3 ms·
About a decade or so ago I did IT for a company that had a large copier that could also scan to email. The email delivery stopped working even though this was G
by johnklos 3y ago
About a decade or so ago I did IT for a company that had a large copier that could also scan to email. The email delivery stopped working even though this was Gmail and nothing SHOULD'VE changed (Google has never cared much about standards, so even now it's never surprising when Gmail using normal tools just stops working).
The person who had the company Gmail administration login had tried to open a ticket, had played with settings, had deleted and re-added the account on the copier many times, but nothing worked.
Never being someone who is content to just wait for someone else to, you know, do their job, and not wanting to deal with the proprietary bullshit that is Gmail, I decided to do something far simpler: set up an SMTP server.
A $12 PogoPlug, an SD card, and a couple of hours later (I had to compile Sendmail from pkgsrc), the printer could scan to email and deliver by smarthosting through a public SMTP server.
People will often tell you that something is a waste of time because they don't know how to do it or because "everyone does something else". Some people tell me that running email servers is a waste of time, but standing up a whole server is infinitely easier than trying to deal with Google.
Someone from the company called me many years later and asked me if I wanted my PogoPlug back. It had been in use for at least half a decade before they replaced that copier.
- stewx 3y agoWhat did you use the PogoPlug for?
- johnklos 3y agoI use them for all sorts of things, even now. They make excellent VPN devices, they're great as local recursive DNS resolvers, and I have several that're backup NAT routers / firewalls for various networks. They also are perfect for ssh-based port forwarding / jump hosting for networks that have crappy NAT firewalls. Turn off atime and devmtime, turn of daily and weekly cron jobs, and log to tmpfs, and SD cards will last for many, many years. I have one that's been running continuously since 2015.
- rabbitofdeath 3y agoOH man I forgot about PogoPlugs -I had about 3 of them around the house before raspberry pi's took over - they were running silly things like dlna and a VERY slow OwnCloud installation - thats really when I got into self hosting.
- don-code 3y agoAt a startup I worked for, we had a cheap wireless microphone and speaker from Craigslist that we used for all-hands meetings. The UX for anybody remote (pre-pandemic, but board members did like to dial in) was terrible - IT would just place a laptop pointed at the speaker. The audio quality left a lot to be desired. At some point, I pitched the silly idea to IT that I'd figure out what frequency the mic ran at, tune it with gqrx and an SDR, then feed it back to my own microphone using a loopback device in PulseAudio. That day, we had our best-ever voice quality on the remote call, I ended up becoming critical path for all-hands meetings. Fast forward a few months, the only thing that saved us from building a Raspberry Pi + SDR + Zoom box was another round of funding, with which we bought a proper conferencing system.