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Mesh WiFi and Linux - experiences and recommendations wanted
by Chris Green 27 Dec '21

27 Dec '21

We have a big house and parts of it have 1930s brick walls so to provide reasonable WiFi coverage needs several APs in addition to the Draytek 2860n router which does the VDSL as well. At present, we have wired ethernet to the following:- Draytek 2860n in my study upstairs, provides reasonable WiFi upstairs (not heavily used anyway). VDSL (FTTC) comes in here. TP-Link TD9980 router used as an AP in the breakfast room at the back of the house, provides WiFi in breakfast room, kitchen and outside, seems pretty reliable. Draytek 2820n used as AP in the lounge, covers lounge and dining room, this needs replacing as it's showing its age. Tenda W311R used as AP in my wife's Cabin which is thirty or forty metres from the house, UTP ethernet cable is buried. Works pretty much OK in the cabin except, occasionally, when the RJ45 plug gets pulled out! :-) Each router has its own SSID, '2860n', 'breakfast', 'lounge', 'cabin'. I just disconnect and reconnect my laptop as I go back and forth between the breakfast room and the lounge (I have a two character command line script to do it for me). People with mobile phones seem to manage reasonably OK but I suspect it's not ideal for them. However, as noted above, the Draytek 2820n is getting a bit unreliable (dropped connections, odd other quirks) and its wired switch is only 100Mb/s so wired clients in the lounge are limited to 100Mb/s when using the LAN. So I'm looking for something to replace the 2820n. As you can see from the above I'm not one to buy new stuff when it's not necessary, all my 'APs' are actually old routers with the WAN side not used. I *do* need wired ethernet on most of them, the lounge has an Onkyo box and the TV wired, the breakfast room has a Gigaset base station, the cabin has my wife's laptop connected to it quite frequently. So, I've been sort of wondering whether a 'mesh' system will make life easier in the house, pension off the 2820n and the TD9980, ignore the WiFi from the 2860n and have (say) three wired backhaul mesh APs providing coverage. Will this *actually* work for my laptop, or will it simply stay stuck on the first AP it finds? As far as I understand it mesh depends on the *clients* co-operating to some extent and moving from AP to AP and I'm not at all sure my Linux clients are going to do that well. Alternatively should I just do a straight one-for-one replacement of the 2820n with a 'proper' AP? So recommendations and ideas please. If I go for 'mesh' my requirements are:- Web configuration (I hate configuring with a 'phone) Wired backhaul easy Several gigabit wired connections per AP (I think this may be a killer) For a replacement AP I'm after:- Web configuration Gigabit switch incorporated May have to be a router I suppose, if so easy to ignore WAN Finally I don't want to spend hundreds of pounds on this, I *might* stretch to the sort of £150-200 area for a mesh system if I'm persuaded that it will really improve things but that's about my limit. -- Chris Green

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Any Drupal or Node.js experts here?
by Mark Rogers 04 Dec '21

04 Dec '21

I have been asked for assistance upgrading an existing site from Drupal 8 to 9, although this is complicated by it running on a Bitnami stack (which to my knowledge will mean that the site actually needs migrating to a new Bitnami instance with newer PHP versions on it). Similarly, a Node.js v10 application which needs upgrading to v14. I know PHP well, but only having passing acquaintance with Drupal, Bitnami and Node.js. This likely isn't work I would want to undertake myself, so I'm looking for people who would be interested in doing it (commercially, of-course). Any interest? Happy to discuss on- or off-list although unsurprisingly I can't share specifics publicly. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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OT: Debugging a weird web quirk
by Mark Rogers 03 Dec '21

03 Dec '21

I host a wordpress multi-site install for personal use. My Dad has a site on it, and he's come to me with a weird issue that I can't even figure out how to start debugging! If you visit the site in Chrome: https://www.lyveden.org.uk/ .. and visit a page with images, eg "Garden Revealed", you can click on the images to see them full size. However, when you click "back", the browser reverts briefly to the page before showing the image again, and if you click back a second time you are returned o the previous page (the one prior to the one you opened the image from). Dad has reproduced this on three PCs (two Ubuntu, one Windows). I couldn't initially reproduce it until I tried in a private tab, which might be a clue. I tried using Chrome's developer tools to see what was going on but nothing stood out and I was quickly out of my depth! I know it's not Linux related (highly doubt it's a server issue!) so it's OT, but does anyone have any clues? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Capturing a web request (server-side)
by Mark Rogers 01 Dec '21

01 Dec '21

Background: I have some hardware which can make a REST request when an input changes. I'm trying to send that request to a ThingsBoard server but it's generating a mostly useless error (it indicates that the JSON won't decode but won't tell me what's being received). If I direct it to a PHP script on a different server which just logs the POST data, everything looks OK and if I copy+past that same data into a commandline curl request to the TB server it works fine. So whatever is failing is more subtle. So what I want to do is set up a temporary server-side script that will log everything that is received in an HTTP request (URL, POST/GET data, headers, etc). I can then point the hardware at it, and then also the working curl commandline, and see what is different. Any suggestions as to how to do this? Or how better to describe what I' trying to do so I can Google it more effectively? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Mail search that can find an exact date
by Chris Green 29 Nov '21

