[Cerowrt-devel] Dave needs to get better at pushing out patches

[Cerowrt-devel] Dave needs to get better at pushing out patches

[Dave Taht]

The overhead of formatting a patch properly is trivial.

Getting a patch set into thunderbird or the web so totally dwarfs the
tedium of actually creating the patch, it's unbelievable.

I have a string of mostly trivial patches I could have got out ages
ago with git send-email.  I could slam out patches every day that way
and be a zillion times more effective coding-wise.

All year I have tried to get to where I could send email effectively
from the command line on my laptop or wherever, and today's email
server setups have become so complex that I have completely failed to
find a way to so. (I note that I am frequently offline and need to be
able to do it from my main development box, my laptop, and I have been
highly mobile of late)

I recently spent most of a day trying to get bufferbloat.net's email
server to take email from me, using sasl, or certs, and failed
entirely.

I've been running my own email servers for 3 decades now, It's both
embarrassing to me and unbelievable how difficult it's become to use
such a basic transport.

And I USED to read my email with emacs. I liked it. I was FAR more
productive switching from code to irc to email to patches and back
when I didn't have to run tools like a browser and thunderbird all the
time.

-- 
Dave Täht
SKYPE: davetaht
US Tel: 1-239-829-5608
FR Tel: 0638645374
http://www.bufferbloat.net

Re: [Cerowrt-devel] Dave needs to get better at pushing out patches

[david]

On Thu, 8 Dec 2011, Dave Taht wrote:

> The overhead of formatting a patch properly is trivial.
>
> Getting a patch set into thunderbird or the web so totally dwarfs the
> tedium of actually creating the patch, it's unbelievable.
>
> I have a string of mostly trivial patches I could have got out ages
> ago with git send-email.  I could slam out patches every day that way
> and be a zillion times more effective coding-wise.
>
> All year I have tried to get to where I could send email effectively
> from the command line on my laptop or wherever, and today's email
> server setups have become so complex that I have completely failed to
> find a way to so. (I note that I am frequently offline and need to be
> able to do it from my main development box, my laptop, and I have been
> highly mobile of late)
>
> I recently spent most of a day trying to get bufferbloat.net's email
> server to take email from me, using sasl, or certs, and failed
> entirely.
>
> I've been running my own email servers for 3 decades now, It's both
> embarrassing to me and unbelievable how difficult it's become to use
> such a basic transport.
>
> And I USED to read my email with emacs. I liked it. I was FAR more
> productive switching from code to irc to email to patches and back
> when I didn't have to run tools like a browser and thunderbird all the
> time.

as a holdout pine user I understand your frustration :-)

have you considered doing something like setting up openvpn to connect to 
the bufferbloat.net server and then configuring the mail server to trust 
mail arriving form the VPN clients?

I know this is horrible overkill for such a trivial job, but it avoids all 
the problems of doing authentication for the SMTP connection (and the fact 
that many locations block outbound connections from dhcp addresses to port 
25)

David Lang

Re: [Cerowrt-devel] Dave needs to get better at pushing out patches

[Dave Taht]

On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 12:55 PM,  <david@lang.hm> wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Dec 2011, Dave Taht wrote:
>
>> The overhead of formatting a patch properly is trivial.
>>
>> Getting a patch set into thunderbird or the web so totally dwarfs the
>> tedium of actually creating the patch, it's unbelievable.
>>
>> I have a string of mostly trivial patches I could have got out ages
>> ago with git send-email.  I could slam out patches every day that way
>> and be a zillion times more effective coding-wise.
>>
>> All year I have tried to get to where I could send email effectively
>> from the command line on my laptop or wherever, and today's email
>> server setups have become so complex that I have completely failed to
>> find a way to so. (I note that I am frequently offline and need to be
>> able to do it from my main development box, my laptop, and I have been
>> highly mobile of late)
>>
>> I recently spent most of a day trying to get bufferbloat.net's email
>> server to take email from me, using sasl, or certs, and failed
>> entirely.
>>
>> I've been running my own email servers for 3 decades now, It's both
>> embarrassing to me and unbelievable how difficult it's become to use
>> such a basic transport.
>>
>> And I USED to read my email with emacs. I liked it. I was FAR more
>> productive switching from code to irc to email to patches and back
>> when I didn't have to run tools like a browser and thunderbird all the
>> time.
>
>
> as a holdout pine user I understand your frustration :-)
>
> have you considered doing something like setting up openvpn to connect to
> the bufferbloat.net server and then configuring the mail server to trust
> mail arriving form the VPN clients?
>
> I know this is horrible overkill for such a trivial job, but it avoids all
> the problems of doing authentication for the SMTP connection (and the fact
> that many locations block outbound connections from dhcp addresses to port
> 25)

Both 25 and VPNs are blocked at lincs. 567 works. Neither certs nor
sasl from postfix worked. So far I've figured out

That the last 'update' from ubuntu wiped out my certs on my main
email box.

