Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Previously, on "Weekend Projects for Homelab Admins With Control Issues," we created our own dynamically updating DNS and DHCP setup with bind and dhcpd. We laughed. We cried. We hurled. Bonds were forged, never to be broken. And I hope we all took a little something special away from the journey—namely, a dynamically updating DNS and DHCP setup. Which we're now going to put to use!

If you're joining us fresh, without having gone through the previous part and wanting to follow this tutorial, howdy! There might be some parts that are more difficult to complete without a local instance of bind (or other authoritative resolver compatible with nsupdate ). We'll talk more about this when we get there, but just know that if you want to pause and go do part one first , you may have an easier time following along.

The quick version: A LetsEncrypt of our own

This article will walk through the process of installing step-ca , a standalone certificate authority-in-a-box. We'll then configure step-ca with an ACME provisioner—that's Automatic Certificate Management Environment , the technology that underpins LetsEncrypt and facilitates the automatic provisioning, renewal, and revocation of SSL/TLS certificates.

Enlarge / All shall tremble before your fully functional forward and reverse lookups! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Here's a short summary of the next 7,000-ish words for folks who hate the thing recipe sites do where the authors babble about their personal lives for pages and pages before getting to the cooking: This article is about how to install bind and dhcpd and tie them together into a functional dynamic DNS setup for your LAN so that DHCP clients self-register with DNS, and you always have working forward and reverse DNS lookups. This article is intended to be part one of a two-part series, and in part two, we'll combine our bind DNS instance with an ACME-enabled LAN certificate authority and set up LetsEncrypt-style auto-renewing certificates for LAN services.

If that sounds like a fun couple of weekend projects, you're in the right place! If you want to fast-forward to where we start installing stuff, skip down a couple of subheds to the tutorial-y bits. Now, excuse me while I babble about my personal life.

My name is Lee, and I have a problem

(Hi, Lee.)

Enlarge / Let's look deep within. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

I've been using fediverse stuff (Mastodon and, most recently, Calckey—I'm just going to use "Mastodon" as shorthand here; purists can bite me) for over a year now and have been doing so full time for about six months, following Elon Musk buying Twitter (since on principle, I decline to give Elon Musk money or attention ). This latter part coincided with the "November 2022 influx," when lots of new people joined Mastodon for similar reasons. A lot of that influx has not stuck around. Everyone is very aware at this point that active user numbers of Mastodon have dropped off a cliff.

I have evidence of this. I recently shut down my Mastodon instance that I started in November, mastodon.bloonface.com, and (as is proper) it sent out about 700,000 kill messages to inform other instances that it had federated with that it was going offline for good and to delete all record of it from their databases. Around 25 percent of these were returned undelivered because the instances had simply dropped offline. These are people and organizations who were engaged with Mastodon and fediverse to the point of investing real time and resources into it but simply dropped out without a trace sometime between November 2022 and now. I know multiple people who tried it and then gave up due to a lack of engagement with what they were posting, a lack of people to follow, an inability to deal with the platform's technical foibles, or, worse, because they found the experience actively unpleasant. Something has gone badly wrong.

There are some good reasons for this that really point to both shortcomings in the whole idea and also how Mastodon is and was sold to potential new users, some of which might be uncomfortable for existing Mastodon users to hear. There are some conclusions to draw from it, some of which might also be uncomfortable, but some which actually might be seen as reassuring to those who quite liked the place as it was pre-November and would prefer it if it would go back to that.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Ars Technica is pleased to announce the return of Ars Frontiers, our single-day event that explores tech's most vexing and fascinating issues. This year's event will be held on May 22, and everyone is invited! Attendance this year is virtual, so we'll be streaming all six sessions over the course of three and a half hours.

Readers who stop by the front page every day already know that Ars is a leader in bringing smart people together to talk about important topics—whether that means interviewing experts about current events or watching our highly skilled readers dissect an issue in the comments. In that same spirit of fostering brilliant discussions, this year we've curated a list of topics that explore the modern interconnectedness of innovation, with panels led by our subject matter authorities like Eric Berger and Dr. Beth Mole. All sessions will be streamed live on the Ars YouTube channel.

The main event

Ars Frontiers 2023 will feature six virtual sessions on May 22, starting at approximately 13:30 US Eastern Daylight Time (-4 UTC). Ars Technica Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher and I will host the event from our studio in Manhattan. Each session will run about 30 minutes, which will include some time at the end for audience questions. Here's the line-up! (Session order might change between now and when the event happens.)

It is now possible to change your #Movim #blog privacy level using a new setting in the Configuration page.

All the Movim blogs used to be restricted to the users following them, now you can give access to your content to everyone visiting it 🥳

You can also know if a blog is restricted or not by visiting it.

Enjoy this new #feature !

Movim 0.21, codename Whipple, is finally out!

Let's have a look of all the new and improved things that you can find in this big #release 🥳

Message replies

You can now reply to messages thanks to the implementation of the XEP-0461: Message Replies.

More and more clients in the XMPP ecosystem supports this feature, including Slidge, new XMPP gateways project that is allowing you to bridge Movim with Telegram, Discord and many others chat platforms.

Push Notifications

Movim now integrates WebPush. Never miss a message, even when Movim is closed. This feature is also working when you install Movim as a Progressive Web App on your Android or iOS device.

