2017 – FoolControl – Phear the penguin

Secure traffic to ZNC on Synology with Let’s Encrypt

September 10, 2017

I’ve been using IRC since late 1990’s, and I continue to do so to this day due to it (still) being one of the driving development forces in various open source communities. Especially in Linux development … and some of my acquintances I can only get in touch with via IRC :)

My Setup

On my Synology NAS I run ZNC (IRC bouncer/proxy) to which I connect using various IRC clients (irssi/XChat Azure/AndChat) from various platforms (Linux/Mac/Android). In this case ZNC serves as a gateway and no matter which device/client I connect from, I’m always connected to same IRC servers/chat rooms/settings when I left off.

This is all fine and dandy, but connecting from external networks to ZNC means you will hand in your ZNC credentials in plain text. Which is a problem for me, even thought we’re “only” talking about IRC bouncer/proxy.

With that said, how do we encrypt external traffic to our ZNC?

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Automagically deploy & run containerized WordPress (PHP7 FPM, Nginx, MariaDB) using Ansible + Docker on AWS

May 21, 2017

Update: containerized-wordpress-project comes with enabled HTTPS site encryption using Let’s Encrypt certificates.

In this blog post, I’ve described what started as simple migration of WordPress blog to AWS, ended up as automation project consisting of publishing multiple Ansible roles deploying and running multiple Docker images.

If you’re not interested in reading about my entire journey, cognition gains and how this process came to be, please skim down to “Birth of: containerized-wordpress-project (TL;DR)” section.

Migrating WordPress blog to AWS (EC2, Lightsail?)

Since I’ve been sold on Amazon’s AWS idea of cloud computing “services” for couple of years now. I’ve wanted, and been trying to migrate this (WordPress) blog to AWS, but somehow it never worked out.

Moving it to EC2 instance, with its own ELB volumes, AMI, EIP, Security Group … it just seemed as an overkill.

When AWS Lightsail was first released, it seemed that was an answer to all my problems.

But it wasn’t, disregarding its bit restrictive/dumbed down versions of original features. Living in Amsterdam, my main problem with it was that it was only available in a single US region.

more “Automagically deploy & run containerized WordPress (PHP7 FPM, Nginx, MariaDB) using Ansible + Docker on AWS”

Secure (HTTPS) public access to Synology NAS using Let’s Encrypt (free) SSL certificate

February 17, 2017

Secure public access to your Synology?

Every time I’m outside of my home network, and I need to get something from my Synology NAS, I’m facing the same dillema. Who’s sniffing the network I’m on, and who will I hand over my credentials in plain text using HTTP.

Of course, you can add extra security to your Synology account by using 2 step authentication, or first establishing connection to (preferably private) VPN connection. But even then … footprint of sensitive data you’re leaving behind you is just not worth it.

To resolve this problem, you could get a self-signed SSL certificate, but whole process will cost you time and money. But thanks to good people at Let’s Encrypt, this whole process now takes 15 minutes process and is free!

Secure (HTTPS) access to Synology NAS using Let’s Encrypt (free) SSL certificate

There are couple of tutorials which cover this same topic, however reason why I wrote my own is because none of them worked for me.

more “Secure (HTTPS) public access to Synology NAS using Let’s Encrypt (free) SSL certificate”

FoolControl – Phear the penguin

Year: 2017

Migrating WordPress blog to AWS (EC2, Lightsail?)