wp-cli "Connection refused" error

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Couldn't find anything about this with a few google searches so I decided to note it here. Weird problem: whenever I ran any wp-cli command, I'd get a list of 100+ lines of "Connection refused" before it actually did what I wanted. I tried a few things to figure it out, including So on a hunch I tried … after which all wp-cli operations worked again. After some further digging, I enabled w3 Total Cache again, and found that it was configured to use redis, which wasn't running on the server. So the connection attempts were failing to connect to … Read more

Troubleshooting postfix using bcc to local user

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After routing mail through postfix to an external relay server (in this case gmail's smtp relay), all the mail from a server was routing correctly. Except after a couple of days I noticed a couple of strange bounces. Authentication at the gmail end was by IP address and domain, so any address [email protected] could be used to send email. But these were coming from [email protected] so were being rejected with a helpful message by gmail.

The IP address you've 550-5.7.1 registered in your G Suite SMTP Relay service doesn't match domain of 550-5.7.1 the account this email is being sent from. If you are trying to relay 550-5.7.1 mail from a domain that isn't registered under your G Suite account 550-5.7.1 or has empty envelope-from, you must configure your mail server 550-5.7.1 either to use SMTP AUTH to identify the sending domain or to present 550-5.7.1 one of your domain names in the HELO or EHLO command. For more 550-5.7.1 information, please visit 550 5.7.1 https://support.google.com/a/answer/6140680

Pretty helpful as messages go. Less helpful was the fact that there were several websites on the server and a couple of other apps, and I didn't have access to the admin panels of any of them. The mails, once bounced, were removed from postfix's queue, never to be seen again. Time for some detective work.

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Migrating from Notecase to CherryTree

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So I have a few documents which started life in TreePad. Then about 8 years ago I migrated them to Notecase, for reasons I don't remember. I hadn't opened them for a few months, but when I opened one in Notecase last week, I found out that they'd removed the everlasting Trial mode and they now have only a 30-day trial or paid modes. The prices are not unreasonable, but given that I hadn't opened any documents in the 6 months since they implemented the change, I decided to look for another Note Organizer. My search took me to CherryTree. … Read more

RTL8188 adapter upgrade hell

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On my desktop I've been running Linux Mint for the last few years, and have always done the distro upgrade-in-place. This time I tried it and there were too many errors — the upgrade tool wanted to remove around 50 apps, disable all my repos, and generally mess around with my system in too many ways, so I opted to go the "wipe and install fresh" route. My reasoning was also that after 6 years of upgrades, there were probably a few extra files on there, that I didn't need ( a mysterious 3 Gb in the flatpak directory for eg), and I'd messed around with the system config a few times over the time — pipewire, different DNS resolvers etc — so a fresh install would be a good thing. And it was, but for one nightmare: my RTL8188 adapter.

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Digital Ocean spaces vs restic

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Very easy answer to a problem that's probably had you cursing for ages. When you set up a DO Spaces instance, you get a URL like https://myspace.eur3.digitaloceanspaces.com/, where eur3 is the datacenter you're in and myspace is the space name you supplied. So you just take that and append s3: to it in your restic config, don't you? Of course you do. Except you don't. That will just give you a weird client.BucketExists error. So what it actually wants is this: Or if you have created a subfolder, then use If you're scripting this and using environment variables, your whole … Read more