29 Nov '21

I'm looking for an E-Mail search command that will find an *exact* date. I.e. I know the E-Mail I'm looking for has:- Date: 19 Jan 2010 15:30:24 However none of the mail search programs I've tried seems to be able to handle this, they all want to search for mails in a date range, usually with no time at all specified. I've only tried mairix and grepmail so far but it looks as if notmuch will have the same issues. I know I could simply use grep but that doesn't "know about" E-Mails so although it can find the specific E-Mail it can't show me the E-Mail body which is what I'm after. -- Chris Green

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Best for Twitter?
by Phil Thane 26 Nov '21

26 Nov '21

Hi The only social media I use is Twitter. In the past I've used Choqok as a desktop client but it doesn't play video links you have to click a link to open in a browser. In itself that's not really an issue but it's not always obvious there is a video it could just be a photo and you can see those in Choqok so there's no need to click a link. The result is you either waste time clicking liks tha reveal nothing new, or miss a video. Cawbird does, or rather did, play videos in a popout window but following a distro change/upgrade now doesn't as a rule. I'll post examples of links that do play and don't play in Cawbird and an error message for the latter. It seems to be a GST api problem but I'm not smart enough to fix it, can anyone help? This is an actual post on the Twitter website with a video that _does_ play in Firefox https://twitter.com/RosieisaHolt/status/1464170045861515277 Error message if I try to play in Cawbird: gstvideodecoder.c(1138): gst_video_decoder_sink_event_default (): /GstPlayBin:video/GstURIDecodeBin:uridecodebin2/GstDecodeBin:decodebin2/avdec_mpeg4:avdec_mpeg4-3: no valid frames found Address if I chose 'open in browser' from Cawbird - which also doesn't work https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1464169933110235137/pu/pl/rFhk7k0W508d… This one DOES play in Cawbird and this is the address if I chose 'open in browser' and that works too https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/FFHoG74X0AItrRe.mp4 Those last two addresses are very similar in format except one is actually a link to an mp4 and the other to a container. Is that relevant? -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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Accessing a web page via another server
by Mark Rogers 17 Nov '21

17 Nov '21

My Pi is on my local network (headless and somewhat physically inaccessible) at 192.168.1.200 I have a 3G USB stick connected to my Pi, which presents itself as an ethernet device (eth1); the Pi gets an IP address of 192.168.8.100 and the USB stick has a configuration website on 192.168.8.1 How can I access this website from my laptop (192.168.1.100) via SSH? I tried SSH tunnelling but it's not working, at least in part because the web page links to resources at http://192.168.8.1 which aren't accessible. I have tried w3m on the Pi itself, but the web page has loads of javascript so doesn't work. Presumably I can set up a proxy somehow? Other suggestions? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Replacement for Pinta?
by Steve Mynott 10 Nov '21

10 Nov '21

Has anyone any suggestions for a very simple image editor? I just want something to add text to screenshots which supports multiple layers. I've used Pinta in the past but since they changed the icons in the tools menu & used dark mode it takes me too long to edit since I have to search for "what does the text tool look like"? And the snap version doesn't seem stable. -- Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com> rsa3072/629FBB91565E591955B5876A79CEFAA4450EBD50

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Does anyone here use sshuttle?
by Chris Green 09 Nov '21

09 Nov '21

I've been trying to use sshuttle but I simply can't get anywhere. I have it installed and can run it but it just outputs loads of waffle and leaves me with no command prompt so I can't see how I can possibly do anything. I'm probably doing something stupid or not doing something vital but I can't find any tutorials that actually say 'type this' and then you will have a working sshuttle VPN. So, does anyone here use it, or has anyone here played with it? -- Chris Green

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OT: Mail forwarding and junk folders
by Mark Rogers 21 Oct '21

21 Oct '21

Several family members have domains (mostly at 123-Reg) and use email forwarding for xxx@<their domain> to their personal addresses (eg at Gmail, Virgin, BT, whatever). Increasingly they're finding that mail sent *from* their domain addresses is ending in recipient junk folders. How they send varies: my dad used Thunderbird on Ubuntu (so maybe not entirely OT!), my wife sends via Gmail, others I'm not sure but probably thinks like Outlook/Outlook Express (or whatever it is these days). They'll be using the SMTP settings of their ISP or personal mail provider (eg my wife will be sending via Gmail using her own domain set up as an alias). Since I have several people with issues - and especially since one of them is my wife! - I want to take a fresh look at all of this and get things right. I'm guessing that this is going to involve SPF, DKIM, DMARC stuff that I don't really understand but have succeeded in setting up before. It feels like something that must be a sufficiently common issue that there would be plenty of help out there but it's one of those issues where I can't see the wood for the trees in any search I try, so I'm hoping someone here might have some pointers? The more that can be done server-side the better as that reduces the need for me to help lots of people configure lots of different clients. If I need to move domains from 123-Reg that's not out of the question - indeed I have plans to do that to somewhere I can control DNS, mail forwarding, etc via APIs anyway. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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