What happened?

Sadly Google is shutting down the free version of G Suite for good.

What now?

There are some not-so-good alternatives:

• Self hosting: Mailcow is extremely memory hungry and delivery is definitely spotty unless you use a external SMTP provider like Mailgun.
• Yandex: Free, 10GB space, 1000 seats. Anti SPAM is very hungry and sending can be limited for no good reason.
• VK Mail(biz.mail.ru): Free, unlimited space, 5000 seats. Delivery is spotty.
• MXRoute: Good service, reliable. Price can be as low as $10/yr/10GB during black friday. 1GB mailbox can be as low as $3/year, 2GB at $5/year. There's a $179/lifetime/10GB package. Check Nexusbytes - price is better with resellers.
• MS Exchange: $4/seat.
• Office 365: $99/yr/6 seats.
• Paying ransom to Google: $72/year.
• Apple: $1/seat/month. No unlimited alias.
• Zoho: Free, 10GB space but NO SMTP/IMAP support.
• Disroot: Paid at 0.15 Euro/GB/yr. Delivery can be problematic.
• Protonmail: $5/sear/month. NO SMTP support.

Solution

So what I am looking should have:

• Large enough space(I've accumulated ~8GB of Emails in the last 15ish years)
• Good delivery
• SMTP support
• Unlimited aliases
• Unlimited seats
• Catch-all address

Gmail has a unique feature(not that unique but I've only seen it on Outlook outside Gmail) - "send as alias". You can setup a preferred alias, customize SMTP credentials and Gmail shall call that SMTP server when sending outbound Email when using that alias.
So what we can do is:

• Get Email forwarding service on the domain to catch Emails and forward to your personal Gmail
• Get SMTP working
• Add SMTP as alias in Gmail

Preparations

You will need

• A Email forwarder(will elaborate)
• Preferred SMTP provider
• Gmail account(can be free ones)
• DNS access of your domain

Email forwarder

A Email forwarder should act as your MX record, take inbounding Email and forward to designated address.
There are quite a number of good free forwarders around:

• improvmx
• Cloudflare Email Routing. Note you need full zone(aka using Cloudflare as NS)
• Mailgun: no free plan though
• Your domain register probably provides this feature for free
• Self hosting
• Sparkpost with Heroku

SMTP provider

There's no lack of them with free plans:

• Mailchimp
• Sendgrid
• Sparkpost
• Amazon SES(note traffic is not free)

Steps

Make sure you stick with this sequence.

(Optional) Migrate existing Emails

You can do that in Settings.

Setup Email forwarding

Go to any forwarder and setup MX and SPF record with DNS provider: MX record to receive Email, SPF to send Email on behalf of your domain so you can receive forwarded Email.

Setup SMTP

Use any SMTP provider and verify your domain. Add necessary DMARC and SPF record: the SPF record may looks like v=spf1 include:spf.improvmx.com include:_spf.somethingelse.com ~all
Note down the SMTP credentials. Using Sparkpost as example -

Host smtp.sparkpostmail.com
Port 587
Alternative Port 2525
Authentication AUTH LOGIN
Encryption STARTTLS
Username SMTP_Injection
Password an API key you created

Setup Gmail

1. Go to Gmail's settings and select "send as alias". Put in your desired alias.

2. Click next: Gmail may infer some IMAP settings - replace with SMTP credentials.

3. Click next: Gmail will send an Email to that alias for verification - you should receive that Email in your Gmail as you've already setup forwarding. Put in the code.

4. (Optional) Set the new alias as default.

Now you've got a reliable free Domain Email for completely free.

There's a problem that Slack login is required for Slack integration, but sometimes we want to use OIDC for login: this will make the application vomit.
Steps to fix it:

1. Get a Postgres connector, connect to DB. Backup DB.

2. Consider the Email domain you will use with OIDC: blah [at] cnbeining.com is cnbeining.com, test@gmail.com is gmail.com.

3. Fill in all environment variables required for OIDC integration. Remove ALLOWED_DOMAIN variable - otherwise Outline will not allow logins from Email whose domain is different from it's own domain.