That dovecot sieve sucks compared to procmail

that they've created a new abstraction for mail handling
for doing sasl that doesn't want to work

and I forget what else.

I mean, mail used to 'just work'. Even with bang
paths it would mostly just work. Nowadays you have
to be a rocket scientist to run your own server,
and damn it, I LIKE running my own mail server.

Or at least, I used to.


>
> David Lang



-- 
Dave Täht
SKYPE: davetaht
US Tel: 1-239-829-5608
FR Tel: 0638645374
http://www.bufferbloat.net

Re: [Cerowrt-devel] Dave needs to get better at pushing out patches

[david]

On Thu, 8 Dec 2011, Dave Taht wrote:

>> as a holdout pine user I understand your frustration :-)
>>
>> have you considered doing something like setting up openvpn to connect to
>> the bufferbloat.net server and then configuring the mail server to trust
>> mail arriving form the VPN clients?
>>
>> I know this is horrible overkill for such a trivial job, but it avoids all
>> the problems of doing authentication for the SMTP connection (and the fact
>> that many locations block outbound connections from dhcp addresses to port
>> 25)
>
> Both 25 and VPNs are blocked at lincs. 567 works. Neither certs nor
> sasl from postfix worked. So far I've figured out

openvpn works over any port you want.

now, as a security person I am going to point out that you should not 
break the security of a company network by establishing a VPN that 
bypasses the security controls.

but if it's just a careless network config (they allow anyone to connect 
to it, but then block specific ports outbound), I feel no guilt over 
establishing connections over oddball ports :-)

I just took an openvpn class, and one of the upcoming features is the 
ability for openvpn to work over ping, so I'll bet that you can make it 
work (odds are really good that it will work over port 443 from just about 
anywhere, and anyone who has security setup well enough that you can't do 
it over 443 is probably a place where youreally shouldn't be doing it 
anywhay :-)

> That the last 'update' from ubuntu wiped out my certs on my main
> email box.
>
> That dovecot sieve sucks compared to procmail
>
> that they've created a new abstraction for mail handling
> for doing sasl that doesn't want to work
>
> and I forget what else.
>
> I mean, mail used to 'just work'. Even with bang
> paths it would mostly just work. Nowadays you have
> to be a rocket scientist to run your own server,
> and damn it, I LIKE running my own mail server.
>
> Or at least, I used to.

It's not quite that bad, but yes, the spammers have required significant 
changes.

If the problem is doing this from one particular network (and one that you 
trust to be sane, like your office), why not just configure the mail 
server to allow unauthenticated mail from that IP (or IP range)?

David Lang

Re: [Cerowrt-devel] Dave needs to get better at pushing out patches

[Dave Taht]

On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 1:18 PM,  <david@lang.hm> wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Dec 2011, Dave Taht wrote:
>
>>> as a holdout pine user I understand your frustration :-)
>>>
>>> have you considered doing something like setting up openvpn to connect to
>>> the bufferbloat.net server and then configuring the mail server to trust
>>> mail arriving form the VPN clients?
>>>
>>> I know this is horrible overkill for such a trivial job, but it avoids
>>> all
>>> the problems of doing authentication for the SMTP connection (and the
>>> fact
>>> that many locations block outbound connections from dhcp addresses to
>>> port
>>> 25)
>>
>>
>> Both 25 and VPNs are blocked at lincs. 567 works. Neither certs nor
>> sasl from postfix worked. So far I've figured out
>
>
> openvpn works over any port you want.

udp is completely blocked here. a tcp implementation of openvpn works,
but at 170ms latencies, it's pretty horrible, and I don't know if
openvpn can do both udp and tcp at the same time.
>
> now, as a security person I am going to point out that you should not break
> the security of a company network by establishing a VPN that bypasses the
> security controls.

I'm not into that too.

>
> but if it's just a careless network config (they allow anyone to connect to
> it, but then block specific ports outbound), I feel no guilt over
> establishing connections over oddball ports :-)

No, they are highly paranoid here. They have grad students to cope with,
and after exposure to them, I kind of understand.

I can get stuff out to the submit port, and it's just remote auth that's
failing me. I'm getting there, but I've had to yank out a lot of hair so
far.

(thx for listening)
>
> I just took an openvpn class, and one of the upcoming features is the
> ability for openvpn to work over ping, so I'll bet that you can make it work

Heh. Even tunneling over DNS is blocked. I had never heard of someone
using ping before now.


