Right. With the pandemic and all none of us are going to travel much but still...

About a year ago I purchased myself an OpenWRT router to use on the plane and in hotels.

And so far I really like both the device and the Hong Kong based brand (launching new and updated products, and releasing relatively regular updates for older products). Pick a device that fits your needs (USB powered? LTE? Small form factor?).

The GL-AR750S aka Slate is fully customizable but runs a few nice things out of the box: WireGuard (with a physical button to turn it on or off), OpenVPN, shell access, Tor (requires the latest firmware), IPv6, DoH (Cloudflare only for now), multiple SSIDs (i.e. Guest WiFi), and more.

Oh and I specifically picked this version (compared to other or cheaper ones) because it had both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, as well as 3 Gbit ports (1x WAN, 2x LAN).

I use the device on flights, where I connect to the network once in the air, purchase WiFi or use iPass "for one device" and then connect to the interwebs behind my NAT-router from my iPad, phone(s), laptop(s), and even Shan's devices if she is travelling with me.

In hotels, I either connect it to the wired ethernet, if still available (tends to be more stable), or connect it to the guest WiFi and then connect my devices to the router: saves me from connecting to a new network and typing the room number and login/password/family name on every device. And once again hides the true number of connected devices; quite handy trick for those pesky hotels providing free access only to two devices.

Sure it takes a bit of setup every time: find a working USB port, sign in to the web interface, search for new networks if this is a new hotel or I haven't travelled on this airline, connect to said network, sign in with iPass, and optionally enable VPN)...

And once in a while some fiddling with VPN or DNS that's borking up or being blocked by overzealous firewalls.

Also, some in-flight entertainment USB ports don't provide enough power (and/or are often broken -- looking at you Lufthansa in economy) so be sure to carry a couple of these (US-plug works best) -- I've already forgotten one on my last flight from MUC-SIN on LH, but luckily I have pretty easy access to these.

If you travel a lot it's totally worth the money.

This follows the my two other posts about WireGuard.

Most of this can be copied from the amd64 post -- with a minor change for making it work on RPi4. This is the full git repo (including both rpi and amd64).

The main difference is in the run.sh file. The installation is a bit different and we'll need to install the Raspberry Pi kernel headers.

WireGuard is also installed from testing instead of Debian backports.

Note that for older RPi's (ie gen 1) you'll need to compile from scratch.

I was rebuilding my WireGuard Docker container today and this error started popping up:

Setting up dkms (2.6.1-4) ...
Setting up wireguard-dkms (1.0.20200429-1~bpo10+1) ...
Loading new wireguard-1.0.20200429 DKMS files...
It is likely that 4.19.0-8-cloud-amd64 belongs to a chroot's host
Building for 4.19.0-8-amd64 and 4.19.0-8-cloud-amd64
Building initial module for 4.19.0-8-amd64
Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 4.19.0-8-amd64 (x86_64)
Consult /var/lib/dkms/wireguard/1.0.20200429/build/make.log for more information.
dpkg: error processing package wireguard-dkms (--configure):
 installed wireguard-dkms package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 10
Setting up build-essential (12.6) ...
Setting up libalgorithm-diff-xs-perl (0.04-5+b1) ...
Setting up libalgorithm-merge-perl (0.08-3) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of wireguard:
 wireguard depends on wireguard-dkms (>= 0.0.20200121-2) | wireguard-modules (>= 0.0.20191219); however:
  Package wireguard-dkms is not configured yet.
  Package wireguard-modules is not installed.

dpkg: error processing package wireguard (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Processing triggers for systemd (241-7~deb10u3) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.28-10) ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 wireguard-dkms
 wireguard
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

The solution was to install bc. Seems like Debian is not pulling the right dependencies. I'll be adding it to my Dockerfile.

This is the 2nd post about WireGuard.

So I am running two WireGuard servers -- one on a Raspberry Pi 4, and one in an amd64 virtual machine. This post will be about getting WireGuard working on amd64 in a Docker container.

As this container rarely get rebuild, I am running unattended-upgrades inside the container to make sure security updates are applied.

I am also running Bind9 to act as a caching DNS server inside the container. Ideally this should be running from its dedicated container but that makes everything more complicated and not worth it for what I am trying.

I am also

The public repo that acts as a proof of concept can be found here.

start.sh -- this file starts (or restarts) and builds the container. It will also create the files as needed, set the forwarding DNS server, etc.

