🇺🇸 · Noisebridge · Mcint
create page New page (Preamble: = Meetup - Infra = https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meetups/Infra https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meetups/Infra/2026-..-.. ) 2026-06-22 m [[Meetups/Infra]] {{meetups/infra}} <!-- header --> (TODO summary) == Introductions == * [name] - [background]. [goals for meetup, or interests to explore] * Loren - cloud, backend enginner - new NB infra h/t Elan, confess my sins of OAuth2 and OIDC setup failures (so far) for MediaWiki & Keycloak * Elan - working with Ciara & Dave on setting up NB infra services, on a journey learning * Juan - mainly experiences in frontend stuff, looking to get into architecture and backend, * Dave - does infrastructure * Oleg - first time here, also does infrastructure, far too many interests/projects. Music, hardware hacking, Nix * Harrison - is "null"one * Kevin - truthy * Doug - still likes computers, recently lost a screen to gravity * Chris (not here) - design engineer * Ciara - Likes Matrix and mastodon and self-hosting and working on the noisegarden * Jet - Understands a little more about ssh.. will fill us in later * Victor - do lots of stuff with Linux & nix * Noah - electical engineering, ML stuff * mohammed - worked at a startup, doing agents for healthcare, figuring out what to build next * Eugene - building out nix systems: laptops & NAS for backups, 3-2-1 strategy, ZFS * Robert - building out ereader system...compiled languages * Gwen - here to learn, peer to peer == Lesson or Demo == * Read aloud: clarify for meetup. We are taking notes in a riseup pad (or I am--help appreciated, and links). We have meeting notes posted to the wiki. noisebridge.net, search Infra, or Meetups/Infra. (the Infrastructure page has a disambiguation link.) * Shell, web services, self-hosting, networking! https://computernetworkingsimplified.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/email.jpg * Jet: "Are you sick of email?" Jet was hired as founding engineer for an email company, got laid off. For 3 months worked 24/7 80 hrs/wk on email. We may have heard of stereotypes: that email is hard. Jarring issue with email: that there are only five major email services / servers in the world or on the internet. The origins story: how emails were originally: Messages on campuses where a precursor contained queued messages that folks sent to one another as notes. The problem: Someone iterated through all the users and blasted email to everyone. This was the start of spam. Email servers are fairly undefended and vulnerable and there's an arms-race because the protocol is mostly not defended. The result is an centralization of email servers in the contemporary world, due to the effort it takes to maintain reputation and security and constrain spam. Reputation is an organic response to spam that has arisen. This is a nontrivial and non-email-spec system that is necessary to interact with in order to send email. The barrier to entry to scale this is significant, scaling up to $10s of ks. This is due to the baysian reputation system used by most email providers. They handle reputation on IP/ASN/Domain. Ip is the most important. One aspect of the protocol that sucks: queuing. Mail queing was designed at a time when computers were super-slow. Not true anymore, today's tech is so much faster. But queued sending, delivery and receipt of email is still how it's done, and it's much slower than it needs to be. Sending client->senders-server->recipient-server->recipient-client is the current mail system topology. SMTP has a bunch of error types: this is sent via an internal / system email back at your address asyncronously. Ciara: The email queueing system is entirely oriented around significant amounts of downtime. It'll keep retrying heavily like most old-school queuing. It's mostly a good technology, truly decentralized. it's still possible to make it work (particularly for anarchists). Call to action: Enable DANE (re: DNSSEC) & DMARC, SPF, and DKIM * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities * https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/ So receiving email is not an issue, but sending is. Is there a way to get better sending by borrowing someone else's reputation? Yes, pay for an email relay, they'll do it carefully. Some companies let you proxy for incoming mail. Or just use proton mail (dislike company). Dave: if you self-host -- separate your marketing emails from your identity emails — you can lock people out by bad spam reputation. Adverse selection - on rental IPs. IPV6: History of why IPv4 is about us running out of IPs https://computernetworkingsimplified.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/smtp.jpg EMail... not compatible with ipv6? (wat) https://beta.computer-networking.info/syllabus/default/protocols/email.html (intros cont') * Custom keyboard - Oleg - QMK-VIZ - https://github.com/NonLogicalDev/tool.qmk-viz https://keyboard-layout-editor.com https://qmk.fm/ uses: Input Club infinity ergodox Eugene: how's qmk with bluetooth nowadays? I use ZMK, better for splits. https://zmk.dev/ Keyboard comment layouts React in terminal pretext https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink * ATproto (Loren) - ** at proto PDS concern (+ weird pitch) The tl;dr of the pitch: Could we host a PDS specifically for noisebridge for internal usage and checking out infra and/or hosting space-specific internal information (Dave checked out the drill!) KeyOxide: (who remembers keybase - it allowed people to assert their ownership of public keys and claims: This is a standardization of .well_known and similar. A means to assert public information. * CrowdSec - Elan Elan: VPS - We're hosting some stuff somewhere in Helsinki - We're hosting Git-forge - We're hosting some information and our internal services and CI/CD Pipeline We're currently running both Anubis, Failtoban and Crowdsec: - A distributed and collective means to block bad traffic - high-level architectural overview: VPS acts as an ingress gateway into the tailnet. The tailnet is also possible for folks to join directly * Git Forges - Oleg * OAuth2 & Keycloak (Loren) - Ciara: - Supply-chain attacks hitting Aur - LetsEncrypt outage: down for a few hours. Given this affected only issuance, the impact was limited. Letsencrypt is subject to US export controls, which raises an additional set of concerns. == Outros == * Jessica - figuring out this website * Oleg: A lot of new services to look into, 16 * Juan: Greatly appreciated the email talk and the complexity there * Elan - Email talk by Jet * Loren - Email talk by Jet * Ciara - curious to look more into Ozone, that bsky ecosystem. Curiuos about dual-hosting posts. Footgun, tripwires, landmines - in * Doug - persistence of email, here to stay * Kevin - Email is not great, let's use Matrix * Harrison - will use finnish vps sit to save a bit of money * Victor - look into the noisegarden stuff, how it's set up * Dave - impressed by the noisegarden work, and look into the keyoxide stuff * Gwen - always learning * Robert - trying to make an interface with ''slint'', for the Kobe Clara ..ereader * Jet - libssh, node-ssh, bun-ssh chat * Eugene - kudos to NoiseGarden - always interested in decentralized social media, sucker for keyboards == Questions, Discussion, or Coworking == * [Issue] = For next time = == Questions == == Readings & Exercises == * Readings ** * Exercises ** == Join online == * Try it yourself! ** Join libera.chat #nb-meetup-infra https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meetups/Infra