Version control system migrations are a fact of life for developers in any longer lived codebase. In fact, I’ve had a hand in quite a few migrations as newer, more workable version control systems became available. Also, like a lot of developers, I’ve got fragments of source code dating back quite some years floating around on various servers and development machines of mine. Not necessarily code that is still being used, but still code that I don’t want to just delete forever.…

While I was implementing a few more changes on my web server - mostly adding the sorely needed blacklistd configuration for sshd - I noticed that NGINX’s log was showing occasional errors when trying to contact the Isso process. They all had one thing in common, namely that they were all trying to contact ISSO via IPV6 as the server has both stacks enabled. Turns out that isso only listens on an IPV4 socket and I could not find an obvious way to get it to listen on both.

I may have mentioned this before - I do run my own virtual servers for important services (basically email and my web presence). I do this mostly for historic reasons and also because I’m not a huge fan of using centralised services for all of the above. The downside is that you pretty much have to learn at least about basic security. Over the 20+ years I’ve been doing this, the Internet hasn’t exactly become a less hostile place. Anyway, Elliptic Curve Certificates, what about…

First, I apologise for not noticing that the comments had been broken for a while. This was entirely my fault and not fault of ISSO, which I’m still super happy with as a self-hosted comments system. So in this post I’m going to describe what went wrong, and also how I made the system a little more resilient at the same time.

I’ve blogged about putting together a WireGuard server using OpenBSD a couple of years back. The main purpose of the server was to ensure a slightly more secure connection when I was on hotel WiFi. Of course thanks to the pandemic, I have barely travelled in the past couple of years so the server was mostly dormant. In fact, I kept VM turned off for most of the time. The VPN server was set up on OpenBSD 6.6, which was the last release that supported user mode WireGuard and didn’t…