One problem with using a single Docker server for a modern smuggling operation is that I end up running a bunch of web applications on different port numbers that I can’t remember. The other challenge is needing to connect to that server from a number of different methods.
I might be connecting through local ports on SSH tunnels, NeoRouter, or via a hostname.
Putting a bunch of links to the different server ports on a webpage *seemed* simple enough: just grab a basic Apache container, fire it up, and create a basic webpage full of hyperlinks. Turns out, there are several challenges with this:
- You don’t know what network you will be accessing the server from. The IP, FQDN, or hostname could be different every time you access the webpage. A hyper link to 192.168.1.211 is of no help if that IP is inaccessible to the client. This *could* be solved by using relative paths in the hyperlinks *but*…
- Apache adds a leading slash to a relative path. That means that a link “:1234″ will point to http://example.com/:1234”
- I haven’t created a web page without using a content management system in *at least* 15 years. I am just a bit behind the kids today with their hula-hoops and their rock-and-roll.
So I did what I always do when presented with a technical challenge: fall back on a piece of knowledge that spent like 30 minutes learning that one time, like 20 years ago.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, there used to be these crappy free web hosts like Geocities where people could make their own websites. You could do all kinds of things with Java and JavaScript, but you couldn’t do anything that ran on the web server, like CGI scripts or server-side-includes. Server side includes were important, because you could commonly used code (like the header and footer for the page) in a couple of files, and if you changed one of those files, the change would replicate over your whole site.
You could do something similar with JavaScript. You put the script that you want on every page, and tell JavaScript to load it from a single file. Like so:
<script language="JavaSscript" src="header.js"/>
In the header.js file, I would put in a ton of document.write statements to force the client browser to write out the HTML of the head and body sections of the web page. I called this horrible technique “client-side includes”:
document.write('<body bgcolor="000000">');
For the current challenge, I just have to rewrite the URL for each hyperlink, based on some variables on the page:
< script language="JavaScript" >
document.write('< a href="' + window.location.protocol + '//' + window.location.hostname + ':8989' +
window.location.pathname + '"> Sonarr < / a > </script >
Sorry for some of the weird spacing, convincing WordPress to mark up JavaScript without actually executing it is kind of fiddly. The code examples look better here.
The solution works most of the time. I like to browse for torrents with a browser that blocks ads and JavaScript, so I have to enable JS for that tab, and then browse in that tab with caution. Sonarr, Radarr, and the like all rely heavily on JavaScript, so I prefer to use Brave’s shields wherever possible.
The winter holidays are a depressing time for me, so the last month or so of the year I like to really throw myself into a game or project. After being ridiculed by one of my DnD bros about how inefficient and antiquated my piracy set up is, I decided to modernize by adding applications to automate the downloading and organizing of my stolen goods.
Because I am a hardware/operating system dude that dabbles in networking, LXC makes perfect sense to me. If you have a virtualization platform, like an emulator or a hypervisor, and you run a lot of similar systems on it, why not just run one Linux kernel and let the other “machines” use that? You get separate, resource efficient operating systems that have separate IP’s, memory allocation, and even storage.
I like that Docker can pop up an application very quickly with almost no configuration on my part. Docker storage and networking feels weird to me, like a bunch of things stapled on after delivering the finished product. From a networking standpoint there is an internal IP scheme with randomly generated IPs for the containers that reminds me of a home network set up on a consumer grade router. If you want the container to have access to the “outer” network, you have to map ports to it. Storage is abstracted into volumes, with each container having a dedicated volume with a randomly generated name. You don’t mount NFS on each container/volume, instead you mount it on the host and point the container to the host’s mountpoint. It’s kind of like NFS, but internal to Docker using that weird internal network. Also, in typical developer fashion, there is very little regard for memory management. The VM that I am running docker on has 16gb of RAM, and its utilization is maxed out 24/7. Maybe Docker doesn’t actually use that RAM constantly, it just reserves it and manages it internally? It’s been chewing through my media collection for a couple of months now, and slowly but surely new things are showing up in Plex. Weird as the stack is, it’s still pretty rad.
It’s the end of the year, and I have a lot on my mind. So rather than deal with it, I am going to write about laptops. I have owned many laptops over the years, most of them have been refurbished or re-purposed from some other role. In many ways, I am a bit like a crazy cat lady, but instead of cats, I am surrounded by laptops. I tend to own and operate a few laptops because I have a few specific use cases with different hardware requirements. Rather than calling them laptops, I like to refer to them by the purpose that they serve for me.
Typetop – A big laptop that is suited for long typing sessions. In the past I wrote (and hacked, and coded) a lot more than I do now. I used to write papers for school, reports or emails for work, blog posts, or creative works. While my ideal writing environment is an office chair, large monitor and a 
Notetop – A tiny laptop that is suited for note taking. I have spent many hours in lecture halls and the like taking notes for classes. I don’t really use a laptop for notes at work, unless I am the designated minutes-taker, for example when I worked at a startup company out west, or in my time on the board of directors at 
Jettop – A burner laptop for travel. I used to travel to hacker conferences like DefCon, and you would occasionally need a laptop, but there was always a chance that something awful might happen to it. It might get stolen, it might get confiscated by law enforcement at an international border, it might get hacked by someone with way better skills than mine, or someone [like me] might drunkenly vomit on it or throw it out of a window. To minimize this risk, I would take a cheap laptop with minimal personal information and strong encryption. Once I started carrying a smartphone, I would also travel with an old flip phone, just to be safe. Later on, I would just take my work phone and turn off WiFi and Bluetooth. In later years, I bought a refurbished Chromebook and traveled with it. I found that a Chromebook along with a small Android tablet combined to make a good, lightweight, toolkit.
Crashtop – A laptop for network configuration and troubleshooting Pretty much always the secondary function of a shoptop, looking into network crashes pretty much always requires a laptop. For a dude that tinkers with computers, I like to think that I have a decent grasp of networking. Not just cabling, but also routing, switching and even telephones. My home network is as much a lab as it is anything else. My main router has a console port, and while most of the network configuring I do is with SSH or a browser, sometimes you just need a laptop that you can physically plug in to a device. Of all the legacy ports to disappear from a modern laptop, I will miss the gigabit Ethernet port the most. Sure there are USB serial and Ethernet adapters, but those just aren’t the same as having the gear built right in. Also like the shoptop, I often think about either building a device, or maybe refurbishing a vintage device to troubleshoot networks with. I have always wanted a very industrial-looking 80’s device like the old Informer 213 for terminal-type stuff. At one point in my life, I had an old laptop that had a voice modem in it so that I could also mess with analog telephone lines.
I have been replacing low end servers with virtual machines for a while now, and it’s been kinda rad. In a previous post 
My life as a hacker, a pirate, and a crypto-anarchist has always centered on the belief that I was part of a movement that was changing things. I knew that the corporations and governments would do their best to to turn the Web into “TV with a BUY button.” But, I also knew that people like me would keep Barlow’s “Home Of Mind” alive by resisting that gentrification at every turn. There’s a war going on outside no man is safe from, and I was part of a kind of “
For some of my friends who aren’t pirates (especially the friends that are into British TV) I am like their coke dealer except I deal in movies and TV shows. That means that sometimes I get asked to find things when I’m not at home. Like a third of my 
I know I said that I wasn’t going to write anymore about the doorway server, but I lied. I needed to configure the doorway server to open those ports and then forward them to the torrent server. Let’s assume that my internal network is a 192.168.1.0/24 subnet (a class A block, a range of addresses from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.0.254) with a default gateway of 192.168.1.1. All of my traffic goes through my local router and hits the Internet from my ISP, in the US. If a device asks for an IP via DHCP, this is the network configuration that it will receive, along with red-blooded American Internets. Here is an awful network diagram because why not?
The doorway server has a static IP of 192.168.1.254 and it’s configured to route all of its traffic through the VPN tunnel to Sweden. Any device that is configured to have a default gateway of 192.168.1.254 will also hit the Internet via the tunnel to Sweden, thereby receiving Swedish Internets. At this point, all the configuration is done, and your torrent server will work, but there won’t be any ports forwarded to it, which is lame. No forwarded ports is especially lame when you are using private trackers because it can really mess with your ratios. Now, you could just open a port on your firewall for the web interface on the American side, but that’s also pretty lame. If you want to use your torrent server, you should strictly be using Swedish Internets.