> (odds are really good that it will work over port 443 from just about
> anywhere, and anyone who has security setup well enough that you can't do it
> over 443 is probably a place where youreally shouldn't be doing it anywhay
> :-)

443 is kind of in use on all servers I have.
>
>
>> That the last 'update' from ubuntu wiped out my certs on my main
>> email box.
>>
>> That dovecot sieve sucks compared to procmail
>>
>> that they've created a new abstraction for mail handling
>> for doing sasl that doesn't want to work
>>
>> and I forget what else.
>>
>> I mean, mail used to 'just work'. Even with bang
>> paths it would mostly just work. Nowadays you have
>> to be a rocket scientist to run your own server,
>> and damn it, I LIKE running my own mail server.
>>
>> Or at least, I used to.
>
>
> It's not quite that bad, but yes, the spammers have required significant
> changes.

If postel had lived, he'd have found a solution.

>
> If the problem is doing this from one particular network (and one that you
> trust to be sane, like your office), why not just configure the mail server
> to allow unauthenticated mail from that IP (or IP range)?

Not going to be at this office much longer, am mostly on the road.


>
> David Lang



-- 
Dave Täht
SKYPE: davetaht
US Tel: 1-239-829-5608
FR Tel: 0638645374
http://www.bufferbloat.net

Re: [Cerowrt-devel] Dave needs to get better at pushing out patches

[david]

On Thu, 8 Dec 2011, Dave Taht wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 1:18 PM,  <david@lang.hm> wrote:
>> On Thu, 8 Dec 2011, Dave Taht wrote:
>>
>>>> as a holdout pine user I understand your frustration :-)
>>>>
>>>> have you considered doing something like setting up openvpn to connect to
>>>> the bufferbloat.net server and then configuring the mail server to trust
>>>> mail arriving form the VPN clients?
>>>>
>>>> I know this is horrible overkill for such a trivial job, but it avoids
>>>> all
>>>> the problems of doing authentication for the SMTP connection (and the
>>>> fact
>>>> that many locations block outbound connections from dhcp addresses to
>>>> port
>>>> 25)
>>>
>>>
>>> Both 25 and VPNs are blocked at lincs. 567 works. Neither certs nor
>>> sasl from postfix worked. So far I've figured out
>>
>>
>> openvpn works over any port you want.
>
> udp is completely blocked here. a tcp implementation of openvpn works,
> but at 170ms latencies, it's pretty horrible, and I don't know if
> openvpn can do both udp and tcp at the same time.

I don't think a single connection can do both, but if all you really need 
to do is to send e-mail, why do you care what the latency is? it could be 
1000ms and you would probably barely notice. I'm not saying that you need 
to use this VPN for all your communications, you can setup a VPN 
connection that only routes the traffic to the server over it, and the 
'server' can be a separate RFC IP address bound to loopback that you only 
use for mail delivery. this would let you use normal SSH and everything 
else to the server's public IP address(es) without the overhad of the VPN.

>> but if it's just a careless network config (they allow anyone to connect to
>> it, but then block specific ports outbound), I feel no guilt over
>> establishing connections over oddball ports :-)
>
> No, they are highly paranoid here. They have grad students to cope with,
> and after exposure to them, I kind of understand.
>
> I can get stuff out to the submit port, and it's just remote auth that's
> failing me. I'm getting there, but I've had to yank out a lot of hair so
> far.

unless you are worried about other grad students using the server to send 
spam, just establish trust for your IP range and disable the 
authentication for that range.

David Lang

> (thx for listening)
>>
>> I just took an openvpn class, and one of the upcoming features is the
>> ability for openvpn to work over ping, so I'll bet that you can make it work
>
> Heh. Even tunneling over DNS is blocked. I had never heard of someone
> using ping before now.
>
>
>> (odds are really good that it will work over port 443 from just about
>> anywhere, and anyone who has security setup well enough that you can't do it
>> over 443 is probably a place where youreally shouldn't be doing it anywhay
>> :-)
>
> 443 is kind of in use on all servers I have.
>>
>>
>>> That the last 'update' from ubuntu wiped out my certs on my main
>>> email box.
>>>
>>> That dovecot sieve sucks compared to procmail
>>>
>>> that they've created a new abstraction for mail handling
>>> for doing sasl that doesn't want to work
>>>
>>> and I forget what else.
>>>
>>> I mean, mail used to 'just work'. Even with bang
>>> paths it would mostly just work. Nowadays you have
>>> to be a rocket scientist to run your own server,
>>> and damn it, I LIKE running my own mail server.
>>>
>>> Or at least, I used to.
>>
>>
>> It's not quite that bad, but yes, the spammers have required significant
>> changes.
>
> If postel had lived, he'd have found a solution.
>
>>
>> If the problem is doing this from one particular network (and one that you
>> trust to be sane, like your office), why not just configure the mail server
>> to allow unauthenticated mail from that IP (or IP range)?
>
> Not going to be at this office much longer, am mostly on the road.
>
>
>>
>> David Lang
>
>
>
>