The QUICK quick guide to setting up a WireGurd VPN tunnel

 

 Background story (skippable)

So I've been maintaining a set of OpenVPN tunnels into various NAT-routed networks for several years now and every now and then a software update will declare some of the keys too old and insecure to be used. This means I have to dust-off the TLS PKI files and remember how to use it so I can press-out a new set of keys and distribute these to all the places they need to be. PKI is generally a drag and I decided it was finally time to learn how to set-up the new and hip WireGuard tunnelling solution.

Unfortunately it took me a couple of hours to set it up just the way I wanted as there are a few large differences between the two systems:

• Wireguard does not use TLS/PKI, it just uses pre-shared public/private key pairs
• Wireguard uses a peer-to-peer setup, not client-server like OpenVPN
• Wireguard ignores NAT by default and is fairly "quiet" so you may need keep-alive messages to keep UDP ports open trhough NAT routers
  

How to run a "simple" Samba Podman container under Fedora 31

 

This is really just a "note to self" to document how I set-up a basic home-share from a Samba daemon running in a Podman container under Fedora 31. Unfortunately doing such a notionally simple task involves getting a bunch of slightly finicky security and isolation systems to cohabit in just the right way.

Neapolitan Pizza Recipe

This is just the basic recipe for the dough and sauce for Neapolitan-style pizza. I'll briefly outline the traditional toppings and baking technique, but for various reasons, you probably want to make your own way there. Note that this is an overnight recipe: You make the dough one day and use it the next.

Sorbet reference

I've been getting into making sorbet a bit recently, making icy-poles out of some left-over limes at Christmas time and messing around with frozen mangoes.

Just last weekend, my dad unloaded a bucket of perfectly ripe, if a bit bug-ridden elberta peaches (He's been doing the rounds of friends and relatives to try and get rid of them).

I decided I was going to peel, stone, debug and make the peaches into sorbet too, so I'd better start getting serious about the recipe. I found this pretty comprehensive article about technique and links to several handy recipes by Max Falkowitz in Serious Eats, so I'm making sure I have a record of it for posterity:

How to make the best sorbet

La Viña Cheesecake

This delicious cheesecake recipe was shamelessly plagiarised from Mimo Food, who posted it with permission from La Viña restaurant in San Sebastián, Spain. I stole it so I could make the quantities less gargantuan (halve), Fix an error in the baking temperature (Celsius vs. Fahrenheit) and just ensure that I have somewhere to remember it (It's ungoogleable for me right now).The cake is eye-poppingly sweet and creamy and best served with touches of brown around the edges and "just warm" after baking.

Inside the IceTV Skippa

In which I tell my tale of woe in buying a DVR from a defunct company and pulling it to bits in revenge.

Phonebaby teardown

The Phonebaby backstory

In June this year, I attended Dangerous Prototypes' Hacker Camp Shenzhen (Possibly the last one too). On the intro night, Aaron from Oomlout showed a dinky little "Phonebaby" mini GSM phone he'd acquired recently.