Category: Tutorials Page 1 of 2

Smart Home, Part 3

On February 23, 2024

I can’t believe it’s been almost 3 years since I wrote about this! Things have settled down a bit, so I figured I’d post another follow-up.

First, I built Mike and Joyce’s Smart Home Inventory if you’d like a quick glance at what we have installed. I’ll keep it updated as we make changes.

Things are mostly stable here, though. Apple has spent the past couple of years working on Matter. The Home app was redesigned, but most of the changes have been behind the scenes. I’m hopeful we’ll see more improvements as Matter matures.

Almost two years ago, our router (a Synology RT2600ac) added support for multiple VLANs, so I added a separate network specifically for smart home devices. This allowed me to broadcast dedicated 2.5 GHz and 5 GHz SSIDs for this network, since many smart home devices are only compatible with 2.5 GHz. Eventually, I hope I can firewall it off from the rest of the network, but I’m not sure how I’m going to accomplish that with the Apple TVs needing to connect to this network and the primary VLAN.

Plugs and Bulbs

We’re still very happy with Philips Hue! We use Adaptive Lighting extensively, and the HomeKit integration is top notch.

Here’s one great feature that was added recently: we have a Philips Hue Dimmer Switch in the bathroom, which controls three bulbs. Philips recently added the ability to do time-based lighting, which I absolutely love. Here’s how it works: when you turn on the lights, you can set a different brightness based on the time of day. For the bathroom, we have bright lights during the day, warmer lights in the evening, and very dim lights from bedtime until sunrise. Of course, if you need to override that, you can easily use the buttons to change the brightness. Next time you turn on the lights, it’ll go back to the defaults. It’s really nice to use the bathroom at night without being blinded!

Joyce wrote a Python script for rotating the light strips in our front windows through Christmas colors. We’re planning to expand that to other holidays, too. Once I’ve got that Dockerized, I’ll post here!

We also phased out all WeMo devices. It’s unfortunate, because Belkin / WeMo were one of the first companies to do this kind of stuff, but they haven’t kept up with the times. For one thing, they’ve all but dropped support for our light switches, dimmer switch, and smart plugs – I had a lot of difficulty adding them back to HomeKit once they were wiped. For the ones that support HomeKit natively, I couldn’t get the WeMo app to recognize them for firmware updates. They initially announced Matter support, then backed out. It’s time to move on.

While TP-Link has been hit or miss over the years, they bought a company named Kasa that makes really good smart home products. We bought a TP-Link / Kasa dimmer switch and several smart plugs to replace the WeMos. I’m impressed that they already support Matter, are easily added to HomeKit, are very stable, and reliably (and automatically) update their firmware through the Kasa app.

As mentioned in Finding Balance While Working Remotely, we added Nanoleaf Shapes to our home offices. We’ve found that although they support HomeKit, it’s best to just control the lights through the Nanoleaf app. The LED panels have added a lot of light and color to our home.

Also, it’s not exactly a plug or a bulb, but we have several sensors for triggering lights throughout the house and in the garage. I’ve been very impressed with the Philips Hue Motion Sensor – we have one in our stairwell that is triggered multiple times a day. I can’t remember the last time I changed the batteries, but it’s been at least a year or two. They’re tiny, have a magnet on the back for sticking to surfaces, and you can drill a screw through a hole in the magnet to mount it anywhere. More devices like this, please!

We also have a few Eve Motion sensors, but batteries don’t last nearly as long in those. At this point, I’m leaning towards replacing those with more Philips Hue sensors instead.

Water Leak Detectors

We still have the Flo by Moen water leak detectors. Although we haven’t had any incidents, we sleep better at night knowing that we’ll be alerted if something were to happen.

In fact, we purchased the Flo by Moen smart water shutoff shortly after the last blog post. It’s easy to integrate with the water leak detectors – for example, if the toilet exploded, the water leak detector would screech, the app would send a push notification to our phones, we’d get an email and phone call, and Moen would instruct the shutoff in the basement to stop the flow of water to the rest of the house. Water leaks have the potential to do significant damage, but this setup minimizes the effects.

