tallship @tallship@social.privacytools.io

@agentcasey

That's not actually a subdomain. It's merely a hostname.

Years ago companies like cPanel bastardized the term to describe the deployment of additional virtual host websites within the same DNS zone and origin, and it became the popular way of describing adding yet another host record to a domain.

It's not a subdomain any more than having the hostname "www". Other popular hostnames, by convention alone, are "mail", "webmail", and "ftp", among many others.

All you did was create a single A record for a hostname in a DNS zonefile and pointed it to an IP address.

To create a subdomain, one MUST "delegate" "Authority" to a child zone with two or more NS records (except in very special circumstances noted below) , referring anyone who asks to the DNS nameservers for that child, which in turn will return the results for that child domain.

If you're scratching your head, it's very commonplace so think of it like this:

SLD.TLD is administered by Joe at the university. Mary is the administrator for the entire math department on campus.

Janet runs the mathlab.

Joe delegates authority of the subdomain math.SLD.TLD to Mary with the two NS records pointing to the DNS servers she administers, and in her zonefile Mary delegates the subdomain 'lab' to Janet in the same way.

Janet has four machines in her lab and assigns an A record for each of them. Those hosts are:

www.lab.math.SLD.TLD (the webserver)

mail.lab.math.SLD.TLD (the mail server)

janet.lab.math.SLD.TLD (Janet's workstation)

student001.math.lab.SLD.TLD (workstation)

Janet also installs a NextCloud server and a WriteFreely instance on the webserver, and assigns the following hostnames corresponding to those websites with A records pointing to the IP address of the webserver (www) where she had created those virtual hosts in the Apache or Nginx config file:

NextCloud.lab.math.SLD.TLD

WriteFreely.lab.math.SLD.TLD

"TLD" is the Top-Level Domain under the root, which is expressed as ".", but usually assumed without having to use it syntactically in all notation. The Top-Level Domain is administered by the Internet Registry.

"SLD.TLD" is the Second Level Domain name registered by Joe for the university under the Top-Level Domain "TLD" at the registry.

math.SLD.TLD is a "3rd level domain", a subdomain of SLD.TLD, the "Authority" of which, was delegated to Mary by Joe.

lab.math.SLD.TLD is a "4th level domain", a subdomain of math.SLD.TLD, the Authority was delegated to Janet by Mary.

I personally use the shorthand, 3LD and 4LD to keep things easy to read.

Everything else (www, mail, janet, student001, nextcloud, and writefreely) are just hostnames. Period.

The webserver listens on its IP address for three hostnames to answer to, and serve pages via HTTP protocol from the corresponding virtual hosts configured for that server. Those three virtual hosts are:

www.lab.math.sld.tld

nextcloud.lab.math.sld.tld

writefreely.lab.math.sld.tld

These three hostnames are virtual hosts on a webserver, configured as "VirtualHost" containers (Apache) or Server Blocks (Nginx). They are not subdomains by any measure, but do exist in the 4LD (subdomain) of lab.math.sld.tld.

Operationally, everything is case insensitive. I only added the caps for emphasis. Most of everything is converted to uppercase by the DNS Servers, however. The reasons for this goes back to the original Jeeves server in the mid eighties.

So the next time some one click install, self-professed so-called *webmaster* says that hostnames are subdomains, you'll know that they're full of shit and don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

I did blur the distinctions between zones and domains for the purposes of this discussion, in order to make things easier to digest. If you want more information you can consult the Internet RFCs, which are the definitive authoritative source, but a great online resource that is an easy read is:

http://zytrax.com/books/dns/ch9/subdomain.html

Although this hasn't been updated in about 15 years, I would also highly recommend the old gold standard O'reilly book, DNS and BIND, by Cricket Liu and Paul Albitz, the latter of which is one of the original developers of BIND:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/dns-and-bind/0596100574/

Having worked with DNS since 1985 when we officially deployed it on the ARPANET/MILNET, I've seen a lot of confusion and misrepresentation surrounding this simple, yet core concept of internetworking.

There have been very few changes in the core concepts of DNS since Jon Postel and Paul Mockipetris published the first RFCs on it, mostly relating to the addition of TLDs and then moving the .ARPA TLD to be used only for reverse DNS in the in-addr.arpa zone. Paul also wrote Jeeves, the very first DNS server, that we continued to use until about 1987 or so.

I should mention that there is the notion of a 'pseudo' subdomain, with it's own $ORIGIN contained in the parent zonefile, but I won't go into that here and suffice it to say this this not what you did when you thought you had created a subdomain.

