April 2020

By Shan Wong.

More photos on Google Photos.

This is the first post of several. Next posts will focus on running WireGuard inside a Docker container on amd64 Linux and a Raspberry Pi.

I've been running WireGuard for a few months now and I've been loving it.

I first started using it about a year ago when in China — OpenVPN was once again being actively blocked and it was driving me nuts. Overnight I set up a DigitalOcean server in Singapore and ran WireGuard from it — both my phone and laptop were able to actively bypass the GFW and (at that time) surf the internet freely once more. As WireGuard gains popularity, I am sure the GFW will start detecting it — it's a quiet but not a stealthy protocol.

Back in the days -- when I was 16 or so -- Smokeping was the rage. Every colo provider in Amsterdam, every NOC, they all had their own Smokeping.

Playing around with Docker I saw some Smokeping image and that made me want to set it up again.

I'm running Smokeping on my server in Amsterdam (Leaseweb colo): smokeping.rootspirit.com.

A couple of months ago I had the great idea to set up a shell server in Docker. Simply because my docker skillz were quite rusty and a shell server was something I actually genuinely needed.

Shell servers... so 2005. I remember in the good old IRC days people asking for (free) shell servers to run their eggdrop and stuff. OMG am I getting old? Anyhow...

Noticed my last Shan update on this site was Shan launching a new site. Meanwhile we've moved into our own home slightly over a year ago. I should showoff some pictures.

More pictures can be found on Google Photos.

Realised I haven't updated this in a long while (life happened).

Couple of weeks ago I started to play with NextDNS -- and I really recommend anyone that's something privacy minded and cares about the stuff happening on their network.

I've set up several configs (home, parents, FlatTurtle TurtleBox (the NUCs controlling the screens)) and Servers. Once it's out of beta and better supported on Unifi and Ubiquiti hardware I might deploy it to our public WiFi (well, most access points don't look like that -- but you get the point) networks too.