Improved account configuration

The configuration panel has been redesigned to be more accessible.

You can now block contacts directly from your Movim instance and manage your block-list from the panel.

Microphones and webcams can also be configured and tested from the Audio & Video configuration tab.

New emojis

This version brings the support of Unicode 14 and many new emojis that you can use in your messages, posts, replies and reactions.

Redesign

Movim is following the #Material Design guidelines since 2014. This release is bringing a fresh redesign of the components and animations based on Material 3.

The main menu was reorganized to clarify the navigation and hide the second-level pages in a sub-menu that appears when hovering the account item.

Following this redesign Movim accounts can now set a banner next to their avatars.

Share and Send To

The Send To feature, that allows you to send articles to contacts was completed by a Share feature allowing you to share the article in a new publication on your personnal blog on in a Community that you're in. Useful to share things around !

Audio messages

Movim can now play and record #audio messages.

Gallery Communities

When creating or configuring your Communities you can now set a Community type. The Gallery Community forces the publications to contain at least one image and display them as a grid.

This feature is the result of a long clarification and standardization work made on XMPP Pubsub with the pubsub#type attribute, the introduction of a new XEP based on that change called XEP-0472: Pubsub Social Feed and the support of pubsub#type in ejabberd (related ticket).

Performances, memory consumption and stability

A very important work was done to limit the Movim processes memory consumption.

The daemon and subprocesses are now using PHP Opcache to load and share only once lots of files that were previously loaded multiple time during the Movim runtime. PHP modules are also loaded using a predefined whitelist to limit the usage of useless modules in memory.

DotEnv configuration

The old configuration system has been moved to the DotEnv standard. This change merges all the previous configuration (database, daemon and paths) into an unique .env file.

They can also be set using environment variable directly in your Docker Compose, or Web Server (using SetEnvin Apache for example).

The official Movim Docker image was also updated to fit those changes.

Migration from Movim 0.20

If you are planning to upgrade your current Movim instance please follow those few steps:

1. Copy and rename the .env.example file in .env and complete the few configuration variables in it. They should be the same as the one you set in the previous db.inc.php file and your daemon parameters.
2. Remove the db.inc.php file
3. Remove all the daemon.php parameters from your init.d, systemd services or other scripts. The daemon launch command should look this way: $ php daemon.php start.

...and as always, don't forget to run the migrations (php composer.phar movim:migrate) and restart your daemon.

XMPP Pubsub node security and restrictions

Movim 0.21 is not trusting anymore posts, likes and comments that are not containing the explicit identifier (Jabber ID) of the publisher and therefore now rely on this part of the XEP-0060: Pubblish-Subscribe - 12.16 Associating Events and Payloads with the Generating Entity.

All the existing likes and comments might be not counted anymore or seen as "Non trusted" ones. All the new published ones will be configured properly.

Migration from Movim 0.20

On ejabberd

You can update all the existing stored node configuration to force the new default configuration using the following SQL request. You might do a backup of your database before doing such changes:

update pubsub_node_option set val = `publisher` where name = `itemreply` and val = `none`

...and load those changes without restarting ejabberd:

$ ejabberdctl clear-cache

On Prosody

Ensure that you have the expose_publisher = true set in your configuration, see the related documentation.

What's next?

Movim 0.22 should include two big projects.

OMEMO rewrite ?

The cleanup, rewrite and refactoring of the OMEMO support that is quite buggy and not opmized. We are not promising anything on this side, OMEMO is always a complex beast to handle.

Multi-part audio and video-conference feature

The audio and video conferencing features were already introduced a few years ago in Movim. Some preparation work has been done in this 0.21 release to be able merge back the pop-up video-conference window inside the main window for the upcoming release.

The multi-part audio and video-conference feature is also one of the main feature that miss in Movim and is requested quite often by our users. Let's see if Movim 0.22 finally include this long awaited #feature.

Regarding the amount of work that need to be done regarding those features it might be possible that specific funding will be requested for it to free up enough time to work properly on their integration.

Enjoy!

A big thanks to the #Movim community that is growing more than ever. You can find us on our main support chatroom movim@conference.movim.eu.

If you find issues or if you want to contribute to the project you can find everything on our Github page.

And if you want to support us, fund the development of new features and help us pay our servers, domains and communication we are actively looking for supporters and sponsors on our Patreon.

That's all folks!

Directed by Sean Dacanay. Produced by Justin Wolfson. Edited by Jeremy Smolnik, with Billy Ward. Click here for transcript . (video link)

The War Stories video we ran a few years ago featuring Dead Space 's battle with the drag tentacle is one of the most popular in the series, and ever since it came out we've been aching for another opportunity to collaborate with game designer Glen Schofield. That opportunity arrived a few months ago, when Glen's Striking Distance Studios reached out to us and asked if we wanted to visit the office for an inside look at Glen's upcoming sci-fi horror game, The Callisto Protocol .

We said yes, of course. In addition to the exclusive access, we also were excited at the opportunity to hang out with Glen again—an enormous friendly bear of a man, whose gifted and artistic mind churns out an endless array of many-limbed horrors .

The idea would be to post quick articles with like a photo and/or short video and allow your contacts to see it for like 24h. Yes ? Na ? 🤔 #movim #feature #stories