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…
Category: I.T – Administration
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…
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.
TPM chips can cause system instability
Adding a TPM chip can cause instability on a system? Read on to find out about my experience!
Weird ASP.net PathInfo behaviour
This post is about an ASP.net quirk and the (lack of) solution of it.
It’s a known fact that ASP.net WebMethods as provided by the ASP.net AJAX framework use what’s known as the path info of a url in order to map a request to a Web method. In other words, suppose you need to call a WebMethod called AWebMethod() in page APage.aspx. Suppose your application resides in http://anapplication.com (I really spent some time thinking about proper names about these. Really).
Fax over IP is a pain
The requirement A few months ago came the need for a fax machine. Worse yet, it had tobe connected on a dedicated phone line since the main line was configured to redirect unanswered calls to a mobile number after a number of rings, while incoming faxes could occur any time of the day.
WordPress 3.x on IIS 7.x with Unicode Permalinks – Problem SOLVED!
Generally speaking, I don’t like wasting time hunting down framework bugs. It’s not that I don’t like a challenge, it’s just that they are usually hard and very time consuming to fix (if at all possible), especially in case you have to deal with fringe cases (in other words, “Google isn’t going to help”). Since we have lots of clients…
On Forum software
Recently, I was searching the web for some information on a subject (I won’t get into details, suffice to say that it had to do with my sound card) when a promising link lead me to a forum discussion (which I won’t name here for obvious reasons). A user had uploaded an image as an attachment with his message so…
Fun with caching WordPress & PHPBB 3 on IIS.
Recently, I was forced to look into PHP caching, thanks to a series of events. Here’s what happened: Once upon a fine day, the (windows) server demanded that I will install some windows updates it found and I proceeded. After the restart though, I noticed that all of our PHP sites were timing out. It didn’t take long to find…