The only use case I've ever seen for pseudo subdomains are when infra is being built but the AUTH nameservers haven't been fully deployed yet - like if a school needs to delegate Authority but they're infrastructure didn't have the resources for additional nameservers.

This way, using include files, the administrator of the child domain can affect changes within only their zone, and permission is usually granted so that they can use sudo to affect a reload of named (or whatev DNS server they're using) without having to involve administrators of the parent domain.

You'll see this in things like school districts where the budget can't accommodate the costs of additional DNS servers for each elementary and highschool, as an example, so the tech person at those schools can deploy and retire the ever changing inventory of computing devices at the satellite campus.

In any case, the first link I left you above includes an accurate treatment on how to do just that.

It's certainly NOT what a cPanel server or any web hosting control panel is even prepared to do - they just add new A records for the new hostnames.

I hope that helps! :)

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#tallship #Vger #DNS #subdomains #zone #BIND #Jeeves #hostname #recursion #resource_record #delegation #Authority #ORIGIN #SysAdmin #named #virtual_host #web_server #apache #nginx #server_block

@agentcasey

Simple. Just install NextCloud on the VPS and when you edit your existing Nginx conf file you add in the server block for the NextCloud server.

Say, one server block for the hostname wf.mybox.tld (already existing) and one new server block for nc.mybox.tld.

If you're running Apache, same thing, except they're called VirtualHost containers.

Create the new A RR and if you have IPv6 an AAAA RR pointing to the servers IP for the hostname nc.mybox.tld. you know how to do this because you've already done the DNS for the wf virtual host already, and you've made a server block for nc already on your home LAN.

Then:

$ sudo systemctl reload nginx

Done. Easy Peasy! 🤘😎🤘

Depending on what other services you want your NextCloud server to deliver you might need to open more ports on your firewall with UFW, but you already have 443 open for wf so it will also work for nc.

You can add as many other websites and services as you have resources for too 🙂

You can even install a Pleroma server, but the server block for that will be configured as a reverse proxy because it runs as it's own daemon on another port.

Where your at at it, you might as well install a local SMTP and an IMAP server for mail, but that you're kewl with editing your DNS zonefiles, and a caching BIND server like named to handle all the local requests, and pointy your
/etc/resolv.conf to it on order to speed things up a little bit.

You'll need at least three more DNS RRs, an A (and possibly an AAAA) RR, an MX RR, and couple of TXT RRs for SPF and DKIM.

For those last two records there are plenty of online tools to automatically generate, for example, your Domains SPF record.

Again, Easy Peasy.

All instructions above assume you're running Debian GNU/Linux. Frinds don't let frinds run ewb00ntew. But Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, SuSE, and any of the BSDs are excellent platforms too.

You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

I hope that helps! :)

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randomTemp17921468125339692250.…

I think this speaks for itself
randomTemp12223091630857920685.…

FOSS and Privacy as Standard Method series:

Here's a little sump'in sump'in. A bit of light reading that helps explain how FOSS can have a vested interest as your servant rather than packaging you as its product, as most closed source proprietary platforms do:

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-vs-google-chrome/

#tallship #Vger #FOSS #open_source @OpenSource #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

@PonyPanda @Oblivia @ethot @screamingfrog

Here's that landing page I mentioned:
https://jointhefedi.com/

h/t to mk@spinster.xyz for doing such a fantastically beautiful job on it. Having things that look really nice goes a long way toward making n00bs feel that something is accessible :)

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@PonyPanda

There's a great landing page I boosted a couple of days ago that' #user_friendly. You can look that up. Heck, it might even be ethot that made it. I just can't remember lolz.

Anyway, stats are readily available and simple enough to find in the Fediverse, made even easier by a few #metrics sites like Fediverse . Network, which sadly, went offline recently along with the #Pleroma site of its maintainer. I asked Gargron about that and he said he doesn't know why, so if anyone can shed some light 🙂

Anyway, Fediverse servers are self reporting, and most do not opt out. More info on that is here:
https://info.pleroma.cloud/federation.html

I tend to disagree with much of what the well meaning and well informed folks in this thread have been postulating, and frankly, having used and administered email systems since before we introduced #IP (replacing #NCP on 01 January 1983), especially the well intended simile that Alex and ethot tried to draw with SMTP.

