KeePass, OTP, and Themes

Originally published 2018-09-06, updated 2022-09-05 My beloved KeepassX has not seen a release since 2016, but a newer fork entitled KeePassXC has. The latest version looks very much the same when viewed from LMDE3 with a dark theme. The added functionality is quite nice: A TOTP Seed and Code Generator. For native theme support (under ... Read more

Syncthing <= Dropbox & GDrive

Google Drive (GDrive) and other cloud storage alternatives such as Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive all have the serious drawback of keeping one's information in a third party cloud repository. Privacy and security are generally compromised this way, even when paying for storage (as opposed to having an advertising model, which is worse in many ways). ... Read more

Telegram for Social Networking

Telegram is a great chat app, but there is more, and less to it, than say Twitter and Facebook. The first thing is that a lot of this gamification of likes/thumbsup is gone. Want to know if someone read your post? That has to be done either via direct message, or in a group (and ... Read more

OpenVPN on Debian

OpenVPN on Debian is the second step in securing an operating system. Below we include ufw firewall installation and configuration as well. Related Artices in Debian Services and Applications Debian on AWS Lightsail OpenVPN on Debian + UFW Firewall Nginx and Letsencrypt on Debian PHP & MariaDB on Debian Grav CMS on Debian Note: install ... Read more

Debian on AWS Lightsail

This is a setup of several items, starting with Debian 9 on Amazon AWS Lightsail. This has server basics and apt, and then follows with links to additional articles. In general, after several years of running CentOS on Linode, and then Amazon Linux AMI on EC2 and Lightsail, I find that Debian 9 is simply ... Read more

Obfsproxy, Viscosity, OpenVPN

OpenVPN is great, and the OpenVPN command line client and the Viscosity GUI are also nice. However, all configurations need to be checked to ensure there is no information leakage. Secondly, the basic OpenVPN connection needs another layer of encryption and/or obfuscation, in order to interoperate with Internet firewalls and services that use deep packet ... Read more

ufw, firewalld, iptables on Amazon Linux

ufw is known as a Debian (and Ubuntu) firewall, which is disabled by default but easy to use. There are some GUI front-ends which make it popular for Linux on the desktop. Coming from a CentOS background (RHEL/Amazon Linux AMI), ufw is not as common (as, say firewalld, or simply iptables, to which both ufw ... Read more

OpenVPN on Amazon Linux

See also OpenVPN on ChromeOS and Android OpenVPN on an AWS EC2 T2.Nano Instance The T2.Nano instance is the smallest instance generally available for AWS EC2. As of 17-June-2017, the Nano includes the following resources: 512mb RAM 1 vcpu (30 credits + 3/hr, up to 72 credits) 1gb network out traffic Alternatively, a $5 USD ... Read more

Referer, Referral, Analytics Spam

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, eggs, and spam. You get spam with your analytics. These are not real visitors, just spam in the logs. Here is how to de-spam your analytics. Google Analytics Spam Filters Admin > Account > Filters Add custom filter, exclude by hostname Filter Pattern .*(hostname\.tld|hostname\.tld).* Note that a filter can have ... Read more

Link Disavow Tool Bing Google Yandex

Link disavowel is desired someone (a competitor, or simply a derranged troll) has created low-quality links to your site. In some cases, in competitive, global markets, this may actually be the result of perhaps hundreds of domains created for the purpose of wrecking large numbers of competitors by providing Google with evidence of negative behavior. ... Read more