Hi, I’m fzorb. I’m a person living in Bucharest. I am passionate about many things, such as system administration, web development and public transportation, as well as music and history. I sometimes write posts on here, which you can read below.
A few months ago I talked about Gullo’s hosting, a dirt cheap NAT VPS host that uses OpenVZ. I decided to put the two boxes I bought from them to work by running Yggdrasil nodes. However, I realised that modern Debian just doesn’t really run too well on 128mb of ram. As such, I started looking for alternatives, but Gullo only supported Debian, CentOS and Ubuntu! Surely there must be a way to install Alpine, right?
If you’ve ever looked at a public server’s SSH logs, you would have probably found tens of failed connections from IP addresses you are not associated with. Those are bots that are trying to bruteforce their way into your Linux bots. An easy way you can change this is by changing the SSH port, but that’s just lame. What you should do is do a little bit of trolling. So today, we’ll be configuring sshesame to listen on port 22 and some other common ssh ports.
Merry Christmas! These past few days I have done the following changes: xmin is now the default theme. I consider it to look better. You can choose the old red theme at the bottom of the page. Overhauled the site a little. Mainly made the index page less… flashy. E-Mail is back online. There is now a webring! Contact me to get added. There is now a song of the now!
Site updates Yesterday I have moved the site to a new host, kinda. This is more of an “experiment” as to test how great my new VPS offer would handle a low traffic website. I bit the forbidden apple (JavaScript) and you can now choose a theme for this website. Direct your attention the bottom of the page. The Guestbook is back. Yay! Now using Isso. Removed the Thoughts section. Also I must now mention that today is a very special day in Romania.
Recently I have been seeing this weird “Yggdrasil Network” mentioned alongside Tor and I2P. A few days ago I have started researching it, and it is really cool. Basically, it is a mesh network, but it encrypts your traffic. I think that’s really cool, and while not really a privacy tool, I’d say it would be a great way to avoid any interference in your traffic by your ISP or similar.
Torchbyte is a Romanian hosting company, with datacenters in Bucharest. Being in dire need of a cheap VPS to proxy some heavier stuff through, where lower latency would be preferred, I decided to use the aformentioned host. They’re really cheap, too cheap actually, especially considering you get a dedicated IPv4 too with their EUR 4.50/quarter plan. Pros: Stupidly cheap prices Ability to pay with Paysafecard DDoS protection (not sure how great it is though) Cons: Support kinda sucks You might have to go through support to do some things, because of some funny DDoS things Port 25 is blocked.
Have you ever wanted a proxy server that you can run on a toaster (literally)? Well, enter today’s setup, Microsocks on NetBSD. Microsocks is a simple, fast and efficient SOCKS5 server. NetBSD is a highly portable UNIX system that you can literally run on a toaster. Prerequisites Something running NetBSD Internet connection Getting microsocks Microsocks is not in the NetBSD repositories as far as i can tell, so we’ll just compile it.
Today’s story starts in a similar vein as to the last one. While waiting for a train, I stumbled across a provider which offered extremely cheap hosting, and severely undercut Gullo. Their name is C-SERVERS and they seem to be reselling Hetzner, just like Gullo, but they give you more ram, at the cost of not giving you any IPv4 ports, at least as far as I can tell. So I bought one of their NanoVPS servers.
While at a metro station, I was chatting with some friends on a Telegram group, when one of them shared an intriguing hosting provider: Gullo’s Hosting. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a 3,50EUR/YR VPS, so I impulsively bought it. Now, it does have some caveats, such as: Low storage space: I kept bashing my head against the wall trying to figure out how I could clear space. No public IPv4: It’s fine for a 3.
At around 16:09 GMT+3, fzorb.xyz and all its associated services went down. I wasn’t able to investigate, as I was busy with other stuff until 19:05 GMT+3. It turns out that our VPS provider, Frantech/BuyVM, had a problem regarding their Router. Apparently, some guy at the datacenter Frantech colocates at left an USB stick in a router, so after a restart, it booted into the Junos install interface. Service has been restored ~30 minutes from the time of writing this.
Selfhosting is a great way to fight decentralization, however, you might find yourself scratching your head as to how to expose those services to the internet. You could just port forward, but you’ll have to deal with the problems of having to constantly update your home IP or having to constantly worry that some script kiddie will be able to take down your internet at home, which if you work from home, isn’t very good.
If you live in a house where extending a simple networking cable would require a lot of work, you might find yourself buying something like a network printer and not being able to connect it to the network due to it not supporting wifi. These situations suck, but thankfully, there’s a solution, the Wireless Client Bridge. Okay, what the hell is that? A Wireless Client Bridge is a device that helps your computer/laptop/smart fridge connect to the internet when a direct wired connection to your main router wouldn’t be possible.
About a year ago, I have made a blog post about how I run things round here. Since then, a lot of things have passed. Since I think that I’m more free now than I will be in 3 months, when I initally planned on making this post, I’ve decided to just do it now. The components My suite of servers is comprised of the following computers: Frantech/BuyVM VPS: I use this as a VPN in order for me to be able to expose my services to the internet without needing to port forward on my home IP address.
Earlier this year, Nitter has ceased development, due to the removal of guest accounts, but, you can still self host an alternative Twitter frontend, and we’ll do it with something some love and some hate, Docker! We will be using Privacydevel’s Nitter fork for this. Prerequisites: A Linux server with Docker and Docker-compose installed A few twitter accounts A machine with a residential IP (for logging into your twitter alts, nothing else.
If you have a huge physical music collection or a desire to not pay for your music, running a Music server is a great way to organize your collection. This guide will be covering configuring Navidrome and slskd. This tutorial will be assuming you’re running your music server in the /srv/music directory, but it should be trivially easy for you to change where it is. We’ll also be assuming you have docker and docker-compose installed.
Cloudflare is a DDoS mitigation platform which offers free proxying of your origin server. Unfortunately, this proxying is not well-used by some people, such as the person who inspired me to make this blog post. He has since fixed it. On Sunday, me and a friend of mine have exposed a vulnerability to one of our other friends, which we will be referring for privacy reasons as X. X has agreed to the “hacking” of his website.
I’ve had the chance these past days to go to the CFR museum in Bucharest, Romania, where they had a beautiful train model, as well as many other things, such as a whole steam locomotive in their frontyard. I highly suggest anyone visits this museum. It may not be as big but it makes up in quality. It’s next to the North Railway Station and is served by STB routes 1, 10, 82, 97, 105, 182, 282, as well as the Gara De Nord 2 (M4) Metro Station (Also Gara De Nord station.
The first Class 101 trains from Altsom have arrived recently in Romania, and I have to say I am 3 weeks late to the party. I can’t explain in words how big this is. This is CFR’s first aquisition of new electric trains in 20 years. Below is a picture with the most common electric locomotives in Romania, the class 4x ones. A class 40 train of CFR Calatori at Bacau.
Over the past 5 years, I have inherited my father’s philosophy of self-hosting. It all started with my brand-new Raspberry Pi 4. I wanted to create a Minecraft Server for me and my friends to play on. Unfortunately, due to my lack of skill, I have had to offload the responsibility onto my father’s server (which was really weak! an intel celeron j1800 was barely cutting it for versions newer than 1.
Running a fediverse server is now easier than ever, you can run it on hardware as low spec as a Raspberry Pi. With the recent twitter drama, it is extremely lucrative to create a fediverse account now. While you may find it easier to create an account on a more well-estabilished server, it isn’t exactly the best idea. Why? Well, if you’re going to make an account on a well estabilished instance, you’re subject to their moderation policies, and, you can get banned for some nonsensical reasons.