But suffice it to mention that #Fediverse servers only require a single A or AAAA RR to function, while #SMTP also needs an MX RR to effectively participate (leaving out #DKIM, #SPF, and other #TXT records, etc).

The *forgone* conclusion that was mentioned, however, is supported by the fact that #Jon_Postel did assign it official port numbers in his nom de guerre role as #IANA - which is actually a real thing now, and not just a role account (The Evil #ICANN, but I digress). Of course, this didn't happen independent of requests for comment - again, this to too was Jon, as he was also the #RFC maintainer.
🤘😎🤘

I don't like to think of #Fediverse as 'alternative' - it's just a #decentralized #disruptor network that I enjoy using. If it isn't someone else's cup of tea then that's kewl too. #Faceplant #Twatter, and #InstaSPAM don't float my boat.

Some here have inferred that #Fedi is a thing, maybe the next thing, but not the thing after that which will replace it. Well, I don't look at things like #Mastodon or #Friendica or #Zap or #Pixelfed or #Funkwhale or #GNUSocial as Fediverse - they're just platforms, social in this case, that "are capable" of #federating with the Fediverse... The Fediverse not actually being about people at all, but rather, #machines that accommodate the exchange of #communication and #information over (primarily) the ActivityPub and #OStatus protocols, among a could of others that can be bridged in by server platforms that also speak other protocols such as Diaspora.

Thinking that Mastodon and Pleroma servers are the backbone of the Fediverse is just plain "wrong think". What I see happening actually, are future transfigurations whereby other, more capable protocols obviate #ActivityPub much in the same way that ActivityPub has mostly supplanted OStatus - server platforms that wish to remain relevant and viable will integrate newer protocols eventually deprecating the older ones as they become less viable, and newer server platforms arrive all the time - some are successful, and some aren't. In fact, Pleroma started out as merely a front end, and #Misskey enjoys a large footprint in the Fediverse as well.

Now, since this thread is really about #people, and not #machinery, and the platforms with their associated instances that might best serve any specific special interest, I'd better get back #on_topic lolz...

The graphic earlier, of #instances where folks love to hate and paint themselves into a corner (as you were so illustrious in pointing out in your blockbot comment on Twatter), well I think that's a wonderful thing. Why? Because those fuckers know who they are, what they like, and what they want to see; and that my friend, is what the #social aspect of the Fediverse is all about.

Go and open a fresh account at Twatter. You won't see Jack shit until you start following accounts. Same thing in the Fediverse. And it was the same thing at #gplus, there's always a bit of a learning curve when you first set down the lunar lander on the surface of a moon.

Now, there is the notion of, on Mastodon-esque platforms, a #feed that is really fricken' #noisy, and which includes all of the instances with that your instance currently #federates with, as well as a feed that shows traffic of all the #actor accounts that everyone in your instance follows, and a feed that includes those that you alone follow. So this curve doesn't need to be so steep - but noisy is a technical term, to put it socially it's a cacophany that includes love, hate, tech, anime, frogs (you said that's your thing?), politico, hobbies, crafts, art - you name it.

The filtering mechanisms available to the user enable the participant to finely home the precise kind of view into the Fediverse that one is desirous of. It takes time, and a bit of patience. You didn't build your #InstaSPAM stream in a day either.

In a nutshell, from an operational standpoint, it doesn't really matter which instance that someone joins, although it does make the curve less steep if you deploy an instance that serves the needs of your particular **community**.

The word #community is of paramount significance here, since joining an instance where folks are hostile to your proclivities will likely result in a less than enjoyable experience, to say the least, in these months of #censorship and #cancel_culture. But this too shall pass. It's just a fad where communities of people are trying to form and decide how #inclusive or #exclusionary those folks wish to be with others in the world - and that is okay too. Hey, some people just ain't happy unless they're miserable, right?

So the Fediverse affords them this customized #social_network. Again, this is a good thing coz it's like Burger King:

"Hold the pickles hold the lettuce special orders don't upset us all we ask is that you let us serve it your way."

Perhaps your best bet is to choose a server platform that fits your style of usage and launch your own instance. I often hear people retort that it's too #complicated (there are hosting providers), that it's too #expensive (you can do this in your own home in an rPi or and old win95 beater box collecting dust in your garage), or that they're too #lazy (kewl, just get an account anywhere in the Fediverse and figure it out or stay with Faceplant and Twatter). In the end, the most important thing to remember is that you will indeed, and undoubtedly, "Have it your way (at #Burger_King)."

