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Microsoft Outlook can not communicate with Postfix

This week I received a incident that someone was unable to send e-mails (it suddenly stopped working) and shortly after that, another incidicent with the same issue was received. In both cases Microsoft Outlook was used as the e-mail client and Postfix was running on the (e-mail)server. TL;DR: this out-of-band patch fixes the issue. The postfix logs did not show any concrete errors: postfix/submission/smtpd[8479]: SSL_accept error from some.rdns.entry[1.2.3.444]: lost connection postfix/submission/smtpd[8479]: lost connection after STARTTLS from some.

Youtube login with a Google account

Usually I’m not logged in to youtube with my Google account, but sometimes you want to, because you want to subscribe to a channel to show your support. When I logged in to my Google account and was redirected back to youtube, I got an oops and was effectively not logged in. Long story short: disabling “Enhanced Tracking Protection” for ‘accounts.google.com’ fixed it for me. Please note: I am using Firefox Multi-Account Containers, which might influenced my situation.

Lud and Schlatt's musical emporium

Yesterday I “found” Lud and Schlatts Musical Emporium on youtube, which has amazing classic creative commons music. This is a new youtube channel made by Lud and Schlatt. As to their reasoning for doing this, Lud posted a Schlatt and I Fixed YouTube video. They even did the right thing by making their creations available on archive.org. Well done guys!

Flashing the SonOff USB Zigbee dongle

A while ago I purchased a SONOFF ZigBee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus on aliexpress. Finally I am coming around to using it for domotica around the house via Home Assistant. Last week I had an interesting call with a friend of mine. He switched from ZHA to Zigbee to MQTT and he boasted about it having better device support. Since I had some issues with my smart radiator valves, I thought I’d give zigbee2mqtt a try.

Microsoft Teams on Linux woes

At work we use Microsoft Teams to communicate. Of course I try to use this natively on Linux, since that is my platform of choice. Today I looked into an issue, that causes me to get an empty pop-up when receiving a call. Which effectively means that I can not answer incoming calls. (TL;DR: was not able to fix it) Obligatory stats: Ubuntu 21.10 with awesome wm, running Microsoft Teams version 1.

HikVision HWP-N2404IH-DE3 PTZ controls

Recently I came into the possession of a HikVision HWP-N2404IH-DE3 mini PTZ camera. It has POE, RTSP, ONVIF, can pan/tilt/zoom remotely, has optical zoom etc.. Hardware wise the camera is great. Proper build quality, nothing to complain about here. But the IT part looks better on paper than IRL. Worst thing is that I could not use the PTZ controls in the webinterface, because they require some Windows .exe to be installed to get that working.

Thinkpad T420 - CMOS battery replacement

A long time ago I bought several Lenovo Thinkpad T420 laptops (used of course). But my wife’s laptop gave her the dreaded error (after power loss): Real Time Clock Error - Check Date and Time settings. Press Esc to continue or F1 to enter Setup. Finally I got fed up with it, so I swapped out her old CMOS backup battery with a new one. Then I also did the same for my other T420’s.

Evoluent Vertical Mouse 4 - Disable blue LED light

For a while I’ve been using the Evoluent VerticalMouse 4 Right. At first I had to get used to this type of mouse, but after a day or so, I already got used to it. The strain on your wrist/arm is much less with a vertical mouse, so I can really recommend it. But I cannot recommend the blue LED light at the front of the mouse (facing the user). It’s a very bright LED with no added value to the user.

GRUB - grub_register_command_lockdown not found

Recently the OS disk of one of my servers failed. Since the OS disk is a USB stick and I have had good experiences with Diet Pi for my raspberry pi’s, I thought I’d take a look if it is also available for AMD64. Guess what, it is! So I fired up dd to push the downloaded image to the USB stick, popped the USB stick into the server and ran the OS for the first time.

freenode requires irc.com

Last weekend I wanted to check in again on my Freenode IRC account. I logged into my trusted irssi IRC client and was confronted with these errors: 21:01 [freenode] !*.freenode.net *** You must use TLS/SSL and authenticate via SASL to connect to freenode please visit https://irc.com/login/sso in order to create an account. SASL Configuration: https://freenode.net/kb/answer/sasl - Webchat: https://webchat.freenode.net/ 21:01 [freenode] -!- Capabilities requested: multi-prefix 21:01 [freenode] -!- Capabilities supported: account-notify account-tag away-notify batch cap-notify chghost draft/relaymsg echo-message extended-join inspircd.