Oh
No, the way, what?
This reminds me of one time, one time when I was in the Army, I was, stationed in South Korea for a little bit and they had the most ancient communications technology, right?
Like there was literally this like phone thing from like the Korean War or something. I don't know but I had in one hand I had my cell phone Trying to call somebody on this ancient like Korean War like landline phone from the army and the sergeant major came up and took a picture of me with like this device from like, you know, brand new device from 2010 that could actually work and make a phone
call holding this ancient piece of tech on the other side being like can you hear me now like it was hilarious and that's how I feel like this is where like on zoom trying to send smoke signals to somebody who Speakers aren't working.
Hmm.
Yeah.
That like mash.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much.
Pretty much, yeah.
Anyway, just wanna mention that we sponsor 3 other groups that meet the Linux. This is the one of the groups as Linux presentations.
They would have a Slack meeting. That's for configuration workshops. All kinds of hardware. Doesn't have to be a PC or Linux box or Microsoft or Apple or.
DSD or whatever. I know we used to, we used to be face to face. And solve people's configuration problems.
And surprisingly we can solve a lot of problems just remotely. And then there's the new Linux, user group that's for beginners, beginner workshop.
And that'll be on the fourth Tuesday of the month. We also have a calendar. You go to our calendar.
Oh boy, wrong button. Control. Control.
Open the hyperlink.
Where is it? Yeah, here's our calendar. On our page and for every month. We all the stuff in red is is our sponsored meetings.
And if we. Turn off everything else and just shows the the red meetings. That's when our meetings are, are show up.
Right there. Course we also show other remote meetings and stuff that's in St. Louis and historical items and so forth and so on.
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of Univax Payton on computer. Is something another.
Okay. Oh, and then declared invalid. Oh no. 1973.
Okay.
Oh well. So much for proprietary folks. Anyway. I put some of the items in here.
Gary puts a lot of them in. We had some other people, but we could sure use another volunteer wouldn't hurt.
Anyway.
Boom, going back.
Yeah, so that's our sponsored events. And then we have a mailing list. We have an announced list.
Discuss stuff. Channel discussions and so forth and we have the steering committee mailing list And this, it's upon our website, so forth.
Presentation archives, of course, this meetings being recorded and it will be available in a few days up on our web page.
And so much for that. Any questions, feedback? Comments. Complaints.
Anybody want my address so they can send me a $20 bill?
You send me. Yeah, I mean, if you send me $2920, I won't put you on the ballot for the election come February.
No takers. All right. Everybody's here subject to being placed on the ballot. Okay.
At this point, I guess we can introduce our main speaker tonight, Ken Johnson. Ken has been with the group for a number of years.
And it's provided a number of good talks. And he's he's worried that what he does tonight won't be of his usual high quality standard.
. Okay, we're flexible We can ask questions and drag it out as long as we can. Good.
You want to take over? Let me stop sharing here.
Alright.
We gotta tell him why to keep you off the, nomination committee. No, I'm proud of
Okay, so, I call this short topics on short notice. I actually, I will.
Hi, I got a request from Gary sometime, yesterday evening. We actually were able to get together because I was.
Busy with something, sometime after 9 o'clock. And this is what we get.
So this is what I do. Yeah, explains the. Somewhat broad.
Range of topics that we'll touch on tonight.
And I touched on this already. A little bit. This will be less organized and there will be more issues left as an exercise for the reader than usual.
Okay. Trying to set your expectations appropriately.
And I'm gonna talk about some things which have either interested me or that I've been working on recently.
Problems I've needed to solve or some tools I've needed to use.
And somebody that relates to the fact that October is Cyber Security Month. There you go.
So here is our rough outline. We're gonna talk about some real life email troubleshooting that I've needed to do over the past month.
I'm gonna talk a little bit about fossil and get.
We'll talk about IP set aggregate IP block lists. Some things related to using. Those tools and some others to protect systems that are connected to the internet.
And then finally I'm going to touch on. The movie problem. And how that affects PBI and in turn TIAA.
And how that ties into crawl.
So.
I've got some references here. Because I'm going to be touching lightly over a lot of things.
But. To the extent that I've looked at it, the explain from first principles. Article about email looks pretty good.
There's a reasonably informative if uninspired article at Wikipedia about the sender policy framework, which is also known as SPF.
So those are your. Exercise is left for the reader. If you need to find out more about some of this stuff, those are some places to start.
So we're gonna start about Going to start talking about some issues that are related to problems.
And DNS configuration. Yeah, I guess putting it very broadly.
Then the second part of the email troubleshooting will relate to the use or the misuse of SPF.
I'd like to point out that
I'm gonna be talking about how some things work and there are a lot of steps I'm going to leave out because they're not working to the problem.
That I found. Okay. So let's imagine that Stan wanted to send an email to me. Can at example.
Dot com.
How would that work?
Well, Stan would have some kind of email client and it would be hooked up to some. Sort of email server.
I need compose his email and send it off to me. Probably admonishing me for failing to have numbers on my slides.
And then his email server would get it. And the first thing that it would do is it would look for what's called an MX record.
For example.com.
Hey, MX record basically identifies. What's the mail server for this domain or the domain?
In my email address. This example.com. Okay.
So if you want to see.
Oh, you can look for an MX record.
Dig example.com MX. If you don't have dig installed. You did.
And example.com is fictional, but we can imagine that. Dig would give a lot of output, but the key thing that it might return would be something like mail server. Dot example.
Dot com. Which would be the fully qualified domain name for something. Well, for a node, which is the mail server, for example.
Dot com.
And then if you do a dig on mail, server.example.com, you'll get an IP address.
So it's normally a 2 stage process. First get the MX record. Good, a fully qualified domain name.
Look up that domain name. Get an IP address. And at that point. The mail server that Stan uses.
Be ready to send something off to me. It's got an IP address for the server. And it should be ready to go.
Okay, but things aren't always.
Aren't always perfect.
What if there is no MX record?
There should be an MX record.
The SMTP standards recommend strongly that there is an MX record. But if there is Then the sending mail server should just look up.
The domain name that's associated with the IP address.
And use that as the IP address. So over example, the command line would be in this case would be dig example.
Dot com.
And this will probably bring you an IP address, but it's probably not going to be the right one.
Often it's the IP address of the web server.
Which doesn't necessarily help.
So.
If you knew.
What Yeah, even though the MX record had somehow gone missing. You could send directly to it.
So. But like you kind of understand that in the event of certain failure modes, can at example.
Dot com. And can@mailserver.example. Dot com are not the same.
So during the past month, there have been 2 occasions when my customer has needed to send email. To.
2 different companies that are their suppliers.
And after 48 h, our mail server bounced the mail back to the sender.
I'm sorry, hey, I can't deliver this. There's nobody there.
And I looked into it. And there's no MX record.
So.