4. Create a new entry in table authentication_providers. name is always oidc, domain is the domain of your Email, enabled is true, teamid is the same as the original one. Note self hosted Outline can only have 1 team at a time.

5. Go to table teams. The name is ALWAYS HARDCODED as Wiki. domain is empty. Failing to do so will cause Outline to complain "max number of teams reached".

6. Now your new OIDC should be working but users is not be associated across authentication providers by Email.

7. In user_authentications table, create a second entry for users you want to associate: random id, same userId, set authenticationProviderId, scopes and providerId as the new one's. Delete the newly created but disassociated user.

8. Now you should have more than 1 login method with users associated across the board by Email.

Outline what?

Outline is a nice personal wiki tool that

• Supports Markdown natively
• Self hosting option
• Fast
• Nice searching function
• Not overly complicated
• Supports live collaboration

making it great for hosting personal wiki.
However there's no free official hosted version of Outline - but it's pretty simple to host on Heroku for free.

Preparations

Heroku

Register an account, and bind a credit card: this will give you 1,000 hours of running time per month, which is good enough. A worker dyno is needed so this shall give you 500 hours of usable time per month.

Slack

Slack app is required for authentication and integration.
Go to api.slack.com/apps and create an app - in a space you feel comfortable.

Other authentication

OIDC is supported but I have not tried it - Auth0 and Okta have free plan that supports OAuth.

S3

S3 is needed for rich media storage.
There are a couple of free providers:

• Backblaze B2: 10GB space, 1GB download traffic per day. Technically should work with Cloudflare but I have not figured out how.
• Scaleway: 75GB space, 75GB/month traffic. DC located in EU.
• IBM: 25GB space, 5GB/month traffic.
• Storj DCS: 150GB space, 150GB traffic.

Create an account and collect all the details.

Email

Get something that supports SMTP. Free options includes:

• SparkPost: 100 Emails/day.
• SendGrid: 100 Emails/day.
• MailPoet: No hard limit?

Create an account, verify the domain and collect SMTP config.

(optional) Cloudflare

Use Cloudflare to use your own domain. A free plan is good enough but you may need a Page Rule for overriding SSL settings.

(optional) GitHub account

Use this to update the application in the future, or configure auto update.
Fork the repo;
Install wei/pull, enable it for your forked repo so your personal fork is always up to date.

Setup

Instructions as follow:

Get it running first

Click here to deploy the application. Follow the instructions, and put in environment variables as requested. Generate UTILS_SECRET with openssl rand -hex 32. URL is the https://xxx.herokuapp.com for now.
Do not bother with Google OAuth - you need a paid account to get it working.
You should have a working app: try logging in. If in doubt, check logs under More.
Remember to enable workers at Configure Dynos under Overview.

Cloudflare setup

This official documentation is not very clear - TLDR version:

• Add your desired domain to Heroku, don't bother with SSL - it's paid addon
• Go to Cloudflare, add a CNAME record from that domain to xxx.herokuapp.com - NOT the record Heroku gave you!
• If your SSL settings is NOT Strict, add a Page Rule to override it;
• Change URL in Heroku config to the new domain under Settings.

Now you should have access on the new domain. It may take a while for Cloudflare to issue the new SSL certificate.

Setting up app update

Go to Deploy, connect your Github, select your fork.
Enable auto update as you wish(de facto nightly build), or conduct manual updates.

Database backup(for Heroku Postgres)

It seems that there's no way to set this up in the UI:

• Go to data.heroku.com/ and click in the Postgres DB
• Settings - View credentials
• Copy the Heroku CLI command, something like heroku pg:psql postgresql-blah-12345 --app outline-yourname
• In your local shell that has heroku setup, run heroku pg:backups:schedule postgresql-blah-12345 --at '02:00 America/Los_Angeles' --app outline-yourname, change the time as your preference.

Limitation for free DB:

• Only 1 backup per day
• No point in time
• Only preserving the last 2 backups

OpenVZ - no Docker this time.

• install Nginx, php 7.4, and plugins www.cloudbooklet.com/upgrade-php-version-to-php-7-4-on-ubuntu/
• install mysql
  • get a root password
  • make sure root password is in deed working, and wrong passwords are rejected
  • restore backup
• copy all files to new box
• chown to www-data:www-data
• In wp-config.php:
  • disable cache
  • change DB
• In wp-content:
  • delete advanced-cache.php
• In Nginx conf:
  • revert to no cache version

If error out:
- Test with phpinfo() file
- if 502, check php-fpm and Nginx connection
- Test with new WordPress
- If 500, check DB

• Rebuild cache

In the light of recent news that
Docker Desktop for Windows and macOS is no longer free, efforts have been put in to search for a replacement.

Docker Desktop?

Docker Desktop used to be Docker Toolbox, which is based on VirtualBox. Docker Desktop is able to utilize Hyperkit on macOS which makes the performance much better compared to Type II hypervisor.
In my mind a good in-place replacement should be:

• Runs single Dockerfile
• Supports volume mounting and port forwarding
• Runs docker-compose.yml
• Easy to setup
• Supports Windows and macOS(Docker Engine on Linux remains open-sourced)
• Works with built-in debugger for common IDEs(IntelliJ & VSCode)
• Works with IDE's built-in support that's based on Docker socket
• Supports ARM Mac

Common replacements proposed includes:

• Podman: a Redhat-backed solution that runs on OCI. Spins up a Podman-flavored VM. Very limited support for Docker-Compose. Probably requires reworking Dockerfile. Volume mounting is painful. Cannot be used with IDE's built-in support.
• Microk8s & k3s: Kubenetes. Won't work with Docker-Compose.

Multipass

This is where Multipass comes to shine:

• Utilized Hyperkit, Hyper-V, and Virtualbox for best performance
• Handles volume mounting nicely
• Easy to setup
• Networking is easy
• Volume mounting is simple – at least when using Hyperkit
• Native ARM support

Downsides include:

• Ubuntu. Not even Debian. Bad news for CentOS lovers.
• Overlapping function with Vagrant. Can't deny that.

The actual setup

Steps based on macOS Catalina, 10.15.7.

Install Multipass

Download installer
here. You DO NOT need to set driver as VirtualBox – leave it as is and Hyperkit will be used as default!
You can try running brew install multipass.
Make sure that you give multipassd Full Disk Access – otherwise mounting will fail!

Create and setup your instance

I am calling my instance as
fakedocker.
Note the default disk size is merely 5GiB – not enough for setting up Docker. To give it a bit more space:
multipass launch fakedocker -d 20G
Use -c to add more CPU cores, -m to add more RAM. Documentation

One-liner with cloud-init

You may want to change Docker-Compose's version to the latest.
Save this file as cloud-init.yaml, and run:
multipass launch fakedocker -d 20G --cloud-init cloud-init.yaml

#cloud-config
apt:
  sources:
    docker.list:
      source: deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $RELEASE stable
      key: |
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package_update: true
packages:
  - apt-transport-https
  - ca-certificates
  - curl
  - gnupg-agent
  - software-properties-common
  - docker-ce
  - docker-ce-cli
  - containerd.io
  - avahi-daemon
  - libnss-mdns
runcmd:
  - sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.29.2/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
  - sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
  - sudo systemctl daemon-reload
# create the docker group
groups:
  - docker
# Add default auto created user to docker group
system_info:
  default_user:
    groups: [docker]
write_files:
  - content: |
      [Service]
      Type=notify
      # the default is not to use systemd for cgroups because the delegate issues still
      # exists and systemd currently does not support the cgroup feature set required
      # for containers run by docker
      ExecStart=
      ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// --containerd=/run/containerd/containerd.sock -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock -H tcp://0.0.0.0:
      ExecReload=/bin/kill -s HUP $MAINPID
      TimeoutSec=0
      RestartSec=2
      Restart=always
    path: /lib/systemd/system/docker.service.d/overwrite.conf
    owner: root:root
    permissions: '0644'
power_state:
  mode: reboot
  message: Restarting after configuring Ubuntu for Docker and Docker-Compose

If having any problem, run multipass shell fakedocker to SSH into the VM. Logs are located at /var/log/cloud-init.log.

