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…

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…

In part 2, I reconfigured my WireGuard VPN to use an Unbound DNS server on the VPN server rather than rely on a third party server I had used for the original quick and dirty configuration. It was important for me to set up a validating DNS server, which I did in that part.

In the first part, I described how I set up the basic OpenBSD WireGuard VPN server. I also hinted that I wanted to set up my own validating, filtering DNS server. With a little bit of spare time during the holidays I decided now was a good time as any.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I somehow ended up with a corrupted filesystem on the WireGuard server I had set up earlier this year. That iteration of my VPN server was built on Linux as I expected I would get better performance using the kernel-based WireGuard implementation. It had taken me a while to set it up right, and I didn’t get the impression that the performance was so much better anyway. Keep in mind that I mostly use my VPN server from hotel WiFi and we all know how…