Matt Horan's Blog

I’ve had a VPS with ARP Networks for a long time now. Things were a bit different back then. The default FreeBSD installer suggested setting up multiple partitions (slices) on a disk by default. This is no longer the case. Encryption wasn’t a thing that people generally worried about. I’ve had it on my todo list for a while now to figure out how to converge to a single encrypted partition on my VPS — saving me from running out of space in /var/, and also to protect the data on the underlying “disk”. I finally worked it out a few weeks ago.

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I typically utilize public key authentication when connecting via SSH to matthoran.com. However, there are times when I’m away from a device which has my private key and need access to my server. I reluctantly enabled password authentication for those occasions, but after enabling two-factor authentication for most of the services that I use regularly, I wanted to do the same for my own server.

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I’m one of two people I’m aware of who still runs their own e-mail servers. I do this for a multitude of reasons, mostly because I love mutt and nothing else quite stacks up to it. Running a local mail server with mutt reading a local inbox is relatively simple. I run Postfix and it gets the job done with relatively little configuration. However, if you’d like to check mail remotely, and not rely on ConnectBot to SSH into your ARP Networks VPS, you’ll have to venture into the world of IMAP servers.

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Instead of relying on PAM or /etc/passwd for authentication and authorization, I decided to store account information in an OpenLDAP database. Of course I could have used NIS or flat file databases, but OpenLDAP proved to be the best solution for my situation.

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