675. Surviving a migration to Outlook 365 in a Linux-hostile environment

 At work we were just migrated to o365 ('M365' as they call it), and :

* they've disabled forwarding (so can't automatically forward my mail to e.g. a gmail account)

* they've disabled access for all email clients other than Outlook

This happened half a year ago to the students at my university, and here's the solution one of them sent me:

1. Get evolution-ews

 -- on thunderbird you have the non-free (as in beer) options of OWL for exchange and ExQuilla

-- DAVmail may also be a solution, but I haven't managed to get it to work. It will act as a layer between your mail client (e.g. thunderbird) and the EWS server, allowing you to continue using e.g. thunderbird without having to install anything.

2. Create a 'New Mail Account':

Identity: do whatever is appropriate for you organisation. Disable 'Look up mail server ...'

Receiving Email: Add the appropriate username for connecting to the mail server.

Host URL: use https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx -- it's the same for all organisations these days.

Authentication type: OAUTH2 (Office 365)

Check 'Override Office365 OAuth2 settings'

Tenant: leave empty

Application ID: d3590ed6-52b3-4102-aeff-aad2292ab01c

Redirect URI: urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob

Then click on Fetch URL. This should populate the OAB URL field.

You should now be done.

674. Suddenly can't find USB audio devices (pulseaudio, debian)

 Sometimes only the onboard audio devices show up as being available in gnomeusing pulseaudio. Your usb devices for some reason don't show up. This has occured at some very inopportune moments, such as during online teaching.

If that happens, unplug/turn off the USB device, and run

pulseaudio -k && pactl load-module module-detect

then turn on the USB device again.

It should now be found.

673. "Better Minecraft [Forge]" server for version 1.16.5

In post 672 I showed how to set up a better minecraft server for version 1.18. As it turns out, if you want to play Better Minecraft you'll want version 1.16.5, since most of the mods aren't yet available for minecraft 1.18.

The instructions here are adopted and adapted from  https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Setting_up_a_Minecraft_Forge_server

1. Download the following files and put them in an appropriate folder:

https://files.minecraftforge.net/net/minecraftforge/forge/index_1.16.5.html

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/better-minecraft-modpack/files/3585404

2. Next, do the following

First install the server by running this in the terminal

java -jar forge-1.16.5-36.2.20-installer.jar --installServer

It should give output similar to this:

JVM info: Debian - 17-ea - 17-ea+19-Debian-1

java.net.preferIPv4Stack=true

Found java version 17-ea

Target Directory: .

Data kindly mirrored by CreeperHost at https://www.creeperhost.net/

Extracting main jar:

  Extracted successfully

Considering minecraft server jar

...

The server installed successfully

You can delete this installer file now if you wish

Next do this to unpack and generate the eula.txt file:

java -jar minecraft_server.1.16.5.jar

[07:39:16] [main/ERROR]: Failed to load properties from file: server.properties

[07:39:16] [main/WARN]: Failed to load eula.txt

[07:39:16] [main/INFO]: You need to agree to the EULA in order to run the server. Go to eula.txt for more info.

Edit eula.txt and change eula to true:

 eula=true

3. Launch the server

On debian 11.1 the server crashed with openjdk 11 and 17. However, it worked with openjdk 8.

Instead I launched the server with

/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/bin/java -Xmx10G -jar forge-1.16.5-36.2.20.jar

Note that I'm dedicating 10Gb of RAM to the server (I have 32 GB). You might want/need less.

Enjoy!