So since there's no, there's no. It does look up on the. It does look up for an IP address on example.
Dot com. It's the IP address of the mail server. Through the destination company. There's no, there's usually the address of the web server for the destination company.
Because that's very common. That www.com and example.com and example.
Dot com will both point at the same place. Not universal, but quite common.
And the next thing you know. The mail is not getting delivered.
I had meant to have. Hey. A slide here that would show. Oh, you can use Telnet.
To. Sure, check for the presence of the mail server.
Domain name, space. 25. We'll make a connection to.
Okay, I'm. That is a server for incoming mail. You don't actually need to type anything at it.
If you get a connection, there's something there if it. Sits there and hangs. There's no mail server there.
That's as much as you need to know for that kind of diagnosis.
So in one of these cases, I had a phone number for the contact at this suppliers. Office and I called them up and I explained the problem.
And it turned out that They hire all this out. They have no idea. They called their provider, their provider said, everything is wonderful.
It's all fine.
There's not much I can do in that case. I explained it to my customer and I'm not trying to work around.
I look in the email, incoming email log. For the most recent email that came. From that supplier.
And I looked at that IP address.
And I wired up.
The DNS resolver. On the mail server. To return that address for. We'll call it example.
Dot com.
And so the mail started going through again.
Is a horrible hack. I hate it. But it gets the mail delivered. And.
You know, I can't fix their, their email unless they hire me.
Let's see. Oh, the other thing of course that happened. During this is that they were telling me, well, you know, we're still getting mail from other people.
This current slide. Probably explains that.
Because my customer was trying to send to example.com.
But if they had other customers who are sending to Males are.example.com. And that was actually pointing in the correct place.
That mail could go through.
So that's why it's pretty important to understand the content of this slide. When you're troubleshooting this kind of problem.
Any questions about that?
If anyone's too awake.
I'm awake.
So are you just escalating it to the DNS guys or do you fix it on the DNSI?
Well, what should I mean what should happen is that their mail, their email service provider should fix the DNS records that are associated with their mail server.
There's nothing I can do about that.
And as long as their provider is taking the point of view that Everything is wonderful. Everything is perfect. There's no problem.
Even though I gave them.
You know. Detailed data on exactly what the problem was. Well, I gave it to my contact at my customer supplier.
I assume they passed it on. They told me they did. Yeah.
I don't know, I would have thought that this would be an email administration one on one and I can't understand it.
But I've run into it twice. In the last 3 weeks. Just in people that this one customer, you know, needs to send to at 2 different companies.
It beats the heck out of me.
Hey else?
I would think you'd want to. Beat on the email company to get rid of the bogus.
You know, host name. You don't want to send email to host name. You want to send an email to a domain.
That way the regular mail server can respond according to the MX record.
Well, but you know.
First of all, I don't have, you know, I don't have direct contact with them.
Secondly, I'm not being paid for that.
I mean, you know, we got to the point where I gave him enough information that somebody like I say who had gotten through email server administration 101 should have been going oh I'm going and fixed it.
And after that, my customer has a long list of projects they want me to work on. And this isn't one of them.
My customer has their own X. Which I administer.
Your customer have their own post. Okay. I'm wondering if it's possible to have.
Excuse me just a second. To have the ex, rewrite the envelope so that any mail that's going to user at example.
Dot com. Will get rewritten so that it goes to user@mail.example.com.
And then even with the broken DNS on the other side of things. Could get through that way.
Because it sounds like you wouldn't be able to convince the employees@example.com to set their reply to to be you know, their user ID at mail.
Dot example.com. Cause everybody would have to do that for.
Email reliability.
Sure, sure. So what you've described with certainly be possible. But it was easier for me.
To make a modification to the configuration for the DNS resolver. Which sits on the same. System as my customers.
Email server.
So I just translate example.com to the IP address of. meal.example.com and That takes care of it.
You know, what you described would in fact work and that would be another way of doing it, but.
Hi, I took a different approach that happened to be simpler for me.
Yeah.
Yes, sir.
This is Stan. Are the IP numbers or is example.com and The male@theirmail.example.
Dot com or those 2 different machines.
Yes.
Okay, so that's why you have 2 IP numbers. Okay.
Yeah, yeah, so example.com for them is probably the same as WWW.
Dot example.com.
Right.
And then. You know, they're mail server.com is somewhere. Dot example.
Dot com is some other system. Maintained by their email service provider who might or might not be their web service provider i don't know I'm, you know.
Well, let me ask you this. What was the MX records?
I beg your pardon?
What were the MX records pointed to?
There wasn't an Mix record.
Well, that's the main problem. You need to set the MX record to the right server.
Yes. I've explained that to them.
And.
Yeah, I hear you.
Like I told you, Lee. Mills, one on one.
And you know.
And as I said, I probably wouldn't have brought this up except like I said, it happens twice in the last month.
Don't know why that is. Maybe that's random chance. But it's been pretty startling and disturbing.
Well, let me ask you this if they didn't have an MX record, how to heck could Google validate an SPF and legitimately send them email.
I can't answer that question, not my problem.
Cause I Yeah.
You know, I'm not getting paid by them. And I asked my customer, how much time do you want me to spend on this?
And the answer was Not much.
They have other things for me they want me to do, so.
Yes, sir.
This is Stan. I understand that. The DNS problem and solution that you that you put together.
What's the SPF? I don't remember.
Oh, well, that's something else that we're going to talk about in a minute. It's not related to this particular problem.
Oh, then I'll be able to to figure it out from that. All right, great.
Any other questions about the, DNS stuff?
Alright.
You know, this is off topic, but I see your email down at the bottom contact point@pobox.com.
Yes.
I would. I would not have been able to resist doing p.o.box.com. Oh.
Yeah, well that's They're a service. Well, I'll actually briefly bring that up when we talk about the next topic.
Good.
Yeah.
Gotcha. That was just a segue. I know I'm doing.
So can a quick clarification.
Yeah, I'll give you your $10 later. There's another question, yes.
The DNS half that you did on The DNS server that you had access to so you sort of set up an emboster zone for example.
Dot com so that you could take care of your customers mail going to example.com. Is that what you did?
Basically, yes.
Okay.
Although what I really did.
Right, or I'm actually working with is not a DNS server, but a DNS resolver.
And I'm able to force things into its cash.
Right, that's very clever. That's something that. Yeah, that's a clever solution.
Hey, there are difficulties with it, but you know the mail is going through for now. I fully expect that at some point I'm going to get a call from.
The present, of my customers company and he's going to tell me my mail is not getting through to them anymore and I'll say, okay, we'll figure out what's wrong now and go fix it.
Yeah. Yeah.
And then, you know. Will just do this incrementally. Until either they get it right or somebody there in finally gets tired of it.
Yeah.
Well, I can save experience experience experience just prepared for somebody to call you and say, hey, I'm trying to send an email to my customer on Google and it's rejected.
