• 3 Posts
  • 107 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Every time I think about hosting my own mail server, I think back to the many, many, many times I’ve had to troubleshoot corporate email systems over the years. From small ones that ran on duct tape and prayers to big ones that were robust, high dollar systems.

    98% of the time, the reason the messages aren’t coming or going is something either really obscure or really stupid. Email itself isn’t that complicated and it’s a legacy communications medium at this point. But it’s had so much stuff piled on top of it for spam and fraud prevention, out of necessity, and that’s where the major headaches come from. Honestly, it’s one service that to me it’s worth paying someone else to deal with.




  • Set up a VPS. Create a VPN tunnel from you local network to the VPS. Use the VPS as the edge router by opening ports on the VPS firewall and routing incoming traffic on those ports through the VPN tunnel to servers on your local network.

    I used to do this to get around CGNAT. I ran RouterOS in a Digital Ocean droplet and setting up a wire guard tunnel between it and my local Mikrotik router.

    It will obscure your local WAN IP and give you a static IP but that’s about the only benefit. And you have to be pretty network savvy to configure it correctly.

    It does not make you immune to DDoS attacks and is honestly more headache to maintain (albeit just a small headache).








  • Best software salesman I ever met was the best because he knew how to fucking listen. He worked for an electrical engineering software company. First time I ever met the guy, he flies into town to meet with my employer, his client, for the first time after taking over the account. I called him up and asked if I could buy him dinner the night before the big meeting, basically to warn him that they’re on the verge of getting fired.

    Dude walks into the meeting the next day with nothing but a pen and a legal pad, introduces himself, and says something like, “I’m not happy because I’ve heard you all are not happy. I’m going to do whatever I can to fix that so I want you to tell me every single problem you’re having no matter how small you think it is.” And they let him have it for a good two hours. He took it like a champ, listened to and documented every single complaint, and made an actual effort to get fixes for the things we were upset about. He saved a $2 million a year account just by listening and making an effortto help keep the customer happy.

    I guess the moral of the story is, good salespeople don’t sell products. They solve problems.