@AdamF What hasn't made you happy with Unifi? That's what I'd be deploying.

@Oksana Seems weird choices. What does either do better than ProxMox or other totally free and open choices? They both come with loads of risk and support issues. How do they justify the cost or risk when every aspect of them is worse than the baseline?

The 8.x family is based on the great Debian 12 "Bookworm" and comes with a 6.2 kernel, QEMU 8.0.2, LXC 5.0.2, OpenZFS 2.1.11.

https://www.proxmox.com/en/downloads

I think that you can install MeshCentral on Chromebooks now.

@WrCombs that site doesn't even exist here.

@JaredBusch said in Configure Mastodon to Use Zoho ZeptoMail for SMTP Email:

@scottalanmiller said in Configure Mastodon to Use Zoho ZeptoMail for SMTP Email:

@PhlipElder said in Configure Mastodon to Use Zoho ZeptoMail for SMTP Email:

All of our mail servers are properly set up with a SmartHost, SPF, and DMARC. We don't have any reputation issues. That's a 2000s kind of problem.

No, it's current. Microsoft blacklists entire datacenters still. There's a lawsuit in Illinois about it that they lost. It's a very real thing still that RBL are used by the majors (like Microsoft, but not Google) and used to shut down entire ISPs and IP blocks. I've been brought in to help providers with these issues, it's a huge legal problem and if you don't get hit with it, it seems like it doesn't exist, and if you do get hit, it seems like there's no recourse (hint: there isn't.)

MS blocks entire IP blocks based on ISP ownership of said IP at the ISP request. It is fucking horrid.

Example (a Comcast IP): https://check.spamhaus.org/listed/?searchterm=69.139.101.133

They do, but they also block ISPs at the request of OTHER ISPs!! It's nuts. They are super willing to block anyone and everyone and there's no process for fixing it.

@stacksofplates said in Installing Mastodon 4.1.2 on Debian 11:

Their official image is here ghcr.io/mastodon/mastodon

Yeah, that one was flaky. But is it official? Why's it on a different account?

@jt1001001 said in ESXi for Free: Pros & Cons:

I will be glad when this month is over as we're decomissioning our "free" ESXI server and going to absolutely nothing (yea cloud!!)

REad: KVM

@PhlipElder said in Configure Mastodon to Use Zoho ZeptoMail for SMTP Email:

Mastodon is temperamental with SMTP.

Like from version to version? What does it do? It's sad that they've not implemented API calls yet.

@PhlipElder said in Configure Mastodon to Use Zoho ZeptoMail for SMTP Email:

All of our mail servers are properly set up with a SmartHost, SPF, and DMARC. We don't have any reputation issues. That's a 2000s kind of problem.

No, it's current. Microsoft blacklists entire datacenters still. There's a lawsuit in Illinois about it that they lost. It's a very real thing still that RBL are used by the majors (like Microsoft, but not Google) and used to shut down entire ISPs and IP blocks. I've been brought in to help providers with these issues, it's a huge legal problem and if you don't get hit with it, it seems like it doesn't exist, and if you do get hit, it seems like there's no recourse (hint: there isn't.)

@PhlipElder said in Installing Mastodon 4.1.2 on Debian 11:

Mastodon is very particular about component versions. So, while we take the out of the box Ubuntu LTS version there's been times where we've tweaked the repository for a specific component version.

That's what I was suspecting. Debian felt like a few fewer "tweaking" components compared to Ubuntu with any semblance of being updated.

@PhlipElder what are you using Mastodon for over there? Internal corporate use? Private group? Public server?

This is a testing instance for us, but we hope to take it live soon and it is going to be public.

@PhlipElder said in Installing Mastodon 4.1.2 on Debian 11:

I've not had the time to compile them into a How To as of yet as each successive install has needed to be tweaked so keeping a public facing How To is out of the question.

I think that the Mastodon team has had the same issue and just gave up, lol.

@PhlipElder said in Installing Mastodon 4.1.2 on Debian 11:

We install on Ubuntu and yeah, their documentation really sucks. There's lots of little tweaks that need to be done outside of what they have.

Current or LTS? I tried on current and there are some super recent breaking changes in the last few weeks that basically don't work on Ubuntu 23.04. I didn't try LTS because once doing that, I looked and Debian 11 felt like the better choice and it worked with a LOT fewer tweaks. At least Debian 11 is current, at the moment (but not for long, lol.)

That Mastodon requires Ruby 3.0.6, what the heck. I couldn't get it to run on 3.0.4 with the latest Mastodon 4.1.2 and Ubuntu couldn't compile 3.0.6 successfully and it isn't available for it any other way and Mastodon isn't yet compatible with Ruby 3.1 or 3.2, which is even more ridiculous.

ugh.

@Oksana said in ESXi for Free: Pros & Cons:

Most admins know that VMware offers Free and Evaluation versions of their hypervisor. However, there are still some nuances that explain why people would actually buy ESXi.

And then they realize that htey should have been on KVM because even paid ESXi isn't up to par.

@PhlipElder said in Configure Mastodon to Use Zoho ZeptoMail for SMTP Email:

We have an internal IIS or Exchange based SMTP server that we set up for this. It's just too painful otherwise to figure out.

We never do that because it's too temperamental. If you get blacklisted or anything, all it takes is your datacenter getting listed by some random group and suddenly O365 blocks you. We do this with Postfix which is faster, easier and more stable than Exchange (in places where we deal with Exchange we typically put Postfix in front of it for safety) but only to relay to ZeptoMail or SendGrid or Mailgun because that's how you make transactional Exchange or Postfix the most reliable.

@PhlipElder said in Configure Mastodon to Use Zoho ZeptoMail for SMTP Email:

It's also temperamental. It will just stop working.

ZeptoMail? I've never had that happen.

Public notice to all of the bots that try to sign up here... if you sign up with HotMail or Proton mail, we know you're a bot. LOL

This is tested with Mastodon 4.1.2. ZeptoMail is Zoho transactional email system. This is not well documented from either side, so here are the working details.

SMTP_SERVER=smtp.zeptomail.com
SMTP_PORT=587
SMTP_LOGIN=emailappsmtp.20ct9yn34098tv75 (this is your login, NOT the generic API that Zepto shows in samples)
SMTP_PASSWORD=password (the password supplied by ZeptoMail "less secure" option)
SMTP_AUTH_METHOD=plain
SMTP_OPENSSL_VERIFY_MODE=none
SMTP_ENABLE_STARTTLS=auto
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