When we go away on vacation, we set the Moen shutoff to “away” mode, which means that any water used will trigger an alert, shutting off the water for the whole house in the process. Our homeowners’ insurance gives us a yearly discount for having the system installed, and we can download a certificate from the Flo by Moen web console.

The water shutoff also has its own logic to determine if you’re using an unusual amount of water, but pairing it with a water leak detector is significantly more accurate. Our humidifier consistently tricks the water shutoff into thinking we have a leak somewhere, and I’ve had the water turn off during a shower too many times to count.

If you’re thinking about buying the smart water shutoff, the extended warranty is absolutely worth the monthly cost. Ours stopped working due to mineral deposits building up inside, and support sent me a replacement part right away.

Unfortunately, the water leak detectors chew through batteries a little too quickly for my liking. The app shows the battery at 100%, then suddenly it’s dropped to 40%, then it’s offline. It’s impossible to know when we’ll need to replace a battery, making them way less useful when they die while we’re traveling.

One other downside: the Flo app hasn’t been updated by Moen for a very long time. There are numerous improvements that Moen could make to modernize the app, such as Time Sensitive Notifications, Siri support, or allowing multiple users on the account. At the moment, Moen only supports a single phone number for emergency calls, which makes it tough for the two of us to respond to notifications quickly.

It looks like Moen is building a brand new app, but it’s not compatible with our Flo devices yet. I hope they’re working to add the improvements I mentioned above. I’d love to use more of these kinds of devices in the future. The smart shower controls look awesome, and they have a very fancy toilet…if only it sounded like Jon Hamm.

Cameras

I’m hoping to see some improvement in this space soon. We’re still with Arlo, but their support is absolutely terrible. In the past few years, we’ve replaced all of the Arlo cameras a couple of times, hoping for better stability, but it hasn’t quite happened yet.

Right now, we have the Arlo Pro 5S, the solar panel, the Video Doorbell, and the Chime 2. We replaced everything because newer Arlo devices connect directly to WiFi, rather than to the old wired base station, so I figured they’d be more reliable. Now, we notice that one (or all) of the cameras just stop recording randomly until they’re rebooted through the app. It’s not great.

Arlo promised the Pro 5S cameras would be able to be added to HomeKit in 2022, but as of now, that still hasn’t shipped yet. Lots of “coming soon” promises in their forums, posted every few months (including last month). No word on whether they’ll get around to adding HomeKit support for the new Video Doorbell, either. Although I didn’t stream the camera feeds in the Home app, I liked being able to use the camera’s sensors to trigger outdoor lights.

One camera has a solar panel connected, but it just doesn’t provide enough power to keep the camera from needing to be charged every couple of months. So, we manually charge both cameras as needed. In the future, I’d like to permanently connect them to power, but that’ll have to wait until we can add some outlets outside. At least the batteries last long enough that we only need to do this every couple of months.

Every time I’ve thought about switching away from Arlo, I’ve found the competition is much worse: Ring apparently works well, but I don’t want to send our footage to Amazon. Similarly, Nest requires that we send our footage to Google. Eufy, despite being an Anker brand, had all sorts of terrible security issues (and lied about them to The Verge). Logitech outdoor cameras have a reputation for melting in direct sunlight, even on mild 70 degree days. HomeKit Secure Video cameras are limited to 1080p video, and Wirecutter found that they miss important events such as detecting people or packages. I think we’re stuck with Arlo for a bit longer.

Thermostat

We absolutely love our ecobee thermostat. It integrates with HomeKit, but the app also works well on its own. Our energy bill skyrocketed as Russia invaded Ukraine, but we’re pretty sure it’d be worse if we didn’t have this thermostat to keep things as efficient as possible.

We also bought a bunch of ecobee room sensors, which immediately paid for themselves. Having these sensors in nearly every room has allowed us to fine tune temperatures for the whole house. I can’t recommend ecobee enough.

Follow-Ups

Some things haven’t changed, but I can give detail on how well they’ve worked over the past few years:

We’ve still got all of the Sonos speakers, though we’ve had frequent stability issues. I’ll probably need to factory reset the entire system again. When it works, it works well, but when it doesn’t work, it’s very frustrating. Their phone support is surprisingly good, however. If I had to do it all again, and we used Apple Music instead of Spotify, I’d take a hard look at the HomePod minis.

