security

About a year ago I moved all my websites and services to a private cloud. It runs Docker swarm mode and consists out of three machines: two without direct internet access (private nodes) and one with a public IP (public node).

During the transition two problems popped up:

• The PHP Docker containers I used didn’t ship with a sendmail binary, so I couldn’t send e-mails from PHP with mail().
• One of my services ran on a private node but still needed to send e-mails. Since it had no internet access, this wasn’t possible.

After some research and some thinking I came up with a solution: running a mail relay service on my public node, which would simply receive mail from PHP containers and services on private nodes and relay those mails to my (still managed) SMTP mail-server.

Since there a some tricky parts in doing so, I wrote a guide on how you can do this yourself.

TL;DR

I received a cable modem from my ISP which used the serial number as default WLAN passwort. This “password” could be brute-forced in about five minutes.

My internet service provider fixed the issue by notifying all affected customers and awarded me with three months of free internet. 🤓