that she believed E.T. was real as a kid
Month: October 2022
Twitter to start charging $20 per month for verification
October 31st, 2022And if the employees building it don’t meet their deadline, they’ll be fired by Elon Musk. It sounds wonderful to work there.
Report: M2 Pro and M2 Max Macs coming in 2023, not 2022 | Ars Technica
October 31st, 2022The M2 Max will have 12 CPU cores and 38 GPU cores, up from 10 and 32, respectively
Musk jokes about his deleted tweet sharing misinformation on Pelosi attack
October 31st, 2022In what one of Musk’s first steps as Twitter’s new owner, he chose to amplify a far-right conspiracy theory in a now-deleted tweet garnering scrutiny from all sides.
Libraries Are Becoming a Battleground for LGBTQ+ People
October 31st, 2022Between armed Proud Boys, book bans, and online attacks, librarians are finding themselves at the center of a new assault against queer communities.
Charts.css: CSS data visualization framework
October 30th, 2022RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language
October 29th, 2022Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100.
Welcome to hell, Elon
October 28th, 2022Nilay Patel points out the obvious and inevitable conflict between Elon’s dreams and Twitter’s reality.
Sentry is supporting open source
October 28th, 2022They gave $260,028 to open source maintainers of open source software this year.
IRC with ZNC + certbot
October 28th, 2022IRC is still a thriving space for communication. There are a mountain of communities online that still prefer to use IRC. Some of the most technically capable people I’ve met were found on IRC. In 2021, many communities migrated from freenode to Libera after the Andrew Lee drama (I might write about this later). Check out Libera if you want to join communities for #archlinux, #ansible, ##rust, #emacs, #gentoo, #fedora, #linux, #neovim, #ubuntu, #wikipedia just to name a few.
Onto ZNC…
Why ZNC? It’s a very capable and stable IRC Bouncer. It stays connected to IRC, and you connect to it instead of directly to the IRC server. This allows your IRC client to be “always online” in IRC, so you don’t have to miss any action (thanks to ZNC’s buffer), people can always message you, and it also hides your home IP. You will need a server to run it on, and it runs on linux.
Assumptions:
- znc is installed on your system and your znc config files are in your home directory in ~/.znc (this is the default behavior when installing)
- You want to connect to IRC with a bind host instead of an IP address.
- You’ve already configured rDNS for the IP you want to resolve to the domain you want to connect with.
- You’ve already updated your nameserver’s zone file (A record) so the IP points to the domain (many providers will require the IP to resolve to the hostname before they’ll allow rDNS to point back to the IP).
- You want to connect securely to your znc (and you should!)
Here we go. Use a package manager to install certbot. for instance, yum, if you’re on CentOS.
sudo yum install certbot
Before you actually generate a cert, setup a renewal hook deployment script. This will make sure that when the cert is renewed the files get installed into the right spot to make znc work correctly.
cd /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy/
vi update-znc.pem
Contents:
#!/bin/bash
YOURDOMAIN="some.bind.host.com"
[[ $RENEWED_LINEAGE != "/etc/letsencrypt/live/$YOURDOMAIN" ]] && exit 0
echo "Updating certs"
cat /etc/letsencrypt/live/$YOURDOMAIN/{privkey,fullchain}.pem > /home/YOURNUSERNAME/.znc/znc.pem
You’ll need to update the YOURDOMAIN line to change ‘some.bind.host.com’ to your actual domain. Then generate your cert:
sudo certbot certonly --standalone -d your.bind.host.here.com -m [email protected] --agree-tos
Same here – “your.bind.host.here.com” should match whatever domain you put in the update-znc.pem file. That’s it. Assuming rDNS has propagated across the internet (this can take up to 48 hours in some cases) you should now be able to launch znc, configure it to connect to the IRC networks you want, and then you should be able to connect to your znc using the domain name you specified, with SSL properly configured for the domain name.
Read more on the znc website for details on setting up connections from znc to IRC. https://wiki.znc.in/ZNC
Good luck and happy IRC’ing.