We still have our Yale / August door locks. They mostly work fine, though I can’t recommend their support team at all. The August Connect for one of our doors stopped working (this connects the lock to HomeKit), and it took weeks of emailing back and forth to determine that they weren’t going to fix or replace it. Each reply came from a different person, who’d suggest yet another factory reset.

Otherwise, it’s been nice to have a keypad on the front door. I haven’t had to use the physical key once in the past 5 years – the door unlocks automatically via Bluetooth, manually via the app, or with my PIN on the keypad. We’ve also been able to generate emergency codes for family. I can’t help but feel that HomeKey would be a downgrade, as I’d have to tap my phone or my watch to the door lock. That’s hard to do when your hands are full of groceries!

We still have the Roborock vacuums. We run them every day, and our floors are noticeably clean. Each vacuum has required a few replacement parts, which are easy to buy on Amazon. No complaints there. Newer models also mop, empty their own dustbin, and are hopefully quieter, but it’s hard to justify the cost of replacing two fully working vacuums.

The Future

I’m hopeful that Matter will bring all kinds of improvements: more devices from other manufacturers that now integrate with HomeKit, as well as new types of devices that HomeKit doesn’t currently support. More competition generally means lower prices, too.

Plus, being able to integrate devices with each other is the best part! There are so many possibilities. People have been talking about Matter for a couple of years now, and I’m looking forward to seeing it finally take off soon.

Finding Balance While Working Remotely

By Mike

On August 5, 2023

In Tutorials

Alright, back to the technical stuff. Well, sort of.

Something that’s been new to me is working remotely for a company where many of my coworkers are in different time zones. Although I was fully remote at SJU for the last few years of my time there, everyone I worked with started and ended their day at around the same time. That doesn’t happen when you’re working for a global company! To have a work / life balance these days, I need to be mindful of my own schedule. Here’s how I’ve used technology to help me do that.

July 2024: I’m updating this post without making a new one, just to keep things simple. Below each section, I’ve added some additional tips that I’ve learned since originally publishing this blog post.

Focus

macOS Ventura, iOS 16, and iPadOS 16 arrived at exactly the right time for me. I had just started at DoorDash, and was already familiar with Do Not Disturb mode and using the Health app to set a sleep schedule. I’m really glad Apple gave this feature so much attention with the Fall 2022 releases.

To get started, Apple has excellent documentation for iOS / iPadOS and macOS. You have a lot of flexibility to create different Focus modes, but I’ve settled on four: Sleep, Do Not Disturb, Personal, and Off. I work from 10 AM until 6 PM Monday through Friday, so I’ve built my Focus modes around those times.

Sleep: Sleep is a good place to start, since it has to be set up in the Health app on your iPhone. Pick what time you want to go to sleep, and what time you want to wake up. On the weekends, I give myself a slightly later bedtime, and a later wake time. You can pick an alarm if you want to, but I rely on our bedroom Sonos speaker for that, instead, so I can wake up to music. 😄

I’d recommend setting “wind down” to 0 minutes. It just activates Sleep focus early, which is somewhat unnecessary.

In Settings > Focus > Sleep, you can customize a number of things. For me, Sleep focus is my most restrictive – I have a custom Lock Screen (I’m using “Astronomy” which looks great at night), and the brightness is significantly dimmed. I only allow some apps to send push notifications – mostly ones like 1Password, in case I need an MFA code. I also made a page of apps solely comprised of ones that I’d need if I woke up at night or was getting ready for bed. I also have some shortcuts for actions such as the “good night” scene in Home or to quickly make a new to-do item in OmniFocus. I filter out my work email, too. Lastly, all badges are disabled.

Do Not Disturb: I want this to activate at 10 PM on weeknights, and 11 PM on weekends, well ahead of my actual bedtime. The end time doesn’t matter, since Sleep focus will take over. This is my own “wind down” time, where all notifications are silenced (again, except for apps like 1Password). I have a custom Lock Screen here too, so I can tell at a glance that I’ve activated Do Not Disturb. I picked an excellent wallpaper from Wallaroo and set it to greyscale, taking a colorful beach scene and turning it into a snowy evening. I also filter out my work email here, so I only see my personal email.