Google will not accept email today without without a valid SPI, at least a valid SPF record.
Like I said. You know, my customer has one. By customer supplier. Hmm, not my problem.
And if they call me, well, then presumably it's because they're ready to pay. So.
Hmm.
Available hours.
Yes, sir.
Okay, let's talk about SPF.
SPF stands for sender policy framework. And the basic idea behind sender policy framework. Is that you can idea identify the real and authorized outgoing mail servers.
For your domain.
So why would you want to do that?
We talk about that.
Well, if you're a financial institution, It might be that you would prefer that your customers assets are not stolen.
Yeah.
So you might want to make it hard for other people. Do pretend to be you by sending email that looks like it's from you.
Now, there is smelling tricks and tricks with UTFA that can still deceive people, but at least.
It won't be actually your email address.
Ordinary companies do not want to be spoofed just to get spam in the door because dangerous their deliverability.
So put that another way, if I allow somebody to impersonate my customer. And send spam.
That will lower my customer's reputation.
And that will impair their ability to get their email delivered.
And another important reason is to protect their own readers. So for example.
The folks@example.com would prefer that people can't pretend to be the, say, the present of example.
Calm and send email to somebody saying, hey, I need you to pick up some gift cards for me.
Or whatever.
That's one of the common ones, but it can be a lot. A lot more serious than that.
So that's the ID, the idea behind SPF. You can say. These and only these.
Or my authorized mail servers. If it doesn't come from this, from one of these servers.
It's someone trying to impersonate me and you should treat it accordingly.
So far so good, right?
Would that be somebody trying to spoof? An address and they're going through a different.
Right, right. So somebody, you know, configures a mail server that claims to be fidelity.
Mail server, is that what this catch? Catches.
Dot com. And since out an email saying, there's a problem with your account at fidelity.
Dot com. You need to click on this link to get in touch with this. So you need to call us this phone number.
So.
This lets you prevent that. For the most part. Because for the most part most receiving mail systems now.
Will at least put an email like that. Into the spam folder.
At least.
Does that answer your question?
Yes, thank you.
Alright.
So SPF later gets integrated into Dmark and that's not a topic for tonight. This is just a, no, we're not going there.
So how can you look at somebody's SPF record? Used in.
You say dig example.com, then TXT to specify that you're looking for text records.
You will get back probably one or more possibly a lot more records. Look for the one which has the value that begins SPF equals.
That's how you can see it. Yeah, it was mentioned earlier that I use a for an email forwarding service, which is called PObox.
Dot com. purebox.com. Actually does a great deal of spam filtering on my behalf.
They catch that spam. And if I log into their website, I can have the option to release it.
To my to the place where I'm mail actually that where I actually read my mail which happens to be Gmail.
And even better than that. They will let me look at the first part of that mail, including the headers.
And even better than that. They will show me the status of email that they tried that I tried to release.
So there's a company called Residio.
Residio seems to be made up of
The consumer level products from Honeywell. And first alert, smoke detectors. And first of all, safes and.
A variety of other things. It's a moderately big company.
And it turns out that I needed to have an interaction with their customer service people. And in order, would I, in order to get done what I needed to do, I was going to need to send them a small amount of money.
Less than $10.
And the way that they would normally handle that. Is they would send me an email and then I could pay it on line.
And then. They would send me a magic number and Well, that would be good. Or at least, you know, as good as it was going to get in this situation.
However,
So I talk to customer service person and they told me, oh, well, We'll get your spam folder for the email.
And I looked in the spam folder for the email and it wasn't there.
And then. I looked at PO. Box and it was there.
And I could see the first part of it, but I couldn't see the link that I needed in order to pay this bill.
So I tried to release it to Gmail.
And Gmail. Declined to keep it.
So I looked at the reason that Who your box gave. For why, you know, why did it flag it to spam?
And it turns out that, oh, it's. It's an SPF problem.
Well, I know how to look at SPF records. See that? So I looked at it.
And I looked at the email. And it turns out that Residio is using software from this company called Salesforce.
You may have heard of them. To manage their. Customer service work.
And when their customer service people send out an email. It goes through the Salesforce email servers.
And the Salesforce email servers are not in the residual well. At that time, Let me correct that.
At that time. They were not in the residual. SPF record. So Residia was basically saying This email.
The we're about to send you, it's not actually from us and you should ignore it.
This is this is how you line up a shot very carefully at your foot and slowly squeeze the trigger.
So it was clear that their email was never gonna get to me.
So I managed to get on the phone with them again and we worked something out where I would send a check in the mail.
And after about 2 and a half weeks, they actually cashed the check and then things got to move forward again.
I all this fairly annoying so I went poking around to see if I could find the name of the chief information officer for his video.
And it turns out that's not too difficult.
Their website did not provide an email address for her though.
However I did find the email address for somebody else at Residio who was apparently in investor relations.
And their email address was.
Easily constructed if you knew their name. So I play the same algorithm to the CIO and I sent her a message which With all this out in detail and suggested that she assigns someone that worked for her to solve this problem.
You know what? Today I went and I looked at the SPF records for video and they've changed.
It's a triumph of reason over ignorance.
Never heard of that happening.
Yes, well, I did never hear, I never did hear back from her. But I suspect that.
You know, if your the C suite officer. It's not a comfortable thing to have somebody.
Drop an email in your box that says, by the way, the people who configure your email servers are brainless idiots.
I didn't use those words, it's just that it was kind of implied from the result.
Yeah.
Yeah, anyway, so yeah, SPF trouble. This was also, you know, like within within the last month.
So I mentioned I talked about, you know, things I'd run into or had to work on the last month.
So I mentioned I talked about, you know, things I'd run into or had to work on last month and this was one of them.
Questions about that?
So it's indeed, yes. If I'm running example.com and my mail server is hosted at mail.
Dot example.com. The SPF text record should be attached to example.com or attached to mail.
Dot example.com.
The SPF.
I've attached the text record.
So that depends. That depends. Generally it would be attached to example.com because that's the email address that you're propagating for to people to use.
People are sending mail.
To ken@example.com. Okay.
So the SPF record. Would be attached to example.com. We would have information that identifies males server. Dot example.
Dot com. Is the sole genuine and authorized mail server.
If you look up.
Right, but if I'm sending, if I'm sending a message out through my post fix to somebody at Gmail.
And the hello to Gmail. Is from mail.example.com.
Are they not going to use? Mayailed out example.com when they do an SPF.
Check.
Yeah.
Hold on a minute.
Hmm.
Let's see here.
And you enlarge that font, please.
Oh, can you see that?
Just barely, and I'm sure Gary can't see it.
I wasn't expecting you to see that at all.
Yeah.
Okay.
Sure job things on short notice does not come with demonstrations. So the answer is that.
