Intro This is going to be a two parter: The Web In the first part, we hardened the docker-mailserver installation to aggressively block malicious users along with their immediate /24 vicinity. In this part, I am going to briefly explain crowdsec and its concepts, and how I have integrated it with my Caddy reverse proxy and Cloudflare. What is Crowdsec?…
Author: Q
Stopping Malware – Part 1: The Mail Server
Intro This is going to be a two parter: I run my own mail server, something that is generally not recommended, because of the complexity that comes with ensuring security, compliance and “good behaviour,” to avoid having your server end up on spam lists or be vulnerable to attacks and taken over. Not being one to back away from a…
A tale of two (Wire) Guards
The Problem of High Availability with Tailscale I have been a very happy user of Tailscale for about a year now. I tried a direct Wireguard VPN a while ago, in an attempt to get away from the dysfunctional OpenVPN solution I had, but I did face certain bugs with it and it failed to land. That’s probably a case…
Bye bye Pi-Hole & OpenWRT DNS/DCHP; Hello Technitium!
How it started On this post I had posted the following diagram (click to see it in its full size): This showcased how I used two instances of Pi-hole and two OpenWRT routers to achieve high availability. The setup was pretty much as following: The beauty of the setup is that all parts were highly available, minus the DC because…
More fun with Tailscale and Keepalived
Aaaand now I’ve moved on from Tailscale to Netbird. The concept is similar, the implementation has a few differences though. Read about it here. I have migrated from using OpenVPN to Tailscale. Tailscale uses a daemon to initiate an outbound connection with the Tailscale’s servers which act as the gateway, compared to OpenVPN where the server accepts inbound connections. The…
Poor man’s DHCP High Availability for OpenWRT routers
Note: I don’t use OpenWRT’s DNS or DHCP capabilities anymore. Why? I have two routers. One running as a VM under Proxmox which has a Mellanox SFP28 card attached to it and it is my main connection to the Internet, and another running on an old TP-Link Archer C7, which has a 4G modem attached to it and takes over…
A Bunch of Lessons learnt working with Kubernetes, Cilium, Cloudflare & High Availability
In my previous post, I detailed how I got my 2 routers and 2 PiHoles to be highly available, thanks to keepalived. I still have this solution deployed and it works very well. However, about 2 weeks ago I decided to extend the concept of high availability to some of the services I host locally (including this website). These currently…
High-Availability on the cheap with keepalived
Note: While I still use keepalived, much of my stack has changed. Sometimes I work remotely. Other times I mess things up. When I work remotely and I mess something up on my server, say, the VPN connection, because I cannot leave well enough along when travelling, I have to wait until I am back. At the same time, ever…
25Gbps Internet, Speedtest.net server
I’ve been living in Switzerland for about 4 years now. Ever since I moved here I was more than happy with the offerings from init7, probably the best ISP in Switzerland and definitely one of the best in the world. They are not the cheapest, but their reliability and service quality far outweighs the asking price.
Adding Road Warriors to the VPN
This post is the second part of setting up an OpenVPN server. In my previous post I initially intended to have all road warriors into the same subnet, different than the Server subnet, however that proved to be infeasible. Instead, each individual device not behind a network (such as the home network depicted there) will be assigned an IP from the OpenVPN server in the 192.168.201.0/24 subnet and will be able to access both the server as well as any other potential subnets in the network.
Using OpenVPN to connect a Standalone Server and Home LAN
Following is the network configuration I want to achieve. I have a home network, a standalone server somewhere on the internet and some devices that may not always be connected on the home network. I want everyone to be able to see everyone else and I want to do this through OpenVPN.
Corsair’s Link application causes PC sleep issues
EDIT: Link does not seem to cause trouble any more at least with the current version! In my quest to make my system sleepable, I found out on my last post that TPM chips can cause instability. Unfortunately, whilst this solved most issues, there were still times where when the display would turn off to save power, if I tried…
TPM chips can cause system instability
Adding a TPM chip can cause instability on a system? Read on to find out about my experience!
On Semantic Versioning
What is it? If you are a software developer, you may have heard of Semantic Versioning, as outlined here: http://semver.org/ What this is, is a set of rules for versioning stuff with public APIs (usually library components) in order to minimise Dependency Hell. Dependency Hell is something rather common that you encounter with package managers, where libraries that depende upon…
My early new year’s resolution…
… is 3840×2160 š . IĀ used to have 3 monitors side by side and then decided that it really wasn’t comfortable despite the love I had for the real estate they offered. After researching a bit on 4K a few months ago, I decided that they were too expensive to seriously consider; a thought that crossed my mind…
Windows Azure: When Visual Studio eats up all memory
Every now and then I encounter a what seems to be a rather weird case of Visual Studio pushing the OS to its knees, to the point where all memory appears to be exhausted and all kinds of weird problems start appearing, such as dialog boxes without text and processes closing unexpectedly.
Windows Azure SDK 2.4 hates you
The new Azure SDK is out and I was just about to install it. Then I notice this little notice here (emphasis is mine):
Fixing a cheap guitar – Marble effect
I got rid of this guitar now. Its horrible fret access thanks to the Fenderesque bolt-on neck did it for me. I still have five other guitars that are not played nearly enough, so that’s not too big of a loss. Well, I rarely ever find the need to write about anything, since, unless I do find anything that’s…
Holy Tonewood
I have a problem with unsubstantiated claims that are based on “personal experience”, belief or statements “simple and/or obvious knowledge” which are in turn non-provable in the lab. This especially applies to musicians who seem to find all kinds of differences and using “experience” in order to convince everyone else about what’s the proper way to do things.
LSR Guitar Machine Heads/Tuners
Last month I bought a few guitars to add to my collection. One in particular was a Jackson JS32T Rhoads, a cheap Flying-V style guitar. I decided to make this my project guitar and replace the cheap parts with better ones.