Finally, I'd like to mention GAB. That started of as a #mononolithic_silo, like Parler and Faceplant, and when it became apparent that their dev team couldn't cut the mustard they switched to Mastodon with all of the out of the box benefits that it came with. Good for them! Who gives a shit?

And they've since defederated from the rest of the Fediverse and you know what? Good for them! Who gives a shit?

The important takeaway here is that they've always known that they can have it their way. That's what the Fediverse is socially, and they've also demonstrated how it works functionally. They're now an #intraFedi, rather than an #interFedi, and I for one am glad that those folks got to leverage Fediverse technology where their own empowerment is concerned - it demonstrated that anyone can create a more attractive #social_fabric for themselves that exists in a #decentralized #FOSS based, #privacy_respecting model, independent from and exclusive of the contemporary corporate #monolithic silos that package you up as product with a cute little green bow tied arround wrapping paper that says, "Happy Birthday Jesus"... umm, wait. I mean, "Happy Birthday Mark Zuckerberg".

So yeah, use that link to the jason data and all you need to do is just change the hostname to glean several different kinds of stats about instances - purpose/use case, membership, traffic, filtering and federating info, etc.

There are other actual sites that track this data but none as responsive and comprehensive as Fediverse . Network is, or maybe was. Actual stats across all of the different protocols was rather comprehensive.

Here's a couple of others for you to share and do please *boost* this post if you found anything valuable in what I've covered here:

https://fediverse.party/en/portal/servers

https://the-federation.info/Pleroma

I hope that helps! :)

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#tallship #Vger I can haz #Cheezburgerz? 🍔

@Oblivia @ethot @screamingfrog

@sneak @dsv @CodingOtaku

Other admins and myself are seeing huge increases, in Matrix signups and on Fediverse instances that we run, so I'm not sure what you're basing your opinion on, other than a bit of excitement because Snowden gives his nod of approval and Musk made a recommendation - both sound recommendations IMO, but the current woes only serve to demonstate how vulnerable Signal is to a takedown - like some other recent examples in the social networking world.

There is CableIM, but it's simple enough to just fork Signal yourself and build that out in a distributed fashion, yet the one very distasteful thing in my mouth is the fact that Signal depends upon a DID that you have to expose, and that's simply not acceptable for any of my clients. I suppose it's alright for the Whatsapp folks lol. They already don't mind.

Jabber, on the other hand, well I thiink the last time I used one of my XMPP accounts was when I was on a contract w/GoDaddy. I took down my ejabberd years ago. I've just got no use for it.

Matrix serves several use cases as well that Signal just can't. I use a lot of bridges between other platforms such as IRC, Slack, Telegram, because my clients ask for that. On my own homeservers I bridge IRC to freenode. Matrix rooms can accommodate many other avenues of communication that don't depend on encryption, while still affording you such when the users are using a Matrix client, so you have the best of both worlds, and Signal hasn't maintained a very good track record with me personally where video and audio calls are concerned, with Matrix being pretty much flawless all the time.

One thing I think you're overlooking here too, is that this isn't a popularity contest. FOSS doesn't actually care if you adopt it or not - that's why Microsoft eventually had to kneel and kiss the Linux ring after so many years of claiming it was Satan, and forcing people to kneel down and kiss the Borg Ring of Bill Gates back in the day - it just wasn't a sustainable war, kinda like any country that's tried to occupy Afghanistan, they have nothing to lose but everyone who tries to occupy them has plenty to lose.

So in the end, Linux triumphed, being villified by Mircosoft did nothing to prevent its adoption at a slow and metered pace until Android was introduced, then the war was over.

The same with distributed communication networks - First, we retired NCP and replaced it with IP on 01 January 1983, now all networks are migrating toward that model in the open source world. Signal can do it too, or not. It's not like it really matters because it's a good product but I've currently got Cerulean in Beta on a couple of instances although it's not polished as of yet, It's a great alternative to the three major microblogging platforms in the Fediverse (Mastodon, Misskey, and Pleroma).

I like that it has reddit style threading too. I'm not much of a fan of the Twatter style thread posting. And in a world where folks want to self-host and decide for themselves whether they wish to federate or not, Matrix gets a lot of points there too.

"IBM wanted CP/M prompts. It made me throw up."

- Tim Paterson

Flawless, small footprint, and works as described. Without a doubt the very best voice recorder I've ever used, with simple (that's a pundit), no frills controls that you need and none that you don't which you would never use anyway.