Dockerfile -- the example will start a basic container based on debian-slim, set up the port forwarding, install the tools we need, and copy over the configs

run.sh -- this file will be executed after the container has been built. We need to install WireGuard from this file or it will fail due to the volume not being mounted and not having the right params.
This will also start the named (bind9) server.
I manually set ip address add dev wg0 10.200.200.1/24 because using Address in wg0.conf caused issues. I haven't recently tested if that's still the case.

named.conf.options -- pretty standard bind9 config file; I want to be in control of my forwarding server because I am using NextDNS and want to apply a different config.

And of course your wg0.conf.

Running docker exec wireguard wg should give details about your connected hosts.

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.

Since then I've dug quite a bit deeper in WireGuard and am really looking forward to what it's going to bring.

WireGuard differentiates itself to be an extremely simple VPN server (which can make getting started and debugging a bit more challenging) — but it wants to seamlessly work together with existing tools. One of the main features still missing is for example running a DHCP server on the server and dynamically assigning IPs (like oVPN does).

It's also pretty cool because any node can both be a server and a client at the same time. In my setup I am running two servers: one running at home in Singapore on a RPi4 (1Gbit fiber connection) and one on a virtual machine in Amsterdam (1Gbit as well). The RPis at my parents are connected to the server in Amsterdam, my iPad and phones are connected to the server in Singapore. If I am in Europe I might switch over and let my iDevices connect to the AMS server instead.

The example above clearly shows speed gains by cloaking the traffic in UDP packets. The shared folder has only two nodes (sender and receiver) and shows several big files being transferred from Amsterdam to Singapore. Resilio Sync uses the Bittorrent protocol, something ISPs generally hate and tend to slow down as much as they can — thanks Starhub.

Wireguard also allows the client to decide what to route through the server: only the VPN LAN traffic, or a whole subnet, or 0.0.0.0/0? So for my iPhone I for example route all traffic through VPN to avoid hotel/airport/... WiFi's to mine/log/scan my data. For my laptop I have two configs, one to only connect to the LAN, but another that routes all my traffic through the VPN if I want to avoid exposure or circumvent censoring.

Note that I am not running WireGuard to remain anonymous and I'll definitely leak some information — just trying to minimise and remain in control of what I leak. This is not a Tor replacement.

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...

I ssh quite often. I manage quite a few servers (~15?) and routers that require me to login and do some random stuff. I also work on a laptop quite often and that means closing the lid and moving around.

First of all, mosh is amazing and allows you to stay connected via ssh, even with crappy (airport/hotel) internet as well as moving around networks -- that solves half the problem. If you are not using it, start using it now!

Second, during my datacenter technician days at Google we used to have a "jump server" -- a shell server that allowed us to bridge the corporate network and ssh into prod machines. Doubt that's still used nowadays, but the idea stuck. I wanted something similar to ssh from, wherever I was, and easily connect to my servers. And as the network the shell server is running on is stable, I only need to use mosh to the shell server. Thereafter, the connection very rarely dies.

And I guess, third, I recently purchased an iPad Pro and I really need to have my local "dev" environment with my git repo that I edit quite frequently but iPadOS isn't really your average computer, and doesn't even have a proper terminal. This is my experiment to make iPadOS work as a main computer when on the move.

Enter box -- Docker shell server...

I've copied over the files I use to this example repo, and added some comments. Mind you that this repo acts as a proof of concept and isn't kept up to date, as I have my own private repo -- but this should give you a good idea on how to set up your own shell server with Docker.

start.sh -- this is a simple script that I execute when I first run or need to update the container. I execute the same file on two different servers: Liana, my Raspberry Pi at home and Ocean, my server in Amsterdam.

zsh.sh -- this installs what I care about for zsh. This could be part of the Dockerfile but for some reason I separated it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

git.sh -- this clones my Git repos so I can edit and commit stuff from the shell server.

run.sh -- this file is launched by Dockerfile at the end and executes what matters: the ssh daemon. It also adds a Wireguard route and executes the scripts above.

Dockerfile -- this installs everything I need and configures the whole thing. I've added tons of comments that should get you going.

I am also cloning misc and homefiles as submodules in files/ -- but you should change this to something that works for you. See the Dockerfile for more info.