Nginx is probably the most widely used reverse proxy software out there. But when it comes to Docker, I have started to favor Caddy over it. Caddy is a lightweight web server written in Go. Among its advantages are extremely simple configuration and support for automatic Let’s Encrypt certificates. Certainly the automatic HTTPS simplifies any Docker setup. While it is not yet included in repositories and therefore lacks automatic updates, Docker nullifies this drawback. So, I will show you how to setup Caddy reverse proxy for Kibana.

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The first version of Glimpse photo editor, a fork of Gimp, just came out. Unfortunately, an avalanche of criticism by some community members has promptly followed. The reactions range from claiming the Glimpse team are not bringing any value, to accusing them of stealing the Gimp code. To be honest, I found the overall tone quite unreasonable. So, I will try to refute the claims and explain why forking Gimp into Glimpse is a positive development.

“The authors are over-sensitive SJWs”

The most common critique is, that the project was started because of personal sensitivities. More specifically, because the team found “gimp” to be an offensive term. However, if you see their motivation behind the rebranding, you will learn, that it was not the case. Rather, the reason was, that the name hampered Gimp’s adoption in professional and education settings. Therefore, to further spread open-source software, a change was necessary. Since the Gimp team had no intention of rebranding it, they encouraged forking the project to rename it themselves.

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Wireguard is the new kid on the block when it comes to VPNs. It offers significant advantages compared to the traditional choices of OpenVPN and IPSec. It is very lean with about 5,000 lines of code. Thanks to that, the codebase has already gone through a security. More importantly, it is extremely easy to set up (especially compared to IPSec). On top of that, it is also much faster (mainly in comparison to OpenVPN). Currently, Wireguard is in the process of being implemented in the Linux kernel. However, it is already available as a Linux kernel module. In this post, you will learn how to set up a simple VPN consisting of a server with public a IP address and two other machines running behind a NAT. First, some theory. Wireguard uses a peer to peer architecture, where each peer has their own private and public key pair. So, the peers authenticate each other by exchanging public keys. And this creates a bidirectional tunnel. As you can see, the key exchange is almost as easy as with SSH. The communication itself uses standard Linux network interface.

Configure a Debian server

Above, I have said that Wireguard is peer to peer. So, where does server suddenly come from? Well, since directly connecting machines behind a NAT is not an easy affair (you would need to use Dynamic DNS or a similar technique), you will need a peer with a public IP address, that the peers behind NAT will connect to. For the sake of clarity, I am just going to go ahead and call this peer a server and the rest clients. Before you start, enable packet forwarding on the server. In order to do that, you need to edit /etc/sysctl.conf and uncomment this line:

net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

Then run:

$ sysctl -p

In Debian, Wireguard is available in the unstable repository. You enable this way:

$ echo "deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ unstable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/unstable.list
$ printf 'Package: *\nPin: release a=unstable\nPin-Priority: 90\n' > /etc/apt/preferences.d/limit-unstable

After that, you can install the wireguard package. To build the module, you also need to install kernel headers:

$ apt update
$ apt install linux-headers-amd64 wireguard

Afterwards, enable the kernel module:

$ modprobe wireguard

Next, you need to generate the private and public keys:

$ cd /etc/wireguard
$ umask 077
$ wg genkey | tee privkey | wg pubkey > pubkey

The above commands create two files - /etc/wireguard/privkey and /etc/wireguard/pubkey. Now you just need to add configuration for the interface in /etc/wireguard/wg0.conf. It should look similar to this:

[Interface]
PrivateKey = PrivkeyOfServer
Address = 10.10.10.1/24

Later on, you will need to add peers. But for now, we are done. The default port for Wireguard is 51820, so make sure it’s open.

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The other day I wanted to buy a concert ticket from a website I haven’t visited before. That meant creating a new account (even though that shouldn’t really be necessary). I went through the ordeal of filling in my details, clicked “Confirm” and bam… the password was not good enough. As is usual, the password needed to contain an uppercase letter, a numeral, a symbol, a Chinese character and 10 emojis (couldn’t you have told me earlier?). At this point, most people would just say screw it and use a variation of one their few passwords. Perhaps adding their birthdate or something along the lines. I draw that conclusion from publicly available lists of breached passwords. To be honest, I don’t blame them. Remembering tens of passwords is hard, even without all the weird characters. But even if you don’t feel like setting up a password manager, there is a better and safer alternative. Passphrases.

What are passphrases?

As you might have guessed, passphrases use several words, or a sentence, instead of a single word. Nowadays, you can readily use spaces in password. That’s why I would recommend using whole sentences. That typically makes your password much longer. And as a bonus, using commas etc., you will easily fulfill the special character criteria. However, it is important to choose a unique phrase, not something you would easily find on the Internet. While it might be tempting to just use “Winter is coming to Winterfell”, that’s about as good as “12345”. I recommend using something based on a memory.

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DLNA is a standard for sharing digital media. It is supported by most modern TVs, phones and other devices. So, if you have a Raspberry Pi file server, you can easily use it to stream media. To achieve that, we will install MiniDLNA. This guide assumes you are using Raspbian 9, but the commands should be similar on different flavors of Linux.

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I have already explained how to do a basic Raspberry Pi server install. But if you want to do something more exciting with it, perhaps running a Nextcloud instance or setting up a torrent box, you will need more space than just an SD card. That’s why in this post I will show you how to connect external hard drive to Raspberry Pi.

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You might consider antivirus software unneccessary on a Linux box. But if you are running a public facing server, it might be a good idea to run it regardless. Why is that? Even though malware probably can’t affect your server much, it can still use it to infect users. To prevent that, we will learn how to install and set up automatic ClamAV scans with email notifications. In the examples below, I am using Debian 9, but the commands should be the same for any Linux distribution.

Install and configure ClamAV

You can easily install the antivirus by running the following command:

$ apt install clamav clamscan

ClamAV is pretty well configured out of the box. Usually, I only change the frequency of virus signature database updates. You can do that in /etc/clamav/freshclam.conf by changing the Checks line. Since I run the scan once a day, I lower the frequency of updates to that as well.

Checks 1

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This might be the first time you’re hearing about EditorConfig. But don’t worry, I was in the same boat just a couple of months ago. So, what is it? It is a simple file format, that helps keeping coding styles consistent across different editors. And more importantly, across different team members.

How does it work?

EditorConfig consists of two components. Firstly, .editorconfig file, that you put in the root of your project. Secondly, a plugin for the editor of your choice. The .editorconfig file is written in .ini format. You can define things such as number of spaces to indent or whether to use tabs or spaces. Moreover, you can use different settings for different file formats. For complete explanation, head over to the official site. In order to enforce the settings from .editorconfig, you need a plugin for your editor. For the most popular ones, such as Vim, Emacs, Atom, Sublime Text or Brackets, the are plugins readily available. The Jetbrains IDEs even include EditorConfig support in their core.

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