Obtuse Networking (Page 1)

Latest — 01 Apr 2026

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

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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

Self Hosted: Episode 3 - DNS/DHCP/NTP

Used Software: * FreeBSD 14.2 (as jail) * ISC Bind 9.2.0 (from ports) * ISC DHCP 4.4 (from ports) Introduction It all begins with DNS... Building the Jail environment The DNS/DHCP server will be built using a FreeBSD jail. This is done for several reason. First, FreeBSD Jails

Self Hosting: Episode 2 - Firewall

Software Used: * OpenBSD 7.7 Introduction The firewall will separate the segments and provide protection for services that must cross the segment boundaries. To that end firewall will have several interfaces. To keep rules as manageable as possible we will treat all hosts behind each segment/interface the same. This

Self Hosting: Episode 1 - Hypervisor

Software Used: * FreeBSD 14.2 * Sanoid/Syncoid 2.3.0 Introduction Before we can deploy any services we need two things. First a place to store those services and two a place to run those services from (i.e storage and compute). These two requirements do not need to run

Topics

DoH

Dovecot

FreeBSD

IMAP

IPv6

Jail

LAN

LDAP

Notes

Self Hosted

X11

anycast

autoinstall

automation

bgp

browser

canary

comment policy

cwm

dhcp