Manually set up your instance

Create VM

Use multipass launch fakedocker -d 20G to create the instance.
Run multipass shell fakedocker to get into the instance.

Setup Docker and other stuff

Follow this guide to install Docker: docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/
Also this post-install guide to setup groups: docs.docker.com/engine/install/linux-postinstall/
For installing Docker-Compose: docs.docker.com/compose/install/
Run sudo apt-get install -y avahi-daemon libnss-mdns to install Avahi to enable Bonjour so you can access the box by fakedocer.local. This will comes in handy in the following setup.
Edit Docker's Systemd config to expose both port and Unix socket: TCP is for remote debugger on your local machine, the socket is for running Docker command locally:
Create a folder at /lib/systemd/system/docker.service.d/ add a file overwrite.conf with the following content:

      [Service]
      Type=notify
      # the default is not to use systemd for cgroups because the delegate issues still
      # exists and systemd currently does not support the cgroup feature set required
      # for containers run by docker
      ExecStart=
      ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// --containerd=/run/containerd/containerd.sock -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock -H tcp://0.0.0.0:
      ExecReload=/bin/kill -s HUP $MAINPID
      TimeoutSec=0
      RestartSec=2
      Restart=always

then

sudo chmod 666 /var/run/docker.sock
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart docker.service

to make sure that docker command works on the VM.

Mounting local folder

Run multipass mount ~ fakedocker to attach your home directory to the new VM. This will make sure that you don't need to calculate where you are mounting.

Quick sanity test

On fakedocker VM,

• Run docker pscommand: Docker should be able to run. You may need to log out and re-login for group change to take effect.
• Run nc -zv 127.0.0.1 2375to make sure that Docker Engine is taking traffic from TCP.
• Run ls /User/<your_username>to make sure that volume attaching is successful: use catto read a file, and write something random to make sure that the attached volume is readable and writable.

On your local machine:

• do a nc -zv fakedocker.local 2375to make sure that your local debugger can communicate with the Docker instance on fakedocker.

Now you've got a nice environment where you can use
docker
and
docker-compose
as if you are on your local machine.

Setting up Docker on Mac

Run export DOCKER_HOST="tcp://fakedocker.local:2375" or put it in your ~/.zshrc to make the VM your default Docker host.
Follow docs.docker.com/engine/install/binaries/ to setup docker command locally, and github.com/docker/compose/releases to setup docker-compose.

Setting up remote debugger

I am using PyCharm with Docker-Compose with attached volume in docker-compose.yml as an example:

Create a new Docker machine

PyCharm should be able to connect to this instance.

Setup a new Interpreter

Make sure that you do Path mappings as shown: otherwise, debugger won't be able to run.

Setup debug config

Listen to 0.0.0.0 - otherwise, you won't be able to visit the web service.
That should be it! Trigger debugging - if you are listening to port 8000, go to http://fakedocker.local:8000 to visit your site. Setup port forwarding in docker-compose.yml if you want to expose more services, like your database.

Common problems

Multipass VM stuck at "Starting"/ Multipass is stuck on any command

Run
sudo pkill multipassd
and redo your last step. multipassd is a daemon that checks VM: killing this process does not change the state of VM. (So what's the point of making it a daemon?)

Multipass VM is botched

Run multipass delete <name_of_vm> && multipass purge to completely remove the VM. 

Multipass VM cannot read mounted folder on computer reboot

Reattach the volume:
multipass unmount ~ fakedocker && multipass mount ~ fakedocker.

Cannot connect to remote Docker

Make sure that you've edited Docker's startup command to include TCP listening on
0.0.0.0.

Need to debug issues when using cloud-init

Logs are located at /var/log/cloud-init.log.

docker command on VM won't run

• Make sure that Docker's startup command also listens on Unix socket.
• That socket file needs to be 666.

IDE cannot connect to debugger: cannot find debugger file(especially Pycharm)

Mount your project home to
/opt/project.

Reference

github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/913
youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-33489
serverfault.com/questions/843296/how-do-i-expose-the-docker-api-over-tcp
docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/
docs.docker.com/engine/install/linux-postinstall/
docs.docker.com/compose/install/
github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1839
github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1389
docs.docker.com/engine/install/binaries/
cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/examples.html
cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/boot.html
unix.stackexchange.com/questions/542343/docker-service-how-to-edit-systemd-service-file

1. engage.cloudflareclient.com is always resolving to 162.159.192.1, even on IPv6 DNS.

2. Warp is available on 162.159.192.1 to 162.159.192.9 and 2606:4700:d0::a29f:c001 to 2606:4700:d0::a29f:c009.

3. ALL IPv4 addresses are blackholed on GFW. NOT FOR IPv6.

SearX is a great meta search engine that aggrgate multiple engine's result together, giving you privacy during searching.
A list of public instances can be found at searx.space/ - however it's not possible to know what logging those public instances are putting up. Some public instances are using Cloudflare, which is OK - but some tends to set the senstivity too high which ruins the experience. Note Cloudflare can see everything - but for personal users you do need that to stop bots.
A better solution is to create your own instance, and share with your friends. The sharing step is as important as setting up - otherwise it's effectly the same as you are using a single proxy. But think twice before setting up public instance unless you know what you are doing.
SearX has an official Docker Compose repo at github.com/searx/searx-docker - but I am already running Nginx on 443. So I need to hack the setup to make my current setup working with the new containers. Make sure you read github.com/searx/searx-docker#what-is-included- and understand which part is for what.
Grab this repo, edit .env file as instructed, and run ./start.sh once. Don't worry about issues: we will hack them though.

Hacking Caddyfile

I should not use Caddy with Nginx but to make it working:

1. Remove all morty related content
2. If you want to use Cloudflare, hack Content-Security-Policy and add https://ajax.cloudflare.com/ in script-src 'self'; otherwise rocket loader won't work.

Hacking searx/settings.yml

You need to change the Morty related stuffs at the end. Hardcode your Morty URL in, like https://search.fancy.tld/morty .

Hacking docker-compose.yml

1. For Caddy, bind 80 to other ports. Like 4180:80.
2. For morty: limit port 3000 to only localhost.
3. For searx: hardcode morty related URL in.

Hacking .env

1. Put localhost:4180 in host so Caddy won't take port 80 from Nginx.
2. Use HTTP only. We shall do SSL with Nginx.

Hacking rules.json

Remove the block deflate part if you need Cloudflare.

Hacking Nginx

Try this setup:

upstream searx {
  server localhost:4180;
  keepalive 64;
}
upstream morty {
  server localhost:3000;
  keepalive 64;
}
server {
    listen       :80;
    listen       [::]:80;
    listen       :443 ssl;
    listen       [::]:443 ssl;
    server_name  fancy.search.tld;
    ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/fancy.search.tld.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/fancy.search.tld.key;
    ssl_session_timeout 5m;
    ssl_protocols  TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
    ssl_ciphers ECDH+AESGCM:DH+AESGCM:ECDH+AES256:DH+AES256:ECDH+AES128:DH+AES:ECDH+3DES:DH+3DES:RSA+AESGCM:RSA+AES:RSA+3DES:!aNULL:!MD5:!DSS;
    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
    keepalive_timeout 70;
    ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m;
    ssl_dhparam /etc/nginx/ssl/dhparams.pem;
    location / {
        proxy_buffering off;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Connection "";  # Need this or morty will complain
        proxy_pass http://searx;
    }
    location /morty {
        proxy_buffering off;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Connection "";  # Need this or morty will complain
        proxy_pass http://morty;
    }
}

Note you must use upstream for reverse proxy or morty will complain.
With all the setup you should have something more or less usable. Wait for the checker to finish for optimized list of engines to enable - and note Qwant and DDG both uses Bing result, while Startpage is watered down Google.
If you want to set your SearX as default search engine for Chrome: visit your site, go to and your engine should be selectable. You may need to change the URL.