Server

Introduction Earlier this year I looked at switching from Bitwarden (online service) to self hosting Vaultwarden. The post I wrote was fairly high level and focused on different container options. It was a fairly generic deployment that didn’t go into much detail. Configuration and security considerations were woefully neglected in that post. It also didn’t go into detail about how I’d integrate it into the VPS that I use as VPN, DNS, and now password vault server....

Introduction My go to web server has always been NGINX and it’s been my default choice since I started this blog. Any time I need a web server it’s without question NGINX. That is until recently. I’ve been playing around with containerization and specifically making my vaultwarden deployment better. But that’s for another post. As I was looking into this, the Caddy web server kept coming up. Vaultwarden seems to really like it....

Introduction I needed to update some pages on my blog and while looking at it, it feels a bit stale. The site design hasn’t really changed in nearly 15 years. The only real update was in 2019, when I switched from WordPress to Jekyll. They were minor changes and made to accommodate moving to Jekyll. Otherwise, this blog has looked and acted essentially the same for all these years. Wanting to update the style also meant I should take the time to update things like Javascript libraries, Jekyll plugins and what not....

Introduction A few months ago I setup a private DNS resolver with ad blocking. At that time I decided to manually update the block file whenever I installed server updates. This works, but it very quickly became tedious. I’m not sure why I initially thought it wouldn’t. I’ve since decided to automate the process. Block File Script The previous script I wrote would download a hosts file based block list and convert it into a format that Unbound can load....

Introduction For about the past 14 years I’ve been using Linode as my preferred personal VPS provider. I started using them at the beginning of November 2008 when I first setup my blog. Other than a short and painful mistake of hosting my blog elsewhere, it has lived on Linode. Recently I had to setup a VPS with DigitalOcean. This was due to needing the VPS in a data center located in a very specific place....

Introduction When Lastpass first came on the scene I jumped on it because of how easy it makes syncing passwords between devices. Previously, I was using a local password manager that was only on my computer. Thankfully, mobile logins weren’t nearly as necessary for daily life back then. However, I still needed my computer to log into anything on my phone. Over the years, Lastpass started having security incidents. This isn’t surprising with how big it became....

Introduction Recently I setup a VPN to so I could get around geo-restrictions for for a specific streaming service I’m using. So far it’s been working well. Now that I have the server, I started thinking about what else I could do with it. One thing that jumped out at me is DNS. I configured my WireGuard client connections to use CloudFlare and fallback to Google’s DNS servers. While this does provide privacy from my ISP and queries originate from the same VPN server, felt like I could do better....

Introduction I was recommended some videos and I’ve been very interested to watch them. However they’re not available outside of a specific country due to geographic restrictions. This is a common problem and pretty much every commercial VPN service advertises this as a major reason to use their VPN. So I embarked on what should have been a simple journey. Sign up for a VPN, choose an end point in the country I need, and watch the videos....

I’ve started using duplicity combined with Amazon’s S3 to backup this server. Duplicity is an amazing application that makes backups simple. Some of the features I like best about duplicity are: it encrypts the data, compresses it, splits it into manageable chunks, does incremental backups, and can backup to a variety of destinations. When you restore your data it takes care of applying the incremental backups to produce the final files....