Tor on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

Homelab Ketchup

Sat, 18 Jul 2015 19:18:07 -0400

I’ve been busy busy busy geeking out in my homelab. Where did we leave off? Oh, yeah, I set up that Jenkins server.

I’ve been pretty busy since then.

Set up a server outside of my house to act as an OmniOS package repository.
After watching from the sidelines for years, I felt it was time to start taking Bitcoin seriously. I’ve been buying BTC, spending it, learning how it works.
Set up a Bitcoin full node inside of a kvm zone on one of my OmniOS servers. I threw a lot of resources at it while it downloaded the blockchain, which finished overnight. Then I scaled it down and it’s running in a small VM on a big machine.
bitcoind was making lots of little synchronous writes to my ZFS pool so I added an SSD. ~10GB for a slog, the remainder for L2ARC. It’s kind of neat to watch the writes queue up on the SSD and then flush out all at once (every several seconds) to the magnetic disks.
I’ve got a Jenkins job that builds and publishes packages of Git for OmniOS. But I’ve learned enough about CI to know that I want to do this a better (smarter) way, so I’m holding off on making my package repo public until I feel a lot better about what I’m building and how I’m building it.
I’ve got my kids’ Minecraft server running in an OmniOS zone, complete with an SMF manifest. I have great customer acceptance on this story.
I’m also building Tor on OmniOS but I haven’t taken the time to work up the SMF manifest yet. Also, I want to wrap some more scripting around the decision to build or not build based on Git commit tags.
I installed a PDU in the cabinet, but it was an awful experience and I’m ashamed of the final outcome. The tl;dr is that this specific PDU was never meant to be mounted in this specific cabinet.

Once I get the Tor packages building to my liking and I can get them published out, I have a series of articles that I’d like to write about using OmniOS as a platform for hosting Tor hidden services. Now that Freedom Hosting is gone. The raid on that hosting service has had a chilling effect on people who need an online presence under the safety of anonymity. SmartOS or even SDC might be even better for this purpose, but I need to get my hands on some more hardware to prove it out.

fruits of insomnia

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 07:56:48 -0400

One of the common struggles that goes with being autistic is maintaining a regular sleep schedule. For a lot of us, it just doesn’t happen. Last night was a rough night, in which I did get a lot of sleep, but it was at the wrong time: 6PM to 1:30AM. After getting a full night’s sleep, I was ready to kick some ass. What to do?

I know! I’ll start working on my Jenkins CI server!

State of the Nerd Report / Homelab Update

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 00:15:08 -0400

The last few months have been quite a ride. I’ve been busy, both at work and at play. And both influence one another. Of course, if I were going to write about work tonight, I’ve got another outlet for that. So let’s catch up on what I’ve been up to in my personal nerding.

I’ve largely pulled back from photography. This isn’t so much on a permanent basis, but long enough for me to catch up on some other geekery. My home office was looking like something out of hoarders, though, so I took drastic action before my family could stage an intervention.

locked out of Twitter for using Tor

Fri, 03 Jul 2015 16:59:18 -0400

If anybody finds themselves missing my tweets, note that Twitter decided to lock my account for accessing it through Tor. I thought I’d post a little bit about it, because I’m sure this has got to be a problem for people in parts of the world where they must use technology like Tor to connect and enjoy some freedom of speech.

They even sent me a nice note right away with a temporary code (reswizzled here). Shame the temporary code didn’t work.

Homelab Adventures Continue

Mon, 22 Jun 2015 12:08:12 -0400

My updates here have been few and far between, mostly because I’ve been writing for other entities (when I’m in the mood to write at all). But sometimes I’m working on things where my own blog is the most appropriate outlet.

Longtime followers may recall my homelab efforts. My work in the homelab had, until now, largely been stymied by my dependence on Apple’s anemic Airport Extreme hardware, and an Airport Express to bridge my downstairs homelab to my upstairs cable modem. This is no longer a problem.

create a tor-only VLAN with a Raspberry Pi

Sat, 04 Oct 2014 13:33:30 -0400

I’m a big fan of the Tor Project. It’s really encouraging to see more people using it, and more people setting up bridges, relays, and exit nodes.

