Life after GSuite: Two months into Zoho

We migrated from GSuite to Zoho at the end of January after Google announced that legacy Apps for Domains (AfD) accounts will be closed.

Migration away from Google (after over a decade of use) was not going to be without it's pains, but (as I laid out at the time) I felt that there were too many drawbacks to GSuite/Workspace to be able to justify actually paying Google.

So, I went in search of suitable alternatives, some of which are listed in that earlier post. Microsoft's Office365 almost won the day, but was scuttled by their insane choice to require GoDaddy be the registrar for any vanity domains.

Ultimately, I opted to go with Zoho and documented the process of migrating our accounts and data over.

We've all read (if not written) posts about migrations: they're full of optimism, naivety and excitement, but never tell the story of life with the new provider (because the author has not yet experienced it).

With Google's AfD deadline looming, I thought it might be useful to write about my experience after the first couple of months of being on Zoho

Read more…

Monitoring eepsite availability with Telegraf

(updated )

I've been doing some work making bentasker.co.uk available via I2P. A core part of that is setting up monitoring so that I can see when things are going wrong (or starting to).

I previously documented the process of monitoring the I2PD daemon with Telegraf. Whilst daemon monitoring is important, it only tells us about the state of the daemon, it tells us little about an eepsite's reachability and performance.

This documentation details how to use Telegraf to perform reachability checks against an I2P eepsite.

Read more…

Multi-homing a site between the WWW and an I2P Eepsite

I recently gave a high-level overview of some of the things I needed to address in the process of multi-homing my site to make bentasker.co.uk available on I2P.

Although I2P presents some new challenges, some of the considerations were the same as when multihoming between Tor and the WWW.

Although I had originally intended to publish a generic multi-homing how-to, it's not really possible because the multi-homing process can be quite site specific. Instead, this post is more of a deep-dive into the process to show some of the things you need to consider when publishing an existing site onto the I2P anonymous overlay network. More than a few of those things will likely improve your www site too.

Parts of this post can also be used to set up a brand new eepsite, though it's assumed you've already got something listening on port 80: this post doesn't go into installing nginx.

Read more…

Generating an eepsite vanity address

I2P base32 addresses aren't particularly memorable, http://gdncgijky3xvocpkq6xqk5uda4vsnvzuk7ke7jrvxnvyjwkq35iq.b32.i2p/ doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Although you can register a shortname, the availability of your site via that name will depend on whether the shortname appears in the user's addressbook.

Some I2P operators, therefore prefer to generate a vanity address.

This documentation details how to generate a vanity I2P address for use with an eepsite.

Read more…

Monitoring I2PD with Telegraf

I recently made my site available via I2P as an eepsite, using i2pd as my I2P client.

However, establishing connectivity was only really the first part of that - I needed to be able to monitor i2pd so that I could see when it goes down (or has other issues) rather than waiting for people to complain the the eepsite isn't reachable.

I do the vast majority of my system monitoring using Telegraf. A quick search didn't yield any Telegraf plugins for i2pd - so, I created my own Telegraf Plugin for i2pd.

The plugin's currently very rough around the edges, but does what I currently need. Because i2pd only exposes it's stats as HTML it relies on scraping the webconsole.

This documentation details how to set Telegraf up to report stats from i2pd into InfluxDB so that I could generate graphs in Chronograf.

Read more…

BenTasker.co.uk is now available as an Eepsite

I've long felt that it's important to offer a privacy preserving route to view my content - I've no particular need or desire to know who's visiting, and I do sometimes carry content/documentation that censorious states would prefer their citizens not be able to reach.

As a result, www.bentasker.co.uk has been available as a Tor Onion service since 2015 - though admittedly the address changed during that time as a result of Tor shifting to only supporting V3 Onions.

However, Tor is not the only anonymous overlay network, and it's always been my intention to try and add support for I2P too - it's just taken a bit longer than expected to get around to it.

My site is now available as an eepsite, you should be able to reach it at either of the following two addresses

  • gdncgijky3xvocpkq6xqk5uda4vsnvzuk7ke7jrvxnvyjwkq35iq.b32.i2p
  • bentasker.i2p

There are probably some improvements I can make to improve delivery speed, but the eepsite is up and running.

Recent changes to the videos.bentasker.co.uk embed code mean that my video content can be watched on I2P without need for an outproxy. My privacy friendly analytics has also been updated to use I2P as a transport, so that I can spot I2P specific delivery issues and (hopefully) address them.

Read more…

Lenovo Thinkpad X220 Fan Replacement

Replacing the cooling fan on a Thinkpad X220 (or X230) is, by no means, a small job - it's packed away inside and the steps you need to follow would also be enough to change the motherboard.

However, the part - the fan - is incredibly cheap: you can buy a replacement for around £10, so it is a cheap repair to do yourself. It's also relatively straightforward, you just need space and time to do it.

This documentation details how to disassemble a Lenovo Thinkpad X220 in order to remove and replace the cooling fan - the process is exactly the same on an X230.

Read more…