To forward those ports, first set them up in Transmission, then with your VPN provider. The web interface port [12322] is already configured for you by Turnkey Linux. You can set the other port in the Preferences->Network->Listening Port blank. Once the entry points and the end points are configured, it’s time to do more iptables kung fu.
On the plus side, efficient use of memory means that I can feel better about running a dedicated Linux box (container) for each application. Dedicated boxes mean that when I inevitably screw something up, it doesn’t affect the other applications that are running (that I haven’t screwed up yet.) Also, with pre-built containers and snapshots, you can toss machines that you screwed up without losing much time. I know, I know, rebuilding a Linux box instead of fixing it is sacrilege… but I got other shit to do. 
Since OpenVPN container templates make standing up servers so easy, I thought I’d build another one that works in reverse. In addition to GATE that lets OpenVPN clients route in to the DMZ, I thought I would use an OpenVPN client to route traffic from some DMZ hosts out to the Internet via Sweden. In the past, I used a VPN service to dump my Bittorrent box’s traffic this way, but I would like to extend that service to multiple machines. EVERYBODY GETS A VPN!
Since it’s a doorway to a VPN gateway to Sweden, I decided to call the box DÖRR, which is Swedish for “door”. I did this to maintain my trans-dimensional gateway theme (HUB, GATE, PORTAL, etc.)
I don’t know why it’s set up that way. I’m just here to make awful jokes about Germanic languages.
I watched Stranger Things for the first time a couple of weeks after it dropped on NetFlix. Since then, I’ve probably rewatched it at least 3 times. It’s a great show, full of nods to 80’s movies like E.T. and Stand By Me, but it also captures something essential about my childhood, which was playing Dungeons and Dragons in my friend’s basement for hours at a time and being bullied.
The new season of Rick and Morty is awesome. It’s another show full of details and fan theories to obsess over. My existential angst is both alleviated and agitated by the show. The show’s conflicting ideas of finding meaning in uncaring universe either helps or makes things worse; I can’t tell which.
Speaking of the dichotomy of belief and disbelief, the first season of True Detective is one of the best television shows I have ever seen. Rust (Matthew McConaughey) is incredibly intelligent and yet completely unable to interact with people, except for when he is interrogating them and luring them into making confessions. There are a number of similarities to Rick and Morty, mostly having to do with the juxtaposition of human meaning and savage cruelty, but also the juxtaposition of truth and deception, duty and corruption. There is just barely enough evidence in the show to convince you that Rust is either psychic or psychotic, and somehow not enough to convince you which one.
BoJack Horseman is another “grown up cartoon” that specializes in reflecting my own nihilism back at me. While Rick and Morty is an endorsement for not engaging in reality, Bojack Horseman is an endorsement for [shying away from] your responsibility for your own reality. Like Rick Sanchez, Bojack understands that everything is shitty and pointless. Unlike Rick, Bojack learns that he is responsible for his own happiness. Of course, Bojack does a comically bad job of handling that responsibility, but he is aware that the responsibility exists.
CSI: Goth Girl – All I know about this show is that the writers don’t understand how IP addresses work. Also, it’s been on the air for like 15 years. Surely Goth Girl has grown up to be a Goth Woman by now? Maybe she settled down, married a Goth Guy? Had a couple of Goth Kids? Sure, I make fun of Goth Girl, but I also deeply respect her commitment to the Goth Lifestyle. I was all about Punk Rock until I went into the military and they shaved my head. Then I never looked back.
CSI: Hacker Girl – This is another show that doesn’t get how comically easy it is to change an IP. It’s totally possible to match up IP info with other details, but it will take a long time and probably require cooperation with foreign governments that may or may not extradite to the US. Or, you know, the cooperation of a huge and totally illegal NSA surveillance program.
CSI: Cop Killer – I love that my mom watches this show because she was suuuuuper worried about the music I listened to in the 90’s, like 
CSI: Pun Glasses I have no idea if my mom watches this show or not, but there’s a meme for it and I have an awful pun about puns, so by law I have to put it on the list.
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