For my customer. One that I was talking about. Under the DNS issues. There SPF record is attached to Example.
Dot com.
And they're able to send email to Gmail just one.
That's as much as I can tell you.
That may not be entirely adequate as an answer, but it's the answer I've got.
That's great, thanks.
I'm trying to remember if for SPF or if it's a DK IM that you can actually set it to send you have the receiving mail server send you a report.
Of issues.
Well, that's certainly part of Dmark, which is. Whether it's in DK I am, I'm not sure, but that is certainly part of Dmark.
Which is not part of what I'm willing to talk about tonight.
I'm sorry, short topics on short notice is low budget operation.
Yeah.
Little things are good.
Sure things are good.
Anything else I can talk about about this? I'm willing to take up questions. I'm but I'm not willing to guarantee answers.
Yes, sir.
The SPF. Is that aed at solving the email thing or do anything else with websites?
Or URLs.
It's really, it's really aimed at email. It's basically.
It's basically intended to stop schooling.
You know, to stop some, to stop or at least to make it difficult. If someone's paying attention.
To for somebody to successfully pretend to be somebody they're not.
Good, that's very informative. Thank you.
Sure.
Hey, anything else?
Okay, we'll go on to the shortest of the short topics.
Also versus get. There is one slide here.
As many of you know.
The use of get has become extremely widespread.
And I don't want to give you the impression that I think that get is a bad tool because that's not it at all.
But I do think it's worthwhile to keep in mind. The get was built to support the development of the Linux kernel.
A project with thousands. Of active developers.
Most of whom do not know each other. And will never meet each other.
And their work gets followed through.
Series of trusted subordinates to the man at the top. Who makes the final decisions when he thinks he needs to?
Fossil on the other hand. Is the source code control system that's used by the SQL light.
Development project. Which has less than a dozen active developers. Who know each other by name and by face.
And who work with each other, if not every day, at least. You know, several times a week.
So if you're choosing a project. Or excuse me, if you're choosing, you know, source code control.
Tool for a new project.
You might think about whether your new project is more like SQL light or like the Linux kernel.
No, there are there are other considerations. There might be reasons for example why it's really important for you to be able to use one of the public get repositories.
That's the reason.
But. The Oh The Linux kernel uses this. It must be a great tool.
Yes, but it's not necessarily the correct tool for you. The analogy that I would make is that
Rodo Hammer is a fabulous tool if you need to drill a hole in concrete. I've used one for that purpose.
But if what you need to do is to drill out. The corroded bib screw from a shut off valve stem.
Then probably what you want to do is to get started with my little, eggbeater style and drill in a very small drill bit.
There are different tools. They're probably. Best adapted for different purposes.
I think it's something we're thinking about the next time you need to choose that kind of material.
Questions? Comments.
Yes.
Is fossil open source available? That's that. Okay.
Just like SQL like.
Let's it's a little bit like get in the sense that it was developed by One of the Sqlite developers because They wanted something and they.
To have a tool that was gonna work the way they wanted a tool to work.
It looks like fossil is more of a. Management system than just a repository because they got all kinds of other stuff ticketing and wiki and
Well, yes, that's true. But you know.
It's a buffet. You can take the pieces you want.
What's the workflow like with fossil compared to get?
Different. That is as much as I can tell you.
Yeah.
I don't actually claim to know a lot about this, but I came across, you know, an article about fossil.
And I recently had had some Exposure.
In the office of my customer. To somebody who was.
I think very accustomed to working in get. Before they started there. And didn't really get subversion yet.
And. My, my customer happens to use a, it.
At the moment seems to work well for them.
That doesn't mean it's right. That doesn't mean it's the right tool for everybody.
I'm like.
Okay. That was the, that was this subversion. Program.
Yeah, or sometimes notice SVM.
Anyhow, this is just more of a This might be worth thinking about rather than a, oh, you should definitely do this.
But certainly if my customer decides we need something which is Just distributed in a way that subversion is not.
I'm gonna be looking really hard at SCM because certainly their development model is much closer.
To the development model for SQLI.
You know, they have.
It's more like. Under a dozen people working on a particular project at the same time.
We all know each other and who all talk. At least. They better.
Not thousands. So.
Hey, anything else?
This was not a trade advertisement.
That's okay. I don't either yet.
I feel I feel compelled to say that I do not understand gift. Hi, I watched, I watched 4 h or maybe 6 h of videos on it.
And went back to it and looked at it again and realized I didn't understand any of it. Here we go.
I, you know. I
Well, sure.
But that's because I wasn't able to use it with anybody. Good. And normally I can understand a lot of things.
Just from a theory and so forth, but I find I just couldn't figure it out or couldn't.
Hey, it didn't stick with me. Let's put it that way.
Right. Well, it's not something that I've ever needed to use on a continuing basis.
You know, once in a while I need to do. A command line or 2 with get.
Right.
And.
That's. That's as much as I've needed to do.
So.
Excellent.
Stan, there's there's a link in the chat just for you whilst for all of us because I think we can all relate.
We've already we've already had 3 or 4 get presentations. From my experience, the only thing I can recommend is use it.
Because every time you come up with a problem, you'll find. 50 different answers online. And you solve the problem, you learn something.
You keep going, you solve another problem, you learn something. The whole concept of repository, this is hard to wrap your mind around until you use it.
In my opinion.
Also a lot of the IDEs these days have built in integration with get and things so as you're changing your document slash code slash whatever it's indicating which files have changed and you can commit them right there in the the IDE, you never have to leave that environment and you can, I believe, push your stuff out to GitHub at the same time as well.
It's quite quite nice integration.
My situation is that I don't really do development that where I would use an IDE or something like that.
And I found for what my purpose is, I found that sink thing. Is my solution.
It's just for passing. Duplicate files to multiple machines. Rather than
Using get. Process.
Well, if you're just sharing files across machines, then one of the clouds would work on cloud.
Right.
I work is used simple next cloud. Is more complicated, sort of like fossil, has all kinds of tools built in.
Our sync also is a solution that I can use but
Yeah, but our our sync you have to set up. With own cloud or next cloud, it's automatic.
Yeah, true.
You know, you have the client on your machine that uses Webd to compare your machine to the host.
And if there's a newer file on each end, it pushes it the other way.
You know, the big advantage to get is a fact that you, A, you can maintain different branches.
I've probably got 15 different branches on this project I've been working on since beginning of summer.
And even.
I already do magnificent spaghetti code.
Yeah.
Oh well.
And if you get yourself, if you get yourself in trouble, 80, 80 or 90% of the time, get, get the prompt will tell you how to get out of it.
Yeah. Well, solving my problems with our sync and sink thing. Got away from the issue and so I've never really gone back to to address it now.
Now. And often not often well on occasion I've gone back and looked at getting and thought I'd drive into it again and see if I could.
You know, third time is a charm kind of thing.
