For some time the server running this site had been acting up. Page loads were slow, access through SSH seemed lagging and something was absolutely misbehaving.
I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly was going on, but nothing really made sense. there were plenty of disk space, memory was reasonable utilized (no swapping) and the CPU load seemed to be less than 0.1 at any time - there were no good reason the server was “turtling” along at such a perceived slow pace.
As mails bounch around some email programs (I’m looking at you, Microsoft), seems to encrypt package forwarded mails in attachments with the extension .eml.
While Mozilla Thunderbird should be able to read them (as should Evolution), it requires you have the mail application available on your machine, but I haven’t - I’m doing just fine with GMail in the browser. So far the best solution I’ve find - assuming it’s trivial non-sensitive, personal files - that an Online viewer seems to work pretty well. My preferred solution is the free one from encryptomatic. It handles the mails quite nicely, it restores the formatting to something quite readable and even handles embedded images and attachments within the eml-file.
When using Viscocity to connect to a corporate network or any other openVPN server, you’re probably using certificates with a reasonable lifetime, but sometimes the certificate expire and needs be updated. Replacing the certificate files through the Viscocity interface is quite easy - just edit the connection and replace the certificate files in the appropriate tab.
There is however another little trick, which may need to be applied before the new certificates work. Viscocity offers to save the certificate password in the Keychain and I choose to use this feature, which caused a bit of trouble when updating the certificate. While it ought to - Viscocity does not - clear the password, when the certificate is changed, so to get prompted you need to go into the Keychain access tool and delete the stored password.
As stated earlier this site is now running on a DigitalOcean droplet. A droplet is basically the same as having a “real server”, and when running a bare bones machine, it isn’t born with the ability to handle email - receiving nor sending. As a number of web apps require the ability to handle mail, I had to setup facilities on the server (or droplet) to handle mail.
The “default” way to do this would probably be to install sendmail or postfix, as they are full-featured mail server, but configuring a mail-server, keeping it secure and updated is a nightmare I’d like to avoid. Therefore it was time to look for another option.
df -lP |awk '{sum += $3} END {printf "%d GiB\\n", sum/2\*\*20}'- via @clmagic