Introduction #

A full catalog and review of some analytics tools, that are a more privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics. The tools are divided into the following categories:

• Free Cloud-Hosted
• Free Self-Hosted
• Paid (Cloud or Self Hosted)

All the chosen tools should have the following characteristics:

• Privacy Focused (No IP logging, Fingerprinting, Tracking, etc)
• GDPR compliant
• Open Source (Preferably but not hard criteria)
• Offer good statistics
• User-friendly interface (UI/UX)

Reasons for choosing an alternative #

It was a struggle for me to find and choose a different analytics service, but I knew I had to do it if I want to be more respectful of the people that visit my website and try to create a more private and secure internet. The state of the internet is not gonna change from our small websites, but I believe it is important if there is a more private choice available, we do not have a reason to ignore it.

SUI is a startpage for your server and / or new tab page. It offers some similar functionalities as Homer.

We can use this app in order to have a homepage for all our services, apps and links of our server into one place, and edit only some json files for the content.

This guide assumes, that Docker and Docker Compose is already installed in your system.

Run Using Docker #

Clone the repository in your system and navigate into it:

About #

An simple URL shortener RESTful web service API written in Go, using the net/http package for the server, the HttpRouter for the router and Bolt DB for the database.

The Stoplight service was used to design and document the REST API. See below for the API Documentation

The API service is deployed on Heroku, and you can access it on url-shortener-thanoskoutr.herokuapp.com.

Because the Heroku Free plan is no longer available from November 28, 2022, the above link does not work. I wish to deploy the API in a Heroku free alternative service in the future.

In this post we will see, how we can get an SSL certificate for our Apache or Nginx server with Certbot from Let’s Encrypt.

Prerequisites #

• An Ubuntu or Debian server (tested on Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian 10) that you have SSH access and root or sudo privileges.

  You can follow the SSH Server & UFW Configure guide to set up SSH best practices and configure a basic firewall.

In this post we will see how we can install the Nginx web server in our Ubuntu server, and how to configure it to serve some files.

If you have already a web server installed, like Apache, you either have to uninstall it or change the default port that is listening because it will conflict with Nginx.

Install Nginx #

We install nginx and any required dependencies:

sudo apt install nginx

Adjusting the Firewall #

After you have followed the initial server setup and enabled the UFW firewall, make sure that your firewall allows HTTP and HTTPS traffic. You can check that UFW has an application profile for Nginx like so:

In this post, we will see how we can run Node-RED using Docker Containers on our Ubuntu Server. Node-RED is a flow-based development tool for visual programming, for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services as part of the Internet of Things.

The light-weight runtime is built on Node.js, taking full advantage of its event-driven, non-blocking model. The flows created in Node-RED are stored using JSON which can be easily imported and exported for sharing with others.

In this post, we will see how we can install Grafana in our Ubuntu Server. Grafana is an open-source data visualization and monitoring tool that can easily be integrated with other tools.

We will install Grafana in our server as a service and not in a container.

We have more than one way to install Grafana:

• By downloading the Linux binary
• By downloading and installing the .deb package
• By installing from the official repository

We will show the last method, because we don’t have to manually update the package ourselves.

In this post, we will see how we can install the latest version of InfluxDB (ver 2.0) in our Ubuntu Server. With the new version there’s only one thing to download and install and we can avoid installing the TICK Stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, Kapacitor).

The new version is not a simple time-series database anymore, but also a platform for querying, visualization and data manipulation.

We have more than one way to install InfluxDB 2.0:

Homer is a dead simple static HOMepage for your servER to keep your services on hand, from a simple yaml configuration file.

We can use this app in order to have a homepage for all our services, apps and links of our server into one place, and edit only one yaml file.

In order to run the app we need Docker installed in our system, as it is going to be run as a container. We will also need Docker Compose if we are going to use Compose to start and stop the container.

In this post, we will see how we can create and configure our Hugo blog to our needs. This guide assumes, that Hugo is already installed in your system.

We will use a certain theme as an example, but the same principles apply to almost every theme.

We must also note that Hugo is somewhat tied to the theme you have, so if you want to change it, some changes will need to be made, mostly on the top config file, and less on the markdown content.

In this post, we will see how we can install Hugo on our Ubuntu (or any Debian based) system.

Hugo is a very popular open-source static site generator (SSG) that is build with Go. It is mainly known for its speed and flexibility.

Hugo can be used by experienced Front-End developers that can create their custom themes with the Hugo templating system, but can also be used by novice users that want to create their own webpage with little to none knowledge. This is possible thanks to the large collection of Themes that Hugo developers have contributed.

About #

A python bot, that uses Selenium, in order to automatically access the Router/Modem’s web-based setup page and get DSL Link info. It uses Plotly to create an interactive Plot as an HTML web page.

It also supports the export of the data to an InfluxDB Bucket for further monitoring and visualizing.

Currently gets the following info:

• CRC Errors
• FEC Errors
• Showtime_start

Support for the following Routers/Modems:

• ZTE Nova Routers (H267N, H288A, …)

The need behind this project, was to monitor my DSL Link information over time, to correlate with various internet outages or sudden internet speed issues.

About #

The purpose of this project is to create a Web Application in which a user can search movies to watch in different streaming platforms (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+).

The user can filter the results with different criteria and choose to search on any number of the streaming platforms in order to find the desired movies. Also, some statistics are provided about the number of movies that are available on each platform in the form of a pie chart.

In this post we will see, how we can change the default port (port 80) of Wordpress to something else (port 1280) in order to have port 80 available for other applications to use.

To make this change we will need to change 2 main things, the Apache configuration files and some options in the MySQL database.

We are assuming that Wordpress is installed in a LAMP stack on an Ubuntu or Debian server.

Wordpress Installation and Configuration Guide.

Prerequisites #

• Create a sudo user on your server
• Install a LAMP stack
• Secure your site with SSL (can be done after)

Create a MySQL Database and User for WordPress #

Log in to a MySQL administrative account (root):

sudo mysql -u root -p

Create wordpress database:

CREATE DATABASE wordpress DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

Create exclusive user for this database:

GRANT ALL ON wordpress.* TO 'wordpressuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Flush the privileges so that the current instance of MySQL knows about the recent changes:

MySQL #

Install MySQL #

sudo apt install mysql-server

Run security script #

Accept almost everything, and add secure root password:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Change authentication method #

If you don’t change the authentication method from auth_socket to mysql_native_password then anyone with a sudo user password can log in as root.

To check the authentication method, enter MySQL:

sudo mysql

And type:

SELECT user,authentication_string,plugin,host FROM mysql.user;

To configure the root account to authenticate with a password, run the following ALTER USER command. Be sure to change password to a strong password of your choosing, and note that this command will change the root password you set in the security script: