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Writings

Here are a collection of things I’ve written over the years. While occasionally useful to others, the primary purpose of writing these is for me to document/remember how I set things up.

2025

Easy shares with rclone

·4 mins
When you need to mount a folder from a remote machine (like a NAS), NFS and SMB aren’t always ideal. rclone over SFTP is a vastly better option.

Host a Tor Onion Service

·9 mins
Ever wanted to host a website that can’t easily be traced back to you? Tor supports onion services — websites only accessible from within the Tor network.

2024

Microserver Build

·14 mins
Tutorial Self-Hosting XCP-Ng
This post walks through some interesting parts of my home-lab server build using a repurposed Dell OptiPlex micro-pc using the XCP-ng virtualization platform.

Marketplace Scam

·13 mins
Security
We tried to sell a baritone sax case on Facebook Marketplace and got caught up in a remarkably well-crafted phishing scam.

Multi tenancy Example for Phoenix

·16 mins
Tutorial Elixir Phoenix

This post describes my efforts and approach to multi tenancy for a couple of Elixir/Phoenix/Ecto B2B applications I’m working on. Hopefully, it will provide a fairly complete example for those looking to implement something similar, and help avoid a bunch of digging that I found myself doing.

2023

2022

Tailscale Pi-hole Setup

·3 mins
Tutorial Privacy Self-Hosting Tailscale

I’ve recently started using the overlay network Tailscale to provide connectivity between my various machines, regardless of where I am. It’s extremely easy to configure and “just works”. Tailscale also includes a feature called MagicDNS that provides name resolution for machines on my tailnet (i.e. so that ping server123 magically just works). MagicDNS also allows you to override local DNS settings and force a custom DNS server for name resolution machines on your tailnet. This post documents the setup of Pi-hole (accessible only to machines on my tailnet) to provide some level of DNS privacy and Ad Blocking for machines on my tailnet.

Moving my files in-house

·5 mins
Tutorial Privacy Self-Hosting

Every six months or so, when the position of the moon is just right, I flip-flop on the privacy/self-hosted vs. just-let-Google-handle-it issue. Today, I’ve flopped toward privacy and self-hosting.

2021

My Traefik Setup

·3 mins
Docker Traefik
Configuring Traefik as a reverse proxy for Docker containers with automatic Let’s Encrypt certificates and security headers.

Monica on Docker

·3 mins
Docker
Self-hosting Monica CRM with Docker and NGINX to track personal relationships and stay in touch with friends.

2020

Tor Relay

·4 mins
Tor
Setting up a non-exit Tor relay on Ubuntu to contribute idle bandwidth to the Tor network.

2019

2018

NGINX Semi-private Site

·2 mins
Tutorial Server

We used to run a development blog for work. We wanted:

  1. To use NGINX to host this content. It was all static pages.
  2. To limit access to people within our network, or to employees while outside the network (phones, laptops, etc.).
  3. We didn’t want to deal with user accounts, active directory, etc.
  4. We wanted super low friction for users.

2017

2016

Kub Kar Timer

·3 mins
Arduino
Building an Arduino-based timer for Boy Scouts Kub Kar races with conductive chain triggers and an LCD display.

2015

Using GPG with Smart Cards

·26 mins
Tutorial Yubikey
Comprehensive guide to storing GPG and SSH keys on a YubiKey NEO smart card for secure, portable cryptographic operations across Linux, Windows, and macOS.

2014