How’d I Pick fgallery Anyway?

Currently this site is being generated offline as a series of static images, HTML, CSS, and JS files that get served almost entirely out of cache through the CDN provided by Cloudflare. This is made possible by a piece of software called Hugo. Hugo takes a series of Markdown formatted text files, some HTML/CSS/JS templates, and a theme made of HTML/CSS/JS and generates this entire site each time I run the command hugo inside my site repository. This confers a lot of advantages over a more traditional approach such as using a CMS like Wordpress, such as:

Introduction

Why Bother?

As should be abundantly clear from my prior writings I am about to leave on a trip for a year. During that time I’ll likely be making use of numerous public Wi-Fi access points, not to mention whatever dodgy cellular providers are available in each location I travel to. As part of my overall stance on privacy, its essential I take steps to secure my communication while traveling, the primary of which is using a VPN for basically everything on both my laptop and my phone. To do this, I’m using a droplet from DigitalOcean that’s just $5/mo and doesn’t have to be shared with anyone else (from an IP/network perspective anyway).

This post was originally a response to a question I received from a friend via email, with some additions. I’m not going to try to get very in-depth here, this is more of a high-level overview of what you should be doing to secure a server running Linux. This is mainly focused on a business environment where you have multiple users and multiple servers (and are hopefully using configuration management software).