lennys December 15, 2023

Finally...

So the blog is up and running again after a few days of being broken. I've been attempting to get my Contact Us pages to work, and this necessitated a server move. Well, several server moves. I decided to separate all my domains by putting them each on their own virtual machine, so now this blog has a VM all to itself. It seems wasteful, but I found that I needed to isolate some issues onto their own individual VMs to make any progress, so I made 5 new VMs and now I'm in the process of setting up the domains on each of them. I'm going to keep my original web server VM for future use, and my mail server VM is still the same as before. So far I have lsenterprises.tech, lennys.site and this blog up and running, and tomorrow I'll probably get lennyshort.com resurrected. On a side note, I'm finished with the repairs to my truck, for now at least. There was an ordeal I had to work through with the shop I took it to, we were going to put a new engine in there but that didn't work out. The shop manager hunted down 3 different engines from salvage yards all across the US. The first one got shipped out, but was diverted to Los Angeles and just disappeared, no idea what happened to it. The second and third engines were both shipped to the shop successfully, but upon arrival we found that they were no good - one was leaking oil like a sieve, and the other had a blown head gasket. In the end, my truck's original engine seems to still be running okay even with the issue it has with the sixth cylinder not having compression, so I decided to just keep driving it as-is and plan on trading it in sometime next year. It's too bad, as I still like this truck and was hoping to keep it for a while longer but sometimes things don't work out. At least I am getting my $2000 deposit back, which is what I'm waiting on now. I got the paperwork from the shop that showed it credited to my checking account, and after checking my bank app today I saw it hit my checking account. Yay, I got monies!

lennys December 09, 2023

I have to figure out what to do next.

So I'm kind of at a point at which I'm stuck. I have this blog, which I want to add Markdown to, and also build a sitemap for it. I also have a broken "Contact Us" form in my LS Enterprises site I need to figure out and fix, and at some point I intend to work on building an API for my lennyshort.com site. I also want to setup Ansible on my Cisco gear just for the point of it, which I think requires setting up a separate server. I have a small server I'm not using for anything at the moment. Then there's the Python Crash Course book, which I want to finish working my way through. I'm not sure which project should take priority at this point. I guess I need to do some brainstorming on what direction to go in next, but at the moment I'm feeling tired and unmotivated. What's my long-term goals here? I'm going on vacation again in a couple of weeks for Christmas. This time I'm driving to Mom's house in Oregon for a few days. I'm getting a rental car for the drive there and back again, because my truck is still not really dependable and I don't want to get stuck somewhere in the mountains if it breaks down. I managed to get almost all of my Christmas shopping done yesterday, I just need to find something to get for my nephew. He recently turned 21 and is starting welding school in January, but I don't know what kind of gear he needs yet. The other kids were easy to shop for, they just got STEM toys, Legos and some PlayDoh. Maybe I'll just get him a gift card to Lowes or something. I'm still waiting on the new engine for my truck to arrive. I got a call yesterday from the shop manager who said that it didn't arrive yesterday like he was told. I'm lucky that the current engine is still running. If this keeps going on delay after delay I might just try to cancel the engine swap and see if I can get my deposit back, and just drive the truck until it dies then take it to the junkyard. Had I known what I was getting into with this situation, I would've just traded it in for a new'ish truck instead. Anyone want to buy a 2003 Dodge Dakota?

lennys December 04, 2023

Setting up email is a pain

So I was trying to create a "Contact Us" page in my LS Enterprises site. I found a couple of tutorials online that were pretty straightforward, worked through them, and eventually cobbled together a basic finished product. It has 3 fields: the sender's email address, the Subject line of the email, and the email body. Below that is the "Send" button, and that's it - no styling so far. In Django, you can configure it to send the email out to the console, so you can run tests and read the emails that are generated in the console. This part works, but when I try to flip it to actually send an email, the system throws an error in a strange way - it only allows emails to be sent that are addressed to the recipient email address, the email address that is hard-coded into the Django backend. So it essentially sends the email from email@domain.com to email@domain.com. Which is useless. Furthermore, it throws an error when you type in any other email address for the sender, i.e. user@otherdomain.com. So the email never gets out of Postfix on the server, and never arrives at the recipient. I've been around and around on this issue for the last 3 days and I can't figure out how to fix it. I've tried reconfiguring Postfix to no avail, it seems as though nothing I change has any effect. So I'm a little frustrated with this now, and I'm thinking of other alternatives. I could use a service like SendGrid to handle the sending of the emails, but I'd have to rely on their free tier of service, which could go away at any time. I'd rather not do that, as I have my own mail server, and it's working properly. I think I'm going to have to re-write a lot of Django code to rearrange things, or else I'm stuck. I'm thinking of things I want to incorporate in the future into my websites. lennyshort.com is a very basic Django-driven site and isn't very impressive, so I'd like to redesign it and use an API to connect the Django backend to a React frontend. I recently worked my way through a book that covered that, so I think I could do it. I also still want to incorporate Markdown into this blog to make it prettier, plus setup an Ansible server to administer the Cisco switches and routers I have in my cabinet at work. But it seems that no matter what I try, I eventually run into an issue like this email problem that I can't solve. I posted a question on ServerFault about this and got one reply, which I appreciate, but I'm still stuck on this one. Anyone got any ideas?

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