Note: As I wrote this article, I realized that there wasn't much in the way of actual tutorial documentation for some of this stuff. So, I'll be revisiting it in the near future to rewrite parts in such a way to fit this purpose.

If you keep your ear to the ground about the online world, you might have heard something about Google gearing up to break adblocking, ostensibly as a way to crack down on malicious Chrome addons on a wide scale. As a bit of background, Google isn't really a search company because web search doesn't actually bring …

Given the proliferation of spam on just about every vaguely workable platform these days it seems sheer insanity to attempt to run your own mail server.  If it's out there, it's ripe for abuse in one way in another.  And yet, e-mail is still probably one of the best ways to get status reports from your machines every day (my SMTP bridge notwithstanding).  It is thus that the default configuration for mail servers these days defaults to "no way in hell will I relay a message for you," which is a net good for the the Internet as a whole …

cave diving - noun phrase - The act of tunneling through multiple VPNs, bastion hosts, and chokepoints to access some network assets, usually production infrastructure in a more restricted network.  Less hazardous than but just as easy to screw up as real life cave diving.

Longtime readers have no doubt observed that I plug a lot weird shit into my exocortex - from bookmark managers to card catalogues to just about anything that has an API.  Sometimes this is fairly straightforward; if it's on the public Net I can get to it (processing that data is a separate issue, of course).  But what about the stuff I have around the lab?  I'm always messing with new toys that are network connected and occasionally useful.  The question is, how do I get it out of the lab and out to my exocortex?  Sometimes I write bots to …

Now that ISPs not selling information about what you do and what you browse on the Net is pretty much gone, a lot of people are looking into using VPNs - virtual private networks - to add a layer of protection to their everyday activities.  Most of the time there are two big use cases for VPNs: Needing to use them for work, and using them to gain access to Netflix content that isn't licensed where you live.  Now they may as well be a part of everyday carry.

So: Brass tacks.  Here's a quick way to set up your own VPN …