Personal: For obvious reasons, this is my favorite. I have a custom Lock Screen with a picture of my wife. It activates at 6 PM each weekday, but also in the mornings – my wake up time is at 9 AM, so it also covers from 9 AM until 10 AM (so I’m not hit with work emails as soon as I get out of bed).

Off: This is what’s in place during my work hours. “Off” is simply no focus activated – the default behavior for an iPhone. Since I manage Macs, I have an Apple-themed Lock Screen and Home Screen. All email accounts are shown in a unified inbox, and no notifications are silenced. I experimented with creating a “Work” focus, but for my purposes, it was kind of overkill to create a separate focus just for that.

Outside of those schedules, I’ll frequently toggle Do Not Disturb during the work day if I’m joining a Zoom call and don’t want to be distracted by notifications. When I’m on vacation, I manually toggle Personal on, so I don’t see any work emails. I used to fully remove my work account from my phone while on vacation, but this is significantly easier!

One of the best additions to macOS Ventura is that you can add a menu bar icon for Focus mode, allowing you to quickly switch to a different mode. All of your iCloud-connected devices will instantly adopt the same mode.

July 2024: Also, while you’re configuring notifications, disable your email “ding” noise. It’s more disruptive than you probably think. I leave the notification banners in place, but the noise pulls me out of flow unnecessarily.

Slack

Slack has an excellent guide to configuring notifications. I set my work hours in there, so I don’t receive any notifications in my off-hours. Coworkers can still push DM notifications through if it’s an emergency, but otherwise, it’s all silenced at the end of the day.

One additional consideration: since I have both my work Slack and the Mac Admins Slack on my phone, I found that I was still seeing badge notifications for DMs on my work Slack, even in my off-hours. This became hard to ignore, so my solution was to disable badges for Slack on iOS altogether. For similar reasons, I don’t have my work Slack on my home computer, as I found myself checking work notifications in my off-hours just to clear the badge.

July 2024: My colleague, Sam Keeley, offered an even better suggestion: install the Slack EMM app for my work Slack instance, and use the standard Slack app for the Mac Admins Slack. He also suggested removing the home icon for Slack EMM, but leaving the app installed, so I can open it via notifications (or Spotlight).

This also gives me the flexibility of blocking work Slack notifications with Focus mode, which has been great for when I stop for lunch and temporarily switch back to Personal focus.

Same as the mail “ding” noise, I’ve also disabled all of Slack’s notification sounds (except for incoming calls via huddles).

Google

You can set your work hours in Google Calendar, too. My main recommendation here is to pad the time – in my case, I set my work hours from 10:30 AM to 5:30 PM. That gives me 30 minutes at the start of the day to catch up, as well as 30 minutes at the end of my day to wind things down.

Note that I’m not signed into my work email on my personal computer, and I’m not signed into my personal email on my work computer. However, I am signed into all of my calendars on both computers and my phone – this prevents me from double-booking events and makes it easy to block time on my work calendar as necessary.

July 2024: I’ve found it important to also schedule regular “meetings” for lunch and regular breaks. I shouldn’t be sitting for more than two hours at a time, so I’ve got items on my calendar (which can be moved if necessary) so I’m not scheduled in back-to-back meetings all day.

Smart Home

I’m extremely lucky to have my own home office – that was one of the reasons we bought our house in the first place. Even though that’s where I work from during the day, it’s also where I keep my personal computer and video game systems. I typically spend a lot of non-work time in my home office.

We picked up some Nanoleaf Shapes LED panels on sale a year or two ago, and I’ve grown really attached to them. I made an ugly fish with big teeth! They provide a lot of great light, but since they’re so customizable, I’ve set them to change on a schedule:

9:30 AM (30 minutes before I start work): Be Productive

6:00 PM: Jungle

10:00 PM (or 11:00 PM on the weekends): Starlight

This helps provide visual signals when my day has changed. The moment the panels go from light blue to green, I know my work day is over. Since Nanoleaf supports HomeKit, I also have the panels turn off as part of the “good night” scene when I go to bed.

