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  • Most 365 mail admin work doesn't end up touching the routing stuff, domains, or DNS records too often, so I'm by no means an expert. Last year I got rid of the last on-prem exchange servers in our environment. Here are my thoughts anyway, for what its worth.

    At my workplace, domain as internal relay was used as part of our hybrid exchange setup, where we still had an on-prem exchange server largely for recipient management (for stuff connected to AD objects and thus mastered on-prem instead of in the cloud) and for a mail relay for internal recipients so that automated emails coming from legacy systems bypassed all filtering. I'm not familiar with other use cases.


    Stuff that may not apply (minimize the lift)

    I would approach this by using it as an opportunity to raze those hundreds of redirects. Surely the recieving systems have other ways to categorize incoming email than destination address. Stuff like system to system you could probably add shit in the body text and change the filters on the recieving end. So each external system would only have one destination address. That's ideal world though and probably touches a lot of shit outside your control.

    Second thing is that I would look into setting the destination email addresses directly in the sending system. It takes management out of your hands, but why does any of this need to hit your infra in the first place? Again, that's ideal world and also probably touches shit you don't control.

    Point is, I'd look to minimize how many of these things you actually have to deal with, because they'll just keep being a problem and a pain in the ass to manage forever otherwise. That's the real underlying problem, if you can do anything about it.


    Stuff that more directly lines up with your ask:

    If you can script routing rules you can probably figure out scripting the creation of contact objects in 365, and export of them to csv for verification.

    PowerShell is going to be your friend with Exchange Online/365, and most things Microsoft. Exchange Online has a dedicated module (think library if you're used to terminology for other languages).

    You can make a csv with the internal email address, external destination address, internal contact name, display name, and whether or not it's hidden from the address book (do end users need to send to it?). I'd reccomend using some clear prefix in the internal name to keep them obvious compared to any other contacts not related to this fuckery.

    You could use full mailboxes and forwarding rules on each one but that increases complexity significantly.

    In PowerShell, you'd connect to exchange, import the csv, then foreach over the csv contents throwing the values from it into New-MailContact.

    If you want to be fancy you could wrap New-MailContact in a try/catch to spit failed ones out into an array and export that back to csv at the end for review.

  • While the ID shit is godawful, that's not at all how it works in any implementation out there right now. There have even been multiple breaches of these systems, further demonstrating their issues, but you know what hasn't been in any of the breaches/leaks?

    Direct connection between ID and uniquely identifiable user information.

    If I'm wrong about this I'd love to know, but as far as I am aware the ID leaks have not had shit like email address attached.

  • That's the point, it doesn't. Much like the argument about targeting marginalized people when you're talking about children.

    Edit: Yes, there are plenty of children and teens without access to information and the support structures they should have IRL. I was one of them and it's fucking awful. The internet can help with that by offering exposure to different ideologies, evidence that you aren't alone in what you're feeling or going through.

    But I don't look back on everything I did and encountered online in mid 00s - early 10s era internet and go "that was overwhelmingly a great thing that I should have had the sort of unrestricted access to that I did". And the internet has been even more corporatized and "skinner-boxed" since.

    And with the benefit of hindsight, I can see a bunch of other ways that I could have gotten the good I got from the internet without all the bad, and through things in real life that I had dismissed in my youth.

  • If you watch a decent amount of twitch streaming it's pretty obvious. I'm sure there are a ton of whales out there willing to dump >$1000 in one go on a streamer, but just watch something like a "subathon", or a "hype train". You'll see more dollars than viewers they have move around in the span of like 30 minutes.

    Or when streamers "bet" each other large amounts of gift subscriptions. That's explicitly money, and abstracting it behind subs only masks how damn much a lot of these "bets" are really for.

    I'm not going to claim that anywhere near all of it is straight laundering, but it's pretty damn obvious just how fucking easy it would be to use it all for washing/tumbling of dirty funds.

  • Sonic Adventure has such a good soundtrack.

    It's a shame most people only know it for the "lol funny jank" and lump it in with "all 3d sonic sucks". It was an early 3d game trying to do a shit ton of stuff that few other games tried for a number of years later. Not all of it worked out well, but it's a wonderful slice of the times and what does work is great, imo.

  • "Memes" being just rage faces and advice animals to the wider internet was probably the most infuriating time period for me.

    It was like the whole world collectively and simultaneously chose the most embarassing ways to anthropomophize their emotions.

  • i mean

    Jump
  • The left hand goes on the left or the middle depending on the game.

  • Then call out the bullshit, don't just call the whole thing bullshit with nothing to back it up. That just makes you look like a cynical asshat.

  • Hey, if grandpa is old enough to recognize this one, he probably remembers the attempts by /b/ users to find some definition of "meme" (or at least internet memes) that excluded the garbage that reddit popularized to the point of ending up being shared by "normies" on facebook.

    I get it, it used to be important to me too. Gatekeeping was the point for a lot of people who defined themselves by membership to a sort of secret internet "in-club" when they didn't fit into any groups or cliques irl. At least, that was the case with me like 18 years ago or so.

    It was never about the literal definition, but about making a definition for "internet in-joke" to create lines of separation between the in-group and the out-group.

  • 2011? Get off my lawn whippersnapper! I was lurking chan sites in 07 when I should have been underageb& and having a remotely decent time in highschool.

    No one cries for EFG. His name has been long forgotten.

    Seriously, I'm pretty certain EFG was the progenitor to f7u12, and 4chan was pissed that reddit kept stealing their memes and beating them until nothing but a horse shaped hole in the ground remained as reddit kept growing. Pretty sure I witnessed the first advice animal threads too. That little pup with the rainbow background was spammed to hell and back for around a month before it made its way to reddit.

  • If I recall right it's some weirdness with how the float bulb in gas tanks, which is used for that display, works.

    I don't think I've ever seen an instance as extreme as what you're describing myself, but there tends to be more actual fuel volume at the lowest and highest ends, so the gauge isn't exactly linear. Not sure if it's something that can be compensated for by the manufacturer in the design or not.

  • They forcibly replaced moderation teams on tons of major subreddits that went dark in protest too. No hesitation, tossed out the old teams entirely and replaced them with randoms, even on the former default subs. It was fucking chaos.

    There was very obvious botting happening to push opinions in favor of the api-pocalypse in certain big subs, to the point where you could reply to the bots with some of the most basic ass prompt redirection/escape and get them to spit out cooking recipes.

    People were getting banned for even mentioning lemmy. Reddit was reverting people editing their comments to try and scrub their history on the site, and banning the accounts, which is arguably a violation of GDPR's right to be forgotten.

    It was an absolute shit show.


    I had already made a lemmy account by that point. If it had just been the api lockdown, I probably would have went back in at least a limited capacity using one of the patched third party clients (use your own api key) or the patched official official one (removes the ads).

    But all of that shit together broadcast loud and clear that Reddit's owners weren't just passively stupid about what actually made the site worthwhile, they were actively antagonistic towards it.

    It was no secret that Reddit had no fucking clue why Reddit "worked" and couldn't be trusted to make good decisions. But all this shit demonstrated that the only thing they were interested in doing was intentionally killing it in a delusional attempt to maximize short term gains.


    And every time I had even a smidgen of desire to go back, they pulled more bullshit.

    Auto-generated language specific copies of popular subreddits, utilizing poor quality machine translation and literally stealing the top posts from the original subs with no attribution. Reddit disavowed that it was done by Reddit admins themselves, but there's no way it could have happened at the speed and scale it did otherwise.

    Mods still don't have anything remotely equivalent to the old tools from before the api bullshit.

    People getting permabanned over the most basic word filters imaginable (discussing the game Luigi's Mansion after the CEO-cide), then getting IP banned when they created a new account to try and get in touch with support.


    I still browse some of the subs related to my work passively (sysadmin, powershell, azure, etc) but the drop in quality and amount of bots is unignorable. Half the sysadmin sub posts are the most thinly veiled product ad setups.