But then I don't have any, I don't have a problem right now that I can think of that might be useful.
Might be solved with using get.
Well, it's a question of repository. Repository is a way. To collect data.
Right.
And know when anything has changed. And then from any. And point. I've got 3 or 4 of them here that I work with.
Hey.
You do get status or do get fetch? And you can see what's changed, then you can decide what to do with it.
And if something, if you change something that you haven't. Committed yet, get will tell you, and you can stash it if you want to.
Our throw it away. You know, it's just the, the point is unless you have a need for it, It's not gonna be much use for you, but if you do.
Then you just start using it and as you run into problems you solve.
Any sort of code has a use for it because just always bugs introduced and you can kind of go back through and find out when it happened or revert back beyond that or something you you've got a working you know minimum working minimum viable product so to speak and you You want to add features?
Okay, start up a branch. If it all goes sideways, then just Switch back to the main branch and forget that.
Corrupt disaster of a side project sort of a thing.
Commit frequent and commit like commit changes frequently and that's that's pretty important as well with get.
And it's also important that you make your comments as verbose as you can.
Hopefully, something you'll understand 6 months later. Right.
Alright, we ready go on?
Yep. I think so. This has been great. The Little bit of a segue and talking a little bit about get this Nice.
Thank you.
Okay, so this third, topic. Discusses, some tools and some resources that I've used.
To create. Static IP block lists, protect, protect internet exposed systems. Static meeting, not failed van.
And don't get me wrong, field band is good and I use that too. But these are lists that get updated.
Depending once a day or once a week.
Bail to then?
Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, failed to ban is a program that will monitor various logs on your system and when it detects.
Activities that you've defined as unacceptable. We'll use information in those logs to block.
The corresponding IP address from accessing your system.
Okay, thank you.
You know, we just failed about BACK if, and, wants to take a look and see how it's, and see how we're using it.
And there's at least one presentation from me on fail to ban in the. Look archives. And it's a good tool that's just.
No, I'm here, not what I'm gonna talk about tonight.
So the sort of low level. Tool in Linux.
For doing things like. Blocking incoming or outgoing. Ip packets. Is referred to as IP tables.
And it lets you say, okay. Well, walk this IP address or block this IP network. And then you could have multiple commands like that.
And build up.
More sophisticated or more complicated. Blocking environment. IT set works in conjunction with or on top of IP tables or whatever the name is for the thing.
This replace IP tables now that I don't remember.
I piece at what you define.
Sets of networks, sets of IP addresses. They can be very large. And then once you've defined those sets.
You can use IP tables to operate on those same way you would have used it to operate on. A single network address.
So if I have a big, if I have a big long list of systems which are behaving appropriately, I can put those into an IP set.
The.
And then I can tell IP tables. Drop any incoming packets. Good match any of the addresses in that collection.
So there's some tools that I use in conjunction to getting it. To get this stuff done.
In some of the shell scripts. Anyone who needs to can you know, sneer now?
Curl is useful because sometimes the file is that you receive have more fields in them that you need for this specific purpose.
I'm sorry, curl is useful because you need to retrieve these files often from somewhere else.
Cut is useful because they sometimes have more fields in than you need for a specific purpose. Aggregate is lovely.
Aggregate will take IP addresses or IP networks.
That are adjacent to each other. And when possible aggregate them into a larger network.
Sort dash v will sort IP addresses into. IP address order. It's designed for sorting software version numbers, but it does just fine with IP addresses, number, dot number, dot number, number.
I should say these are IP version 4 addresses. And then I'd be said, as I mentioned, is the tool that lets you define collections of IP addresses.
And treat them as a single entity. One year locking things.
So. You should exercise care. With these sources. For example, The Bogons list.
It's basically a list of IP addresses that you should never find on. The internet. And that's fine.
But if you're using this. This kind of filtering on a system which is behind an IP address translation router.
Then it's probably
Sitting on one of those addresses. So you'll need to exclude your. You know, local address, your, you know, non internet address like 10 dot 0 dot 0.
Dot com.
From the
There's a dual called crowd sec. Which basically is intended to. Hello for the collection of intelligence about badly behaved systems from a large number of systems out in the world.
So if you install crowdsick on one of your systems, you can. Both receive and contribute to.
That list it will monitor log files on your system. Thanks like, you know, people trying to log in to SSH and so forth.
But. You can also use a crowdsick list on a system that
Doesn't. Have crowds second sold. On your system where you have crowds installed, you can just dump.
The IP set that it creates, the IP set collection that it creates. Copy that over to another system and load it.
So. If you have something sitting out at the border where you'd like to do this kind of filtering, but installing crowdsack on it isn't really feasible.
Well, you don't have to. Do not route or pure list comes from spamhouse. There is the extended do not router peer list also from Spam House.
D shield is misspelled. Sorry about that. I mentioned I was in a hurry.
Is there?
That should be abuse. Another misspelling. No, I'll explain this was a little budget operation.
You can do. Geolocation blocking based on information that's available from Max Mine, you do need to get a free license, but once you've done that, You can get information which seems to be update up to date enough that you'll block a lot of packets coming in.
I have a customer who's products are subject to export licenses from the Department of Commerce.
There are some companies, this using there are some countries which will never qualify for an export license. They don't need to receive email from those countries.
There is a gentleman named Peter Hanstein who is an active. Developer. He has built up several lists.
Oh, badly behaved nodes based on.
Email that comes into his system. That is people trying to send typically it's been people who try to send to people who don't exist on your system.
And who have never existed. Sends.edu maintains a list which is based on their honey pot systems.
Of nodes which are doing internet. You know, where they just. Scan through all the notes on the internet and try and see if they have their reports and what those ports will say
Even if those people aren't necessarily directly your enemy, they're probably not your friend. And Also, it clears up with logs, logs with garbage, which you really
Isn't very helpful. So if you can cut that kind of traffic down, that's also useful.
I feel like I've touched on this really pretty briefly, but the idea is basically You get these lists.
You manipulate them with sword and aggregate. You put them into an IP, a collection IP set collection.
And then load them into IT tables until it block these prop or, you know, drop these. In calling packets.
That's not a lot of detail. On the other hand, I think it is true that the information I've given you here would give you a head start.
If you weren't already doing this. And I think.
It's now time for the questions which this may have inspired.
Anything?
Yes indeed, again me, So I'm having some email issues. I am running post fix.
With all the various goodies plugged in and dovecot for my I map. And I am running Thunderbird as the client on my desktop.
The newest version. And I have an issue where my in box. I am unable to delete messages.
In my inbox. Using Thunderbird if I'm using round cube or like blue mail on my phone Seems that I can delete them okay.
But not with Thunderbird. However, I am. Not 100% sure it's a thunder bird issue or if it's an IMAP issue and the other round cube and blue mail are not really strictly following I.
Well.
