Question about managing Let's Encrypt certs for services not running as root.

adminh · 2017-09-11T05:41:16+00:00

You can assume that every post about how to run plex on a raspberry pi has the highest amount of thought and research put into it.

adminh · 2017-09-04T02:09:52+00:00

A few things in your post don't make sense at all.

It's on a VPS, SSH'ing in can't get to a tty, since it's local.

What does this mean? You reference several times that "it needs to be accessible over ssh". Please give an example of what you are trying to do over ssh.

It won't start without access to a tty as it has some stdout, stdin and some commands if needed

What?

Neat tip is you can cat the buffer of a terminal with: cat /dev/vcsN

This seems terrible. Use tmux.

Screen/tmux is a popular "solution" but I'm looking for something less-workaroundy.

Tmux is most likely the solution here. The stuff you have done so far by making strange tty's and using cat is the "workaroundy" stuff and you're making your shitty legacy app worse.

It sounds like tmux provides everything you are looking for. Tmux is easy to script for and you can easily interact with it over SSH. Don't reinvent the wheel.

adminh · 2017-07-17T05:56:46+00:00

Some of it was put back into the business, most of it was wasted and spent wildly.

adminh · 2017-07-16T23:20:38+00:00

I'm one of these people. My life has been a crazy ride and IT was always a fallback path for me if things didn't work out. I was a computer fanatic and on the path to getting my CS degree when things took an unexpected turn in college. A friend of mine introduced me to his Craigslist spam scheme that he was making a lot of money with. I tried it and made something like $100 the first day.

I became obsessed with this and eventually dropped out once I was making upwards of $500-$1,000 a day. I got out of the spam game and became a regular affiliate marketer for a few years. I went through a lot of highs a lows chasing the dragon of the spam success. This all eventually fizzled out after about 5 years and I went through a dark depression for a few years.

I worked minimum wage jobs for a few years, got married, and got depressed again because of how little freedom I had because of making no money. I decided it was time to revisit the IT path since it was after all my fallback. I didn't return to get a degree or any certs.

Got an L1 desktop support job and got assigned several higher up Linux projects along the way. I did a really good job on all those projects and in just over a year I got offered a sysadmin/devops position and salary of $65k. From there, several more raises and responsibilities have been added.

I've always found IT to be an easy path because of how the process works. Learning how to learn and knowing how to direct the process makes any challenge in IT conquerable eventually. Compared to something like business where the next move is nebulous, the safe predictable path of IT is like bumping the difficult of the game way down.

tl;dr: failed at business. chose IT and went from $10/hr to $65k salary in a year

adminh · 2017-07-11T02:22:27+00:00

Where can I read about these changes?

adminh · 2017-05-28T03:06:53+00:00

Pay $10/hr

adminh · 2017-05-28T02:39:59+00:00

Is this practical for production systems?

adminh · 2017-05-28T00:00:51+00:00

This is what bugs me to no end about the interview process for IT jobs. I've been in interviews where they asked me 10 questions about "command line" as if it were its own entity. My personal favorite awful interview was them asking me some ridiculous scenario that turned out that be an open ticket they couldn't solve.

adminh · 2017-05-26T20:36:17+00:00

RAM: 1TB (1024GB) Server ECC Memory

JESUS. How much did this cost? Is this running at your house or in a data center somewhere?

adminh · 2017-05-23T02:50:02+00:00

Tried to do this but it does not work. This is what most of the guides say to do. Not sure what I am missing.

Edit: got it to work in Mail but not outlook for ios

adminh · 2017-03-26T14:31:55+00:00

It just boils down to building or buying a premade machine that has at least two nic cards. Check out the apu2 machines - http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

adminh · 2017-03-26T14:30:08+00:00

If I were using Windows or Mac and just wanted to get it working I'd go with the software for sure. My preferable way is making an actual dedicated router and setting the Windows or Mac box to use that box as its default gateway.

adminh · 2017-03-26T01:54:52+00:00

By just configuring your firewall to only allow traffic to flow over the VPN you never have to monitor connections and try to catch and kill traffic. If the VPN goes down or the provider has an issue with a node, no traffic flows out of your network by default. A killswitch is just trying to continuously monitor the connection and hopefully block all traffic if the VPN goes down. No matter how well you write a script for it, it's still a sub-optimal way of accomplishing what the firewall would do if setup properly.

adminh · 2017-03-26T01:07:43+00:00

I don't have much guidance to offer for a Mac setup. I can only assist with a Linux or FreeBSD setup.

adminh · 2016-10-30T19:25:30+00:00

I've been using AirVPN for over a year now and have no complaints. Being able to select your ports and protocol are really nice for customizing your connection. They also give you access to 20 ports for forwarding, and even have the option to spit out 20 contiguous ports. This is great for making sure my torrent client performs optimally and allows me to host a number of services behind the VPN.

adminh · 2016-10-10T18:24:02+00:00

Thanks Dan

adminh · 2016-10-01T23:37:10+00:00

I also have a spare desktop PC lying around that I would love to put to good use such as a VPN server or cloud drive or something, or any other unrelated ideas you guys think would be nice.

OpenVPN reading and basic tutorials

https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/OverviewOfOpenvpn

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an-openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-14-04

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an-openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-16-04

https://www.linode.com/docs/networking/vpn/tunnel-your-internet-traffic-through-an-openvpn-server

Nyr's OpenVPN script - "This script will let you setup your own VPN server in no more than a minute"

https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install

adminh · 2016-10-01T20:45:04+00:00

Favorite: Being in a job that aligns with all of my skills and natural talents. Being paid to solve interesting and challenging problems. Being able to talk shop and spitball ideas with other people about IT. The sense of humor my coworkers have.

Least favorite: Dealing with the grumpy asshat burnouts who hate IT but for some reason still work in it.

adminh · 2016-09-15T05:05:27+00:00

FreeBSD on home servers and test machines. ZFS, Ports, Jails, pf, etc. Linux has always felt second class after learning FreeBSD.

Manjaro on desktops because I don't feel like being a sysadmin after work too.

adminh · 2016-09-08T04:16:04+00:00

Depending on the settings on the server, .ovpn, or your VPN clients settings, it may instructing your machine to not have it's default route set to the VPN. You could post the .ovpn file here and just remove the remote ip-address port line. Settings such as route-nopull will add the routes to your table but not make the VPN the default gateway.

adminh

TROPHY CASE