  • Looks like no official explanation, but the leading theories are relating to the main character's three main weapons or the three major figures of the story (can't be more specific than that without spoilers).

    I definitely never picked up on a specific meaning myself though.

  • Fucking on-call rotation. So much of it should just be automated. I shouldn't be looking up who owns the server that went down at 3am to let them know. It should send direct to them.


    Edit: To be clear because of the downvote, I'm not saying the down server would do the reach out. It's down. It can't do anything.

    My team is infrastructure. The servers are cattle, not pets, and there is a separate team for being able to troublshoot application specific issues and whether it's running properly after a restart.

    All the info to determine if it's a system wide problem vs a single virtual server, to identify the owner properly, and to automate routing this stuff to the people who can actually do something about it are all there for our monitoring system. I know because I was directly involved in all of that. I made sure it was.

    The only thing I didn't handle myself was configuring the alerting system, because that was set to be a project for a co-worker to lead. So every fucking network connectivity blip comes to us because they're going to "sort out the specifics later" before it goes live... like two years ago.

  • Hell yes. The first game is infamous for all the internet areas being particularly labrynthian and looking all the fucking same. Also some pretty heinous translation errors. That all improves as the series goes on, but don't feel bad using maps in the earlier games during the "run all over the place in the net" backtracking sections.

    Also, save every map transistion out on the open net. The games don't make it explicit, more as rumors, but boss rematches are hidden with invisible triggers out on the net. Usally they're down dead ends but not always. So you can occasionally end up in a surprise stronger version of a boss fight just trying to get from place to place. That can suck if you aren't ready and haven't saved in a long time. But those are also how you get the high powered boss chips, so they're worth it once you're ready.

    Be aware that each game has hidden content that you aren't expected to figure out on your own just through the game itself. These are very much products of their time, and lean into the sort of old internet forum stuff with rumors and theories and helping each other out using those external info sources. When you get to the navi cust games where you arrange tetris like blocks to enable skills, there are codes to shrink almost every block that you'll only ever find now by looking them up. Post game stuff effectively requires using guides at this point in time since there aren't the digital equivalent of playground rumors about these games out on forums anymore.

    The later games will start splitting content across versions like Pokemon, but with actual story changes as well. Mostly different bosses in the run through the main plot, but there are some weird choices like majot plot critical scenes locked to one version or another.

    When you get to those ones I'd reccomend looking for fan patches/romhacks that try to make things more cohesive, and look up the "canon" game of the versions if you don't want odd plot holes like characters refering to previous events you didn't play, or an entire fucking main villian just coming back like "Somehow, Palpatine returned." because the scene explaining it is version specific.

    Lastly, chip codes are more important than the game makes clear. If you want to break the battle system over your knee and make it cry, look up program advances and build your deck for them.

  • I too, enjoy plugging a USB-C to A adapter into my Android phone so I can use an ethernet to USB adapter. :P

    More seriously, two of the hard requirements of my house was fiber connection available from the ISP to the house and wired ethernet to the major rooms.

  • Hey, it's the reason I intentionally limit the amount of my news exposure. Efforts to overwhelm by those in power.

    Feeling so overwhelmed in the face of all the horrors of the world that you're frozen doesn't help fix anything.

  • Wasn't going to, as it's just a lazy day home caring for a probably sick toddler. She sounded awful when she woke up, but now after medicine and time sounds and is acting fine. Besides being the hungriest two year old in the world. Wonders of youth.

    But I realized I was getting slightly more frustrated with her normal toddler antics than I should be (she's at the age of testing rules and boundaries), so I took them a few hours ago. Better now.

    Don't be like me. If you're supposed to take psychoactive meds regularly, ones that have effects on your mood and emotional response to things, don't just fucking skip them out of laziness. It's not fair to put the people around you or yourself through having to deal with a worse/less controlled version of yourself due to laziness or lack of enough self control to just take your damn meds. You've been perscribed them to help you, use the help. If they arenct helping, go talk to your Dr.

  • The neat thing is that it depends on the direction you stroke them. In one direction it is very abrasive, but in the opposite it feels very smooth.