July 2024: Shortly after I published this post, I decided that weekends should be special – I wanted my office to have a different feel on Friday and Saturday evenings, and during the day Saturdays and Sundays. I added additional schedules with completely different color schemes, so I can fully relax on the weekends.

Also, I added a HomeKit scene that dims every light in my home office 10% further at midnight, so I can more easily wind down for bedtime. That’s worked very well.

Conclusion

If you’re working remotely, I hope this helps give you ideas on how you can use technology to have a better work / life balance. It’s certainly helped me!

Modern Bootstrapping: Part 2 (Building the Packages)

By Mike

On May 13, 2021

In Scripting and Packaging, Tutorials

This is the second post in my multi-part series on modern bootstrapping with Workspace ONE UEM. If you haven’t read the first one, you can find it here.

Modern Bootstrapping: Part 1 (Intro)

By Mike

On May 3, 2021

In Scripting and Packaging, Tutorials

For a while now, I’ve been meaning to post about how I’m bootstrapping our Macs using Workspace ONE UEM and several open source tools. This will be a multi-part series, and will culminate with a presentation at the University of Utah’s MacAdmins meeting for May 2021. I feel that it’d be best to start with some historical context and how bootstrapping has evolved since I joined the industry.

Smart Home, Part Two

By Mike

On March 20, 2021

In Tutorials

It’s been just over a year since my last post about smart home stuff, and I wanted to write about some of the stuff we’ve changed since then. Here we go!

Setting up Synology’s reverse proxy server

By Mike

On July 7, 2020

In Tutorials

Update: I’ve since moved on to using LinuxServer.io’s SWAG. You can run SWAG on a Synology NAS (if it supports Docker), but I’m running it in Ubuntu on other hardware. I’ve learned a lot since posting this, but I’m leaving it up in case it’s still helpful to anyone else.

In several previous posts, I detailed how to secure various services with a Let’s Encrypt certificate, installed in DSM. I approached each one individually, figuring out how to link the certificate in a way that each application accepted.

On my post about securing Ubooquity, jcd suggested I use Synology’s built-in reverse proxy server instead (and linked to this tutorial). Honestly, this was the best advice, and I’ve since switched away from the various methods I detailed before. Please check out Graham Leggat’s tutorial – this post isn’t meant to be a retelling, but hopefully adds some useful notes that I learned along the way.

Essentially, here’s how a reverse proxy works: you have a service running inside of your firewall over HTTP (not secured). Here are some of your options for opening that service outside of your network:

Open it as-is, unsecured. This is generally not a good idea.
Secure the service and open it outside of your network. You’ll need to read documentation, and possibly convert the certificate and put it in a place the application expects. Furthermore, as you open up more services outside of your network, you’ll need to open separate ports for each – it’s a lot to manage when you just want to access your service outside of your firewall.
You can use a reverse proxy.

A reverse proxy is a separate server, sitting in between your service and the internet, which will encrypt all traffic, seamlessly. When you connect from outside of your firewall, you’ll communicate securely to your reverse proxy, which will then pass along your traffic to your unencrypted applications.

There are many benefits to this approach: this works with nearly every application, requires very little configuration (past the initial setup), allows you to set up memorable URLs without using weird ports, etc.

Some prerequisites:

First, I’m going to assume you have an application/service that you want to open outside of your network, securely. Set it up on an unused TCP port. I recommend checking this list to avoid commonly used ports.
You’ll need a domain name, and be able to add custom DNS entries.
You’re also going to need a wildcard certificate. I paid for one, but Let’s Encrypt offers them for free, too (you’ll probably need to use this script).
If you don’t pay your ISP for a static IPv4 address, you’ll need to set up Synology’s QuickConnect service. It’s free, but requires a Synology.com account.

Now that you’ve got all of that squared away, let’s proceed.