And I've been banging away at this for a couple of days. Have you got any suggestions?
Let's see, a couple of things. It's a little off topic for the IP set aggregate IP block list stuff, but that's okay.
The first place that I would start would be to look very carefully at the DFC logging messages.
Because you when you you know, try to carry out that operation and it doesn't work. There ought to be some walking.
On top of that, My recollection is that there are ways to increase the amount of logging from Dovecot.
So if the default amount doesn't give something to you, then I would try, try increasing it.
I ran at the increased level for I don't know, overnight when I first switched from UW, I'm at to Devcat.
And everything was working so I dialed it back down to the regular level. But that would be where I would start.
If that didn't get me anywhere.
Then I would try to configure as configure things so that I could make
An unencrypted connection.
Between Thunderbird and Devcott.
You know, that is no TLS.
Hello, and I would capture it with Wireshark.
And I would look at the packets.
That's the way I would approach this problem.
That may not sound very appealing, but that is how I would go after it. If I really, if I really wanted it to work with underbird.
That's what I would do.
Yeah, I need to capture the traffic between Thunderbird and I am Dove Cut I think at this point because something very strange happened and I'm I think I've set up a new account more than once to point back to this same account and somehow the inbox keeps getting locked.
I mean, new messages show up in there. I can mark them as red or, you know, whatever, but I cannot.
Delete them and yeah just at the I'm at wits and got the logging turned up the debug logging turned way up on Dove caught and not really seeing anything in there that I recognize.
And.
Good. Well then, keep in mind that, I mean, by default. You know, the connection between Thunderbird and Devcott is going to be encrypted.
So you're going to have to force that to be off.
Yeah
Yeah.
So that when you capture it. You can read it. Otherwise, you're just gonna say, oh, all, all you're going to see is that, oh, a TLS connection gets created.
But nothing of what's inside it.
Yeah Yeah
Let me, I think it's probably fear. It may be theoretically possible to get.
There might be some way to get. The appropriate certificates or keys loaded into. Why are sharks so they would decrypted for you, but.
I've never successfully done that, so.
I try to get it towards the other way first.
Yeah, thanks.
You're welcome.
Other questions related to?
I'd be set. I can block lists, use of aggregate. I, is really cool.
I first found that it was like, this is so neat.
I guess you just need to need to want to do that.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's the wrong slide.
Alright. So this I guess relates to the fact that October was cyber security month.
Some of you may have heard about the move IT breach that happened back around May. Move it apparently was.
Or is a tool that's used to make.
Well, in files from. Well, probably typically.
Between one company and another. Fast and convenient.
And up until May, people probably thought secure.
. That Miss. Appreciation has been corrected, I hope.
One of the companies which was hit by the movement breach. Was a company called PBI.
It turns out the PBI is a is a service company.
To many companies that manage pension assets. Or also to. Any public pensions.
So for example, Calpers. Ti A.
Basically, PBI apparently does things like keeping track of people. Dying or having address changes or whatever.
On behalf of their clients.
So they pretty much have all the goodies. Name, address, phone number, social security number, email addresses, all the goodies.
For all of the clients. Of those organizations that handle pensions.
A lot of that information apparently got lifted. It affected approximately half of the customers of TIAAF, so that's several 1 million right there.
And some others.
After this fact, a thoughtful person might ask, oh. So they had all this really high value information stored on an internet connected server.
Why wasn't it AES 2 56 encrypted?
I haven't gotten an answer back on that one yet. So one of the things that often happens in the cases in these cases where There's been a data breach in your personal data may have been stolen.
Is that one of the organizations that's involved in that happening. Will offer to pay for monitoring. Of something about you.
And in this particular case, the organization that they got to. Do that kind of monitoring is, is an organization called, KRUL, KRUL, KRULL.
It's probably more their name than that. That's the amount. Remember, it's enough.
To find them.
So I got this letter. Dear to later, I thought, well, it's, you know, let's do a web search on these crow people see what I can find out.
And the first thing that comes up is an article at Kribs on Security, which is a day or 2 old.
Outlining how there's been a significant data breach at
Oh great.
They apparently were using 2 factor authentication. But someone managed to steal. To do some stealing on one of their employees and then.
That was enough to get past their. You know, help desk for lost password recovery. And then they were in.
So.
I guess, well, hmm. One lesson here, I guess, would be that if you're responsible for important data that's connected that is stored on
An internet connected server. Maybe you should think about having it under strong encryption. In addition to whatever protective measures you have to make sure that only the people who are supposed to be able to access it can.
That's all I've got. But you know, this fell into the category of. Technical stuff, technical related stuff.
I've been working on. Recently.
And then, you know, the fact that we was Cyber Security Month just made it tie right in.
And here's the final question slide. So this point I will entertain questions about any of these things.
Or Other things for that matter. Oh, you know. I do not promise answers, so.
What you got?
This is Stan. As far as using 2 factor authentication. Which in your opinion, which is better to use the messaging phone messaging or email as they receive the
Code.
If those are the 2 choices.
Yes, that's all I've ever seen.
Yeah.
Then
I'm not sure that I'm particularly qualified. I have an opinion. It's not obvious to me that it would make.
Which
A lot of difference. It would depend on your email provider, I suppose.
In terms of how easy is it for somebody to steal access to email. Might also depend on how good your passwords are.
Versus. How is he for somebody to do Stim stealing against you and thereby intercept your your SMS messages.
Okay.
I, I don't know, Stan. It's not obvious to me that there's a big difference, but I also am of the feelings I'm probably not qualified to hold that to hold an opinion.
I've heard it express that it's better to get the email. Then the SMS messages, but.
I don't really haven't. Follow than enough to understand what would be the difference. You know.
You probably want both, Stan.
Well, you only use one at a time.
Oh.
No, but what if you're not you're on a public computer you may or may not be able to get email You know, what if you're, what if you're in a back cave and your cell phone doesn't work?
True.
Believe me, you always want more than 1, 2 factor. Configured. Because if one isn't working, then you gotta back up.
Okay, I've never seen. I take that back, okay, they a lot of times I'll see it, it'll ask, how do you want to receive it this time?
Okay, so you have an option. Okay, that makes sense.
Yeah. There's also another option I found out about this summer. Our VoIP provider allows you to configure SMS on a landline.
So if somebody sends an SMS, 9 9 7 4,600, I get an email about 10 s later.
Oh, okay. That sounds good.
Because It's a landline, there's no reception issue. And I've, I made a mistake a while back setting up an online bank account.
They want a phone number. I gave them the office number. But then they wanted to send an SMS to it.
For 2 factor.
Oops.
And it took me 3 months. To get it set up, right? Because every time I try to call him and take me an hour or more to get through to somebody that could that could spell to factor.
Anyway, that's my.
Hi. Yeah, I know that problem very well. Oh gosh.
