Michael Graves

All Aboard! The Upgrade Train

(brought to you by AI... I mean the constant upgrades... not the article... that was all me... and my spell checker) As IT professional(s), I (we) have been on the constant upgrade cycle. So much so, Microsoft created a monthly 'holiday' where we get 'gifts'

Automatic Certificate Issuance with ACME

In a previous article here, I described how to setup an ACME server using Step-CA software. While writing that article I got tired fighting with some of the Step-CA nuances and asked myself if there was a better way. Not finding a better way to issue certificates using the ACME

Notes on Roundcube Mail

These are some notes for my future self on how to get data out of the roundcube mail database. This assume sqlite3 database but the SQL should also work with MySQL or PostgreSQL databases as well. View schema sqlite3 rc_sqlite.db ".schema" List users sqlite3 rc_sqlite.

Be your own CA...

I have been running my own Certificate Authority (CA) for my systems for some time now. While running my CA is nothing like running a large commercial CA, running a personal CA is surprisingly easy. Background When I first got started with becoming my own CA, it was in the

Notes on Doveadm

Some quick notes for myself about using doveadm and managing mailboxes.

Self Hosted: Episode 8 - External Services

Software Used: * OpenBSD 7.7 Overview Now that we have some services in our self hosted environment, we may want to allow access from outside our environment. The question is how do we allow this connectivity for ourselves (and anyone else we choose) but not allow the world at large?

Self Hosted: Episode 7 - Email

Software Used: * OpenBSD 7.7 (as VM) * OpenSMTPD (part of OS) * Dovecot 2.3.21.1 (from ports) * RoundcubeMail 1.6.11 (from ports) * twofactor_webauthn 1.3.0 Overview Email is a surprisingly vast and charged topic. It is one of the first services that someone/anyone can deploy

Self Hosted: Episode 6 - Authentication

Software used: * FreeBSD 14.2 (jail) * OpenLDAP 2.6 (from ports) It has been said: "Three people can keep a secret, if two are dead." Fortunately, it doesn't need to come to that. Authentication As with many things in computing there needs to be a source

Self Hosted: Episode 5 - Logging

Software Used: * FreeBSD 14.2 (jail) Introduction If you can't observe what is happening then you can't find and fix what is broken Setting up a logging server at this point may seem premature. But as we move forward, things will get more complicated and more

Self Hosted: Episode 4 - Certificates

Software used: * FreeBSD 14.2 (jail) * Step CA 0.28.1 (from ports) Updated: 2026-02-14 Introduction If it isn't DNS... then it's certificates! Certificates are simple... but it's complicated! Certificates themselves are very simple... ignoring the all the crypto algorithms, hashes, etc. They are