What I’d like to see more of is publicly available networks that transparently redirect clients’ Internet connectivity through Tor. My first step here is going to be aimed more at someone with the means by which to set up many wireless access points on a campus, like perhaps an office building or a University. In these environments, it is typical for wireless networks to be created on different VLANs, with multiple SSID’s advertised, and each SSID being linked to a different VLAN. Often you might have a staff SSID and a guest SSID.

long weekend in the homelab

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 12:02:39 -0400

I’d been neglecting opportunities to work in my homelab for awhile so that I might take advantage of a bit of a creative streak and shoot some photography. That’s probably been satisfied, for a little while anyway, so I’ve spent much of this long weekend tinkering in the homelab.

A few things I’ve learned along the way include:

tmux is pretty awesome. I’m using it now instead of screen. I also switched from Terminal.app to iTerm2 over the weekend and I’m digging it so far. Though the much vaunted tmux integration isn’t there yet.
My respect for Ansible continues to grow. I was able to pretty quickly hack together a playbook to help me get several new virtual machines up to speed.
My respect for The Foreman wanes. It seems particularly fragile. The error messages aren’t as clear as they could be, so troubleshooting issues is not as intuitive as it could or should be. Things started going downhill when I installed the foreman_discovery gem. I’ve since tossed Foreman out of my homelab infrastructure. I can’t help but wonder if there is a quick and dirty mentality in the Ruby on Rails community, or if the fragility is inherent to the framework itself.
Similarly, Docker isn’t quite there yet. I got bit by #4036 and #5684. I’ll continue to tinker with Docker but I immediately moved the workload from Docker into Virtual Machines.
To that end, I stood up Jenkins in a VM along with one build slave. This is a tool I’d like to learn more deeply for unit testing of operations tooling. Just to get the hang of things, I picked a simple to build project (Tor) and set up a simple job to watch the git repo and compile it from source. I’ll start building out a delivery pipeline to test builds on multiple platforms, run unit tests, etc. for the academic exercise.
I’ve been throwing virtual machines at my HP Proliant DL160 G6 (12 cores from 2x Intel Xeon X5650’s, 72GB RAM, 2TB guest storage). Load average stays well below 2.0 most of the time. I like this box.
I have another server, a Dell PowerEdge 1950 III, in the cabinet right now that’s a “utility class” machine. No virtual machines. Right now it’s hosting DNS, and I expect to add dhcp once I can deprecate the Apple Airport Extreme from routing duties. There’s some wiring I have to do in the house to facilitate this, and I have to rethink my wireless & VLAN strategy a bit. This box is nowhere near as decked out but it should be more than enough to handle basic services. I’m thinking I might jack up the RAM, though, and move the basic functions off into virtual machines there. The original plan was to use Docker containers, but I don’t think the technology is quite mature enough yet.
I’ve prototyped a Tor-only VLAN with the idea that I’m going to open it up for WiFi access. Hosts on this VLAN can only exit the subnet through a transparent Tor proxy. With the nearly complete loss of privacy in the United States, I think it’s important for us engineers to spend some of our time extricating the world from the horrible quandary we’ve had a part in creating.

What are some of the things coming soon?

Russia to Tormail:

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 22:22:40 -0400

It looks like the Russian government has taken drastic action to eliminate a big name in liberated email services. Tormail.net has had its domain name pulled by its Russian registrar, and they say the chances are slim of getting the domain name back.

Take heart; they aren’t gone, but everyone with a tormail.net email address has just been moved to tormail.org via a different registrar. You can get official word from Tormail’s hidden service, which is untouched by Russia’s attack.

Take Back Your Freedom: Use Tor

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:17:34 -0400

Tighten up the tinfoil hats, folks; this is going to be that kind of day.

I know my readership extends to Europe and beyond, and I’m going to try to bear that potentially international audience in mind as I write this. But first and foremost, I am an American, and embrace libertarian sensibilities that may seem out of the ordinary for the contemporary political spectrum.

One of the things that Americans often say about this country is that it’s “the land of the free” or that it’s “a free country”. I scoff at this, largely because we have this really unsettling pattern of jailing non-violent people. We’re not really free in our homes, and we’re definitely not free on the Internet.