Try to get through ATT without talking to somebody that once you to reboot your Microsoft box.
Why are you calling AT and T?
Yeah. That's true.
I just unplugged the box and unplugged their box and plug it back in.
That's generally the solution.
I will admit though I've seen some weird problems. I had to call me. Month ago or couple of months ago and said Lee, we can't see the server.
I couldn't figure out what was going on. So I went down there. And I looked on their computer and their IP address wasn't the same subnet as the server.
All the computers had IP. IPs that were a different subnet.
How'd that happen?
Anybody got an idea?
Something crashed and rebooted to default. No?
No. Well, that may have been it, but the freaking charter modem started giving out DHCP on a different subnet.
Oh.
Oh my, I bet that worked well.
Yeah. They were jumping up and down. Hey, we can't we can't talk to quick books.
Yeah.
Okay, so.
We can't talk to this. We can't see our files. Well, now, now I know what to look for so I can.
If I go in remotely. And the first thing I do is an IP config under Windows workstation and just make sure that the subnet.
Do you know?
Go ahead.
Their IP address matches what it's supposed to be. Otherwise I tell them to call charter and tell them to reset the moment.
So, Sorry, go ahead. How were they able to hit the default gateway? With getting a different net mask each one.
No, it wasn't a different. It was to give it not an entirely different subnet for the gateway and.
The, IP addresses.
Oh wow.
And you know the server was static Now luckily. I could if I had known that I could have solved it remotely because I had access to the server over an SSH channel.
And I've got the workstation set, workstation set up on Connect W so I can look at their workstations.
But it is, I did, it never occurred to me that the charter modem would be given out bad IPs on DHCP.
Doesn't that charter modem doesn't that always give out the same subnet?
It should. 1 9 2 1 68 one dot one is the gateway and everything else is DHCP.
But it was like giving out 1 92 1 68 that 10 for some strange reason.
Hmm.
Oh, I never had one do that. I don't have a charter modem, but you know I've got
Player routers here that hand out IP addresses.
I'm never had one go berserk like that
Pardon?
I hope to handle that IP addresses at different times. No, I hope you're doing that at different times and not on the same network at the same time.
Just curious, I'm wondering if anybody knows. Does the IP neighbor Command, would that show you the different subnets?
I don't know.
Oh, interesting. That's worth it.
I mean, It's I've used it and it shows the stuff that I've got in my Network, you know, my But I was just wondering if it showed, you know, other.
Other things on the same wire.
Hey Stan, how do you spell IP neighbor?
IP space neighbor.
Okay.
Oh, space.
Yes.
It's an option on the IP command.
Oh, look at that.
It's very useful sometimes to go in and read the man pages on stuff, even though you only understand 10% of what's there.
That 10% often useful.
Yeah.
Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I've got a.
Okay.
Chuck's old. Raspberry out in the garage and it's got a radio on it Lee that listens to all the
Aircraft.
Is it work?
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. Hey.
I don't know, I think so. But. You know, had a meltdown here a year or 2 ago and I you know, got some new equipment, got everything going and I never did get that one reconnected because I
I don't remember. I'm gonna have to take that red. I think if I take it down, bring it in here.
And hook it up, I should be able to.
You know, reset the IP address on it and then it should work fine. I spin out in the garage for a couple of years altogether and But, you know, it's dry, it's up in the air, it's not getting hurt or anything, it just gets hot and cold.
And we'll find out. I'm gonna have to go out there and pull that thing in.
Cause I really like that display of all the aircraft, you know, they, transmit their
Positions and
It's called ADSP.
Yeah.
Yeah, the Chuck bought a cable, coax for it. The coax is actually, I think, bigger than the receiver.
It is.
The coax is damn here as big as a garden hose.
Yeah.
Okay.
He was living in that. Office building He, he had a small one on there and it and really attenuated the signal.
And so when he installed this, he's never come over to get it. I guess it's, you know, it technically it's his he can he can have it if he wants it but Yeah, oh well.
I wanna see if I can get it get connected to it again. Used to have a much more complicated system here and I vastly simplified the system, but That thing got dropped off.
I need to go get it. You know hook it back up and see what's what
Well.
Yes, but when I get it in here. I'll be probably calling you Lee.
Yeah.
You're Mr. Raspberry.
Okay. Yeah.
Did you put in your pocket whenever you come over?
For anyone that's interested, explaining computers.com. As a very good review of the raspberry.
5. 5. Yeah, talks about all the hardware and the differences between it and the 4 and everything.
It's a Quite a machine.
Oh my.
Well, since. Gary is neutered. And, muted.
Yeah. I should neuter.
Okay, that too. It's gonna be, It kind of cuts down on some of the interaction because a lot of times he would read out loud that various.
Chat messages, which are some of the rest of us are too busy to really notice. Playing with buttons and knobs and things like that.
Yeah, I apologize. I had a rather talk of, 10 almost 11 months old and I figured going off, mute would be, destructive to good order.
Okay, that's understood. Yeah. But, and we normally encourage the people to use the chat, but, I never.
I've got too many things going. I don't have the attention span to look at it in addition to everything else.
And Messing with. I even though we're recording this session with Zoom, I also record it with,
The, Simple screen recorder over on. Anonymous coward connection.
Because I keep that open with the participants listing so I can keep track of who's the who attends.
And, I keep the attendance roster for, for all of these sessions. And the reason we do that is anybody that attends.
2 of our sponsored meetings. In a calendar year is eligible to vote. At the February election. And as I said before, anybody that cares to send me a $20 bill, well, I will keep their name off the ballot.
Oh well. And there's enough time left in this calendar year to qualify for voting in February. Yeah.
Departing the session. Thank you very much, Ken. I think it's been a very good session.
And I think these kind of sessions are just as worthwhile. Often as the more formalized presentations because people have the opportunity to to participate in a different additional topics.
So
Alright. Oh boy. No.
Little bit early here. And Gary posted something and it flash by so quick. I don't know.
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Gary was thinking, Ken for presenting, I believe, and saying that Ken jumped in.
Yeah, it's Yeah, one of the things that Gary was supposed to talk about tonight was all the the issues he had connecting with.
Number of people. I think he in the last few days he probably contacted Probably 20 different people trying to find somebody to jump in at the last minute.
And you know. People don't read their email until the following day. They they have they're out of town or they got they got work that they're in a major project or that day they're they're going to Pittsburgh to do a project or you know something like that.
Is a lot of stuff going on or they've got a lot of stuff they've been working on, but it's not clean enough to just show.
And you know. Lot of times it doesn't have to be that fancy. I mean you don't even have to put the slide numbers on it to make me happy.
Although.
I was one of the people who he hit up last night at 9 PM. And I was actually at the the people who he hit up last night at 9 PM.
Yeah
And I was actually at the Central Iowa Lug presenting at the time he sent the email and I didn't read the email until the next morning.