Get it @fdroidorg -Droid

Simple Voice Recorder - Record any audio easily (An easy way of recording any discussion or sounds without ads or internet access) - https://f-droid.org/packages/com.simplemobiletools.voicerecorder

#tallship #Vger #FOSS #OpenSource @OpenSource

@gdroid #com_simplemobiletools_voicerecorder #fdroid_app_comments

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#Big_FOSS:

A great way to help ensure the protection of your personal #privacy though the #advocacy of #FOSS and the #Fediverse is to avoid providing links to monolithic silos like #YouTube and #InstaSPAM from within the Fediverse.

Using tools like #Bibliogram and #Yotter, or #Nitter and others, posting links to videos and other content through these FOSS tools instead.

For example, here's a YouTube video on how to use #Invidious, and I've posted the link through Invideous itself to demonstrate how you too can help in making a difference:

https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=JvJVvP5JIgs

Of course, uploading videos, photos, songs, and podcasts directly to instances in the Fediverse itself using servers running #PeerTube, #Pixelfed, and #Funkwhale are ideal solutions, but when such content isn't available in the Fediverse directly the tools above do a nice job at protecting the privacy of others and yourself - without being tracked and quantified as a commodity to be harvested like a crop.

#tallship #Vger #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

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#German_Government orders Tutanola to #deploy_backdoors #exposing the #private_data and #intellectual_property of customers...

https://teddit.net/r/tutanota/comments/kaawl1/german_court_forces_encrypted_email_provider

@phryk

Not true.

Buy a #DID and install #Linphone or something comparable from F-Droid.

Everything you actually need such as contacts, calculators, calendars, file managers, cameras, and galleries can be found there, and much, much more. Checkout:

https://www.simplemobiletools.com/

For email, #FairEmail is really awesome. Also available on F-Droid. See my earlier review here or on G-Droid.

In the future, you should #backup your data - and not in Google. Keep those #passwords and other #keys backed up too so you don't lose that #shit again - #KeepassDX works flawlessly on #Android for that, and #syncs well with #KeepassXC, supported #cross_platform on all #desktop OSes.

Now all you need to do is make sure you're always connected to #WiFi so you can make and receive #phone calls and have #Internet access for all of your other apps. For that, you can get yourself a so-called #MiFi puck and carry that around in your pocket everywhere you go as your WiFi #Hotspot. You can get one with unlimited #4G that respects your #privacy here:

https://calyxinstitute.org/membership

Best of all, everything I've listed is #FOSS.

I hope that helps! :)

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#tallship #Vger #VoIP #fdroid #gdroid #calyx @gdroid @fdroidorg @OpenSource

You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

Yup. Haters gonna hate.

One if the very worst Fediverse clients for #Android (Tusky) is a #crippleware app that codes exclusionary #censorship into it's baked code - without even publicly disclosing that fact.

Talk about nefarious.

But the very best #Fediverse client that supports multiple accounts, and multiple types of Fediverse servers, including #Friendica, #Pixelfed, #Peertube, #Pleroma, and others, without censorship or baked in crippleware like Tusky, has found it's lead developer and creator so incessantly harassed that he has just walked away from all of his social media accounts in the Fediverse.

#Fedilab alone is the Android app that is enjoying overwhelming use and adoption by those who are disgusted and disenchanted with all of the vitriolic cacophany that permeates the timelines of those monolithic silos over at #Faceplant and #Twatter and #InstaSPAM, among others, and now those same despicable, hateful individuals that have turned those sites into cesspits of hatred and ad hominem have driven Fedilab's developer from the Fediverse in that same kind of disgust.

I haven't anything much more to say about that, except that those hateful fuckers can go and eat a fucking dick!

Fuckin' punk ass little pussy bitches!

https://framagit.org/tom79/fedilab/-/issues/498

Google play is as sportsmanlike as a kick in the nuts, but stating the obvious seems to be America's favourite pastime.

--

#Google Play is #unsportsmanlike, U.S. states likely to argue in potential lawsuit

State attorneys general are planning a third lawsuit against #Alphabet Inc's Google, this one focused on the search and advertising giant's Play Store for Android phones, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

https://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSKBN29K2BD

Don't you like the embed youtube movies in mastodon? Install this addon and all embedded youtube movies redirect to invidio.us : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/invidition/
Only for #firefox users.

If anyone is looking for a place to host their Git repositories or mirror any GitHub/GitLab projects, https://git.privacytools.io/ is now open for registrations! 😄