About This Website
and myself
Hi!
I'm BodgeMaster (or Jan if you prefer irl names), the owner and operator
of this website as well as some other things hosted here. I like messing
around with computers and networks and have been running websites in one
form or another since 2016 (If not earlier, I don't remember).
In its current form, this website has existed for a couple years,
serving as my personal website, online file storage, Git, and a place
to host projects. As part of a major technology overhaul, the site has been
mostly rewritten in 2023.
More About Myself
I'm a dude in my 20s with slightly too many computers and slightly too little going on in my life. My top personal interests are UNIX-like operating systems, obscure and obsolete hardware, programming, and Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS). Especially in the oddly specific combination that is using modern FOSS UNIX-like systems on ancient hardware to develop new software. Apart from that, I'm also interested in high performance computing, networking, tinkering with electronics, and Minecraft.
I'm not a fan of everyone's online activity being dominated by a few very large websites that are used to publish/consume content or share experiences and ideas. In my opinion, the internet would be better off if the social media giants were less ubiquitous. Small websites operated by people who are passionate about providing unique content and useful information in their corner of the internet make things less homogenous and as a result less boring.
If you want to get in touch, feel free to reach out on Discord or leave me your email (refer to the contact section below). I speak German, though I typically default to English online due to mostly talking to people internationally as well as mostly consuming English-language content.
Technical Details
about this website
This website started out when I found an old Dell PowerEdge on the side of the street that someone had thrown out. I decided to take it home and see if it still worked - it did. So I installed Ubuntu Server and GitLab on it - two choices that I would later come to regret - and ran that setup as pretty much just a dedicated Git server for a while. Since then, GitLab has been replaced with Gitea, the domain name has changed, my personal website got added, the system got migrated to different hardware, and then the website got migrated to Debian on different hardware again.
I host this website from my home. To make it accessible, I am using a wildcard domain that is updated using DynDNS. That allows me to assign arbitrary subdomains for random projects by just adding another vhost to my web server. The certificate for SSL is provided by Let's Encrypt.
The problem with using DynDNS is that there are some things that I just can't do. For example, I can't send mail because no big email server will accept mail from a server in the public dynamic IP address range. There are probably workarounds for this, but I have given up on sending mail for now.
There is also another problem with being "visible" on the internet: The entire IPv4 address range gets port scanned multiple times per day and automatically checked for known vulnerabilities by malicious bots. I mainly use three techniques to mitigate this:
- Following the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid!). The security of complex setups with many components is more difficult to maintain. Not to mention that things that I don't run on my server don't offer an attack surface.
- Ensuring that incoming traffic is only processed when it's actually trying to talk to one of my services. A bot that found my server by port scanning IP addresses is less likely to provide a valid host: header.
- Fail2Ban. If you're operating a server, you should use it as well (or use a similar tool).
This has worked out pretty well so far. Of course, these strategies are not the only ones I employ and neither are they a catch-all that magically makes me immune to being hacked, but they are things that I don't typically see elsewhere.