Yeah, that happens. It happens.
So I mean, I totally could have represented, about using a WSL, and doing Linuxy things in Windows, the update, but that that was.
Well, we, we have openings in December, so. Okay.
Yeah, there's definitely a possibility. I, we were doing all sorts of fun stuff like, we were doing all sorts of fun stuff like Xorg into, so.
Excise we're doing all sorts of fun jumping around and USB forwarding over IP and stuff like that.
Yeah.
So they are possibilities in. We'll see what happens.
Yes, always good. Oh, it's good. And maybe it's some point Gary might get a different computer.
Hmm.
Hey, I'll.
Mmm, I wouldn't bet on it. Say Apple, it's not a real computer.
Well.
That's what my brother says.
I'll give him the talk. I'll give him the tower here. I've been using for a web server for 25 years.
Hmm.
Give them the what?
The tower I've been using for a web server for 25 years.
Oh.
In Haiti's basement.
Oh no, no, it's, it's It's a, tower. It's not a rack mouse.
Hey.
Oh, oh. I'm sorry, I was, recalling something I thought you had written earlier in the day.
Yeah, that's it.
We were talking earlier about.
Yeah
Well, that was Ken.
About displaying a static web page. You know, Grant, Asbury will do a wonderful job, but you could probably grab any old piece of iron floating around.
Yeah, but the raspberry you can hang on the back of the TV and every minute never even see it.
Right, and it's very low voltage too.
That's true. That's true.
Is that rumor a word that you had a Do you think it's racist? Everyone ridicule.
Say again.
Again.
Say again.
Hey Steve, what do you think of the display you're missing?
Yeah, that's what it looks like.
Is that from your house, Lee?
Yeah, that's the one here.
Yeah, once I get, once I get access to the computer again, I think I just. Bring it down and you know it's probably all it'll take.
It's just on the wrong subnet. I just gotta log in and change the subnet.
Hmm.
No, I'll change the IP.
Yeah, just change the IP address.
It's kind of funny when you put all the tracks on her.
Yeah. Yeah, the version of that that we've got on there right now is probably Umpteen versions out of date, I would guess.
Yeah, this is 7.2. I think that's about a year old.
Yeah This thing hasn't really run since Chuck disappeared.
That's the one thing I never got back. I didn't really work at it very hard either.
Yeah, you got other distractions.
Yeah, you could say that.
But I'm gonna try and get it I'm just gonna go down there, drag the thing down here and You know, if I can SSH into it, then we should be good to go.
Forget that. Just put a monitor and keyboard on it.
Well, yeah, that's what I'm gonna do. Bring it down here. Put a monitor keyboard on it.
Then I have access period.
Yeah, but you know, you're on a console. You don't need
No, but once I put it back out and the garage, I need SSH to it.
Yeah, or point your browser at it.
Yeah, I think that's what we did. I not a hundred percent certain, but I think that was it.
I think you point your browser at it.
Well, that's to give you the status page. If you wanna update it, you have to SSH in.
Yeah. I just wanna get that display back up. I don't see any reason why that radio or the antenna that's all been protected from the elements.
I mean, it just, it gets cold out there and hot, but. I don't think, you know, it ran for I think a year or 2 out there anyway, so that didn't seem to hurt it, so.
Yeah.
For that matter, it just may need rebooting. I mean, Could I had a power search come along and cause it to glitch out or an undervol or something like that?
Well, what happened was, My one computer died and that was one I was using it for a file server and Chuck and I had put All the network stick on that computer, which was a stupid idea, but you know, it was late one night and we did it.
The problem now is that thing doesn't have an IP address that's valid for my network.
Cause I, I very much simplified my network. Now I only have one. Subnet. You know everything is on the same
It was, it was complicated.
But now everything's on one subnet, so that orphan is hanging out in the garage and just You know, it can't talk to anything.
So anyway.
Okay.
Ron, BC, did you find this meeting helpful to your issues?
Ron may be away from his microphone. Way up there in British Columbia
Yeah.
Oh really? Cool.
I thought I was the out of towner.
Okay.
We are you from, Andrew?
So I'm, near Des Moines, Iowa here.
Oh, okay.
So not too far, but.
Yeah, that's probably the door.
Yeah, far enough.
Yeah.
I see a face I don't know, Mister Bachelor.
I believe he's brand new. From meetup.com.
Yeah, I don't believe I've met him.
Sure.
That's okay, we, we welcome. Do people all the time.
And then they find out about us and they never come back.
Thank you.
And don't look at the junk pile behind me.
Okay. Hmm. Good.
And Laura, your background, Steve.
Hey, Dave Forrest is leaving the room. Thank you, Dave. Hope you enjoyed the meeting.
I've tried background doing a lot of that stuff, none of it ever works.
How do you blur the background?
You clicked a button, it says border background.
I don't have a button like that.
Under Moore.
What to your video settings.
Under more, MORE.
Yeah, so click on, where it says start video. There's a little chevron there.
Then one of the options should be blur background.
Oh.
I don't see it.
Next to the start video button at the bottom of the screen, the second from the left. And there's a little up arrow.
Yeah, I've got I've got the video settings up, but I don't see anything that says blur background.
Well, choose virtual backgrounds and under, under that are I think it's under virtual background, might be under video settings.
And mine, it's that.
Oh, no, mine says blow the background.
Yeah, on mine it's a background in effects, but then again, I'm also running on a Windows machine here just because.
Life is easier sometimes giving in to the dark side.
I don't know, I'm making a sign of the cross.
Yeah, virtual background. It's supposed to be able to give you different backgrounds. That has never worked.
But I don't see anything in here that talks about
It's on your video. Like, on the gallery here, if you let right click on your That's where mine is.
Right, click on what?
Good. Right click on your square in the gallery view.
And that's where I had, that's where I found it. It's not in the video settings anymore.
Choose virtual background. Oh, that brings up the old video settings. Maybe my version is too old.
Oh. Right click on your square.
In the. Okay, how are you?
Yeah, I did. I got mute, huge virtual background, PIN video. I non video per hide self view and rename.
Thank you. You're Software is way out of date. It should be the second one on there.
Yeah, okay.
I can't even remember where I downloaded Zoom from.
Zoom.
You get it for
Yeah I figured it'd be the answer.
We'll get it.
Other people are welcome to talk here also besides just Steve and Lee. And they and Gary, be welcome to talk if he could.
Okay.
You're still recording.
We are still recording.
It's Gary not talking.
Yeah, that's good.
I guess that's right. I bet if we turn to recording off, he probably figure out how to get the button going.
Okay.
Yeah, we need to do that. We don't need all this this has been, St.
Louis lineage group meeting for October, which was actually on. Good damn it, where's the?
Nineteenth.
Nineteenth, October nineteenth. Speaker was Ken Johnson with a bunch of last minute topics that was an excellent job.
And