Trinkets, Odds, and Ends

Posts

Mar 8, 2019
Cloud Storage Pricing, Revisited
Updated cloud storage pricing as of March 2019
Mar 7, 2019
Determining address ranges for a service from a single IP
This post explains how to come up with a list of all IP ranges used by the company or service for the purposes of configuring your firewall and webfilter exceptions.
Mar 1, 2019
Optimizing Code42 CrashPlan performance
Optimizing performance of Code42 CrashPlan engine for resource constrained hosts.
Feb 28, 2019
Provisioning custom SSL CA and Server Certificate to Synology Diskstation
How to add Self-Signed CA and Server SSL certificate to Synology DSM and configure it to be used with services. Two poorly documented pitfalls I stumbled upon.
Feb 26, 2019
Provisioning custom SSL keys to Ubiquiti CloudKey and UniFi Controller
Could not find the guide that worked. Had to figure stuff out on my own.
Feb 26, 2019
Creating Self-Signed Certificate Authority to issue SSL certificates using Certificate Assistant on macOS
This is somewhat tutorial-ish guide about creating self-signed Certificate Authority suitable for issuing of SSL certificates to be used for various servers, services, and devices to ensure "green lock" in the browsers and happy users using macOS GUI tools.
Apr 25, 2018
Strongswan IKEv2 split/full tunnel VPN on Alpine Linux VM on Synology Diskstation
Ever wanted to have an always-on VPN on an iOS device? IKEv2 is the answer; unfortunately it is not properly supported by any appliances commonly laying around the house - so we'll improvise. This post is about setup and configuration of an IKEv2 VPN server based on Strongswan running inside of Alpine Linux instance in the virtual machine hosted on Synology Diskstation. Pitfalls and challenges making split-tunnel work seamlessly. And don't have your hopes up too high -- while both full tunnel and split tunnel work just fine on a routing level it is not currently possible to make split-DNS work seamlessly enough, without client-side configuration. See closing notes for details. You might as well jump to OpenVPN article, if that is important.
Apr 24, 2018
Failure to negotiate when connecting to Synology L2TP server
Setting up L2TP VPN server on Synology DiskStation, forwarded ports 500,4500,1701 but the hanshake fails for obscure reason; something along the lines of “fatal payload-malformed notify message, phase 1 should be deleted”. What do to? Check the PSK length. It shall not be longer than 64 characters. UI will accept longer string however doing so will result in failures setting up the tunnel.
Apr 14, 2018
Canon MF4150: Printing and Scanning with AirPrint and SANE
I have a fairly old but great laser multifunction Canon MF4150 that never really supported scanning from anything but windows and whose MacOS printing drivers lag behind OS releases by a large margin causing frustration after each new release. Still, it has been over 10 years and it works great and I’m absolutely happy with its performance.
Apr 6, 2018
Cloud Storage Pricing
Looking for a CrashPlan alternative: Comparing cost of cloud storage.
Jan 2, 2018
OpenVPN Split Tunnel on Synology Diskstation
Exhaustive guide on configuring Synology's built-in OpenVPN server and further configuration of the .ovpn files to setup split-tunnel VPN home, emphasizing one-click client configuration, including MacOS, iOS, and Windows clients.
Dec 1, 2017
Unattended Duplicacy setup on macOS
What do you do when your favourite backup provider decides to focus on corporate customers and discontinues home edition of its cloud backup software? You start testing replacements, and soon come with with an alternative that in retrospect happensn to be more robust, flexible and resilient. This post will provide a supplemental information for setting up unattended periodic Duplicacy backup on a MacOS. Main goal is to provide meaningful configuration files to save time re-inventing the wheel.