First, we’ll need to forward port 443 to your Synology server. See here for instructions on how to do that for most types of routers.
Add your wildcard certificate to DSM.
At your domain registrar, edit the DNS settings for your domain name. Add an entry with the following:
1. Type: CNAME
2. Name: application.yourdomain.com
3. Value: (your QuickConnect address – example.synology.me)
Unless your domain name is brand new, it shouldn’t take long for your new subdomain to resolve to your Synology server’s IP address.
In DSM, click Control Panel, then Application Portal, then the Reverse Proxy tab. Click the Create button. Fill in these details:
1. Description: (name of your application)
2. Source
  1. Protocol: HTTPS
  2. Hostname: application.yourdomain.com
  3. Port: 443
  4. (don’t check any of the boxes)
3. Destination
  1. Protocol: HTTP
  2. Hostname: (the local IP address of the server running your application, such as 192.168.1.3 or 127.0.0.1)
  3. Port: (the port you’re currently using to access your application, such as 80 or 8080)
Click Save, then try to access https://application.yourdomain.com in a web browser. If you did everything right (and I didn’t miss any steps!), you should be able to load your application and see that the connection is secure. If you click the lock, you should see your wildcard certificate.

Going forward, you can do this for multiple applications – and each one can use port 443, so you don’t need to open additional ports outside of your firewall or remember anything more than your unique subdomain for each application.

Our Smart Home Setup

By Mike

On February 23, 2020

In Tutorials

Last spring, my fiancée and I bought a house. We lived in an apartment for two years, and experimented with smart home stuff, but wanted to do a bit more with our house. We’ve had enough people ask about our setup that I figured I’d write a blog post.

Securing MunkiReport with Let’s Encrypt on Synology DSM

By Mike

On April 10, 2018

In Tutorials

Update, 2020-06-11: I’m now using Synology’s built-in NGINX-based reverse proxy instead. The instructions below may not work.

Continuing my series on using Docker with a Synology NAS, I now have MunkiReport v3 working – and you can, too!

Some background: MunkiReport is a companion project to Munki (which we set up with Squirrel last week). MunkiReport v3 was released recently, and has a huge list of improvements, thanks to a dedicated group of contributors – especially @bochoven and @mosen, who have overhauled large portions of the project. MunkiReport v3 has some new requirements that weren’t present with v2 – this is the perfect use case for Docker! Docker will handle all of this for us.

Briefly, here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to set up MySQL, Adminer, and MunkiReport using Docker Compose. Then, we’re going to use DSM 6.x’s certificate and reverse proxy support to secure MunkiReport. Let’s go!

Enable SSH to your Synology server. Open the Terminal and connect to your server (I’m using root, but your admin account should also do fine). Leave that open for later.
Install Docker through Package Center, if you don’t already have it.
Add a certificate to DSM. I like Let’s Encrypt – DSM can walk you through the certificate creation process, and will renew it automatically. You’ll need a domain name for this. You might be able to use Synology’s QuickConnect service for this. (I ended up setting up a CNAME for my QuickConnect address with a subdomain that I already own, then used the CNAME for the certificate)
Create a shared folder for your Docker data. I named mine ‘docker’. Create two directories inside of it: ‘MunkiReport’ and ‘MySQL’.
Create a file called ‘docker-compose.yml’ in your ‘docker’ shared folder. Populate it with this data, to start:

https://gist.github.com/flammable/2f5d9d8235fded4190af04de3440d38c

Change line 41, your MySQL root password, to something random. You can also change the port numbers if you’d like, but I’m going to finish this tutorial with the assumption that you haven’t touched those (it can get confusing very quickly).
Switch over to your Terminal window and run these two commands. The first will download the Docker images for Adminer, MunkiReport, and MySQL. The second command will create Docker containers, which contain your custom settings. If you change any of the settings in your docker-compose.yml file, re-running these commands will destroy the Docker containers and recreate them with your new specifications. Pretty cool. You can monitor all of this with the Docker application in DSM.
```
/usr/local/bin/docker-compose  -f /volume1/docker/docker-compose.yml pull
/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f /volume1/docker/docker-compose.yml up -d
```
Now, let’s create the MySQL database for MunkiReport. Go to your Synology server’s IP address, but add :3307 to the end. You’ll reach a login page. Here are the relevant details:
1. Server is your NAS’s IP address, but with :3306 at the end.
2. Username is root.
3. Password is whatever you set in Step 6.
4. Database can be left blank.
After you login, click ‘Create database’. Name the database whatever you’d like – I went with ‘mreport’. For ‘Collation’, pick ‘utf8_general_ci’. Close the Adminer tab.
Open a new tab, with your server’s IP address followed by :4443 at the end. You should be greeted with an empty MunkiReport installation. Nice!
In your ‘docker’ shared folder, you had created a ‘MunkiReport’ folder in Step 4. Inside of that, create a file named ‘config.php’. This is how we’ll configure MunkiReport – by overriding values specified in config_default.php (click to see MunkiReport’s default values). I’ll skip this part of the tutorial, as it’s documented much better on MunkiReport’s wiki. At a minimum, I’d strongly suggest setting up authentication, MySQL connection settings, and the modules you’d like to enable.
Before you can expose your MunkiReport container to the outside world, you’ll want to secure it. You’ll do this with a reverse proxy – basically, another web server put in front of your MunkiReport container (which itself contains a web server). The reverse proxy will add encryption, but otherwise leave your MunkiReport installation alone. DSM 6.0 includes a reverse proxy, so let’s use that.
Check out the bottom of this Synology knowledge base article. Unfortunately, the documentation leaves a lot to be desired, so I’ll suggest some settings:
1. Description: MunkiReport
2. Source Protocol: HTTPS
3. Source Hostname: *
4. Source Port: 4444
5. (leave both the HSTS and HTTP/2 boxes unchecked)
6. Destination Protocol: HTTP
7. Destination Hostname: 127.0.0.1
8. Destination Port: 4443
Click OK to save.
In your router, forward port 4444 (TCP) to your Synology server. If you haven’t given your Synology server a static IP address, that’d be a good idea.
Visit your secure MunkiReport installation in a web browser:
```
https://yourdomain.com:4444
```

From there, you can create a MunkiReport installation package (I like using the AutoPkg recipe for this). Push it to your clients, then watch as they check in with sweet, sweet data.

Securing Squirrel with Let’s Encrypt on Synology DSM

By Mike

On April 5, 2018

In Tutorials

Update, 2020-06-11: I’m now using Synology’s built-in NGINX-based reverse proxy instead. The instructions below may not work.

Yep, this is another Docker blog post…but this time, we’re covering Munki!

It’s pretty common knowledge that a Munki server is just a web server. This allows tons of flexibility with hosting your Munki repository – basically anything that can run Apache, NGINX, IIS, etc. can act as your Munki server (even macOS Server, but I wouldn’t recommend it). Today, I’m going to continue the series of blog posts about Docker, but we’re going to discuss something called Squirrel.

Squirrel, written by Victor Vrantchan (@groob), is described as a simple HTTPS server for Munki. While you can set up your own Apache server (or Docker container), Squirrel comes prebuilt for hosting a Munki server.

As with Ubooquity, I’m going to use Synology DSM’s certificates. That way, we can leverage Let’s Encrypt without needing to do any additional setup.

First, set up Let’s Encrypt with in DSM’s Control Panel. Synology has excellent documentation on that.
Before we go any further, I’d recommend creating a directory for Squirrel to save files (such as certificates). Separately, you’ll also want to create a Munki repository (see the Demonstration Setup, but skip the Apache config stuff). If you already have a repo, that’s great too.
Next, add the Docker image for micromdm/squirrel. Follow Synology’s instructions.
Create a Docker container, following those same instructions.
1. You’ll want to specify two volumes, both of which you created in Step 2: where to store Squirrel’s data, and your Munki repository. I have a shared folder named ‘docker’, and I like creating directories for each service within that: for example, /volume1/docker/Squirrel. I made a ‘certs’ directory within that, as well.
2. You’ll also want to pick a port. If you’re comfortable exposing port 443 to the world, go for it. Otherwise, use 443 internally to the Docker container, and pick another port for the outside world. Be sure to forward this port on your router!
3. The environmental variables you’ll want to override are:SQUIRREL_MUNKI_REPO_PATH (this is the path to your Munki repo, which you specified in Step 4a).
  SQUIRREL_BASIC_AUTH (this is a randomly generated password for your Munki repo)
  SQUIRREL_