Home-grown Wireguard VPN for your own domain (with DDNS)

VPNs are everywhere, yep. They are flagged all over the place as some sort of pro-privacy marketing tactic. Sadly, this is the only side that is communicated to people about the beauty of them. For once, can’t I have my own one and not have to constantly fork money over to these people?

In this post, I show how I used a raspberry pi to become a Wireguard VPN server that also performs dynamic-DNS so it is always accessible whenever (and whenever) I am. Hopefully, you should be tempted to do the same.

This post is absolutely not sponsored by NordVPN.

Getting the phish with Mailchimp

I am in a friendship group which likes to do light-hearted pranks; removing labels from food tins, covering bedrooms in tinfoil, nothing to cause any negative effects to the other. Now we are all graduated, split across the UK and never had the chance to have a graduation ceremony. With lock-down in full swing, there was an idea. Why not a lighthearted prank / rickroll them with an email?

Like most subscription lists and common emails ypu see, there’s the iconic smiling monkey at the footer showing it was crafted by the great provider Mailchimp. This time, the email would persuade them into clicking what would be their “Virtual Graduation”, but would actually be a video on YouTube by big man tyrone.

Resurrection of an iPod classic

It started out as a usual day of lockdown, working on assignments and clearing out old junk from one of the rooms of the house. Most of it was, it was surely surprising the average number of dvds in the common household. What really caught my eye was dad’s iPod Classic in really good shape. Clearly it could power up?

Screen of a dead iPod

Poor guy had corrupt memory.

Netkit, IPsec and Wireguard

From an awesome project maintained by the original developers and a few fellows in the cyber society, Netkit-JH comes from the original Netkit and allows the virtualisation of computers and networks on a host machine. The original netkit has now become Kathara, using docker containers instead of user-mode linux instances.

Netkit-JH logo

This is great for testing and implementing ideas, where this post goes onto making some VPN tunnels using standard IPSec with StrongSwan and also Wireguard.