Re-optimizing Video: 2021 Honda Odyssey

Previously on Optimizing Video: 2021 Honda Odyssey RES I had a beautiful ffmpeg 1-liner to convert videos to “space-saving-letterbox-loving-USB-sized” videos to be played on my Vehicles Entertainment System. Unfortunately, some of the videos continued to fail to play to the point where the system would reset and would need me to cycle the vehicles power to cold reboot the entertainment system.

Suffice to write it’s led to much trial-and-error, with much more excitement on success.

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dovecot – out of the box setup

Trying to learn a new programming language is a daunting task. My process is to take programs that I’ve written before and rewrite them in the target language of choice.

I’ve got a PHP program that interacts with my IMAP server (smart-imap), reads all the messages in the Inbox, takes the localpart of the email address, creates a folder and moves that email into that folder. If the localpart is part of a pre-determined list of email addresses that have been sold off for Spam it’ll move it to the SPAM folder. If there are no localparts that match the domain name of the server then it drops it into an UNSORTED folder.

Today’s language of choice is Python, specifically 3.9.21. To do this entire feat without breaking things I need an IMAP server, and dovecot 2.3.16 is going to be the death of me.

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Server Problems, 2025…

After Gettin’ hacked and rebuilding with a cheaper server I started encountering random slowness and problems. I always seemed to have random CPU spikes here and there but the console at digitalocean didn’t really give me much to work with.

Today I tried to install git so I can get some repos cloned down to demo and the process kept getting Killed. After some simple googling and basic cross referencing of the system I’m leasing I learned the stupidest thing in the world.

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Gettin’ hacked…

This server got hacked. It was used as a scanner for a couple days, attempting to break into other servers to test for vulnerabilities. I only discovered this because I attempted to access this server by the .onion domain that I have for it and it didn’t connect.

I’ve had a home server hacked before due to a user account with a I set up for my son with “an easy” password. I thought I learned that lesson. Apparently I did not with the server I have exposed to the interwebs.

Time to forensically breakdown the timeline of events.

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