Nick Byrne nbx3

It's not immediately obvious how to pull down the code for a PR and test it locally. But it's pretty easy. (This assumes you have a remote for the main repo named upstream.)

Getting the PR code

Make note of the PR number. For example, Rod's latest is PR #37: Psiphon-Labs/psiphon-tunnel-core#37
Fetch the PR's pseudo-branch (or bookmark or rev pointer whatever the word is), and give it a local branch name. Here we'll name it pr37:

$ git fetch upstream pull/37/head:pr37

Most VPN Services are Terrible

Short version: I strongly do not recommend using any of these providers. You are, of course, free to use whatever you like. My TL;DR advice: Roll your own and use Algo or Streisand. For messaging & voice, use Signal. For increased anonymity, use Tor for desktop (though recognize that doing so may actually put you at greater risk), and Onion Browser for mobile.

This mini-rant came on the heels of an interesting twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/kennwhite/status/591074055018582016

How to setup AWS lambda function to talk to the internet and VPC

I'm going to walk you through the steps for setting up a AWS Lambda to talk to the internet and a VPC. Let's dive in.

So it might be really unintuitive at first but lambda functions have three states.

No VPC, where it can talk openly to the web, but can't talk to any of your AWS services.
VPC, the default setting where the lambda function can talk to your AWS services but can't talk to the web.
VPC with NAT, The best of both worlds, AWS services and web.

With heightening concern regarding the state of internet privacy (fuelled in part by the passing of the Investigatory Powers Act in the UK), I have set up a VPN server on the virtual server I have hosted with Mythic Beasts. This uses strongSwan and certificate-based IKEv2 authentication.

Assumptions:

Debian Jessie server already set up and accessible via debian.example.com, a public IPv4 of 203.0.113.1 and a public IPv6 of 2001:db8::1
Client username of me
Clients are running the latest versions of macOS and iOS (Sierra and 10 respectively at the time of writing)
No need to support any other operating systems (although the setup is easily translated)

For automated deployment of a similar setup, albeit Ubuntu-based and using ansible for deployment, I recommend you take a look at Algo VPN. I used that project as a basis for my configuration.

On systems with UEFI Secure Boot enabled, recent Linux kernels will only load signed modules, so it's about time DKMS grew the capability to sign modules it's building.

These scripts are extended and scriptified variants of https://computerlinguist.org/make-dkms-sign-kernel-modules-for-secure-boot-on-ubuntu-1604.html and https://askubuntu.com/questions/760671/could-not-load-vboxdrv-after-upgrade-to-ubuntu-16-04-and-i-want-to-keep-secur/768310#768310 and add some error checking, a passphrase around your signing key, and support for compressed modules.

dkms-sign-module is a wrapper for the more generic sign-modules which can also be used outside of DKMS.

Installation

Create a directory under /root, say /root/module-signing, put the three scripts below in there and make them executable: chmod u+x one-time-setup sign-modules dkms-sign-module

k3s etcd commands

etcd

Setup etcdctl using the instructions at https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/releases/tag/v3.4.13 (changed path to /usr/local/bin):

Note: if you want to match th etcdctl binaries with the embedded k3s etcd version, please run the curl command for getting the version first and adjust ETCD_VER below accordingly:

curl -L --cacert /var/lib/rancher/k3s/server/tls/etcd/server-ca.crt --cert /var/lib/rancher/k3s/server/tls/etcd/server-client.crt --key /var/lib/rancher/k3s/server/tls/etcd/server-client.key https://127.0.0.1:2379/version

	[
	{name: 'Afghanistan', code: 'AF'},
	{name: 'Åland Islands', code: 'AX'},
	{name: 'Albania', code: 'AL'},
	{name: 'Algeria', code: 'DZ'},
	{name: 'American Samoa', code: 'AS'},
	{name: 'AndorrA', code: 'AD'},
	{name: 'Angola', code: 'AO'},
	{name: 'Anguilla', code: 'AI'},
	{name: 'Antarctica', code: 'AQ'},

	AWSTemplateFormatVersion: 2010-09-09
	Description: My Network Environment
	Resources:
	# VPC containing 3 subnets, 1 is public, while the other 2 are private for RDS
	MyVPC:
	Type: AWS::EC2::VPC
	Properties:
	CidrBlock: 10.0.0.0/16
	EnableDnsSupport: 'true'
	EnableDnsHostnames: 'true'

	apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
	kind: CronJob
	metadata:
	name: postgres-backup
	spec:
	schedule: "0 12 * * *"
	jobTemplate:
	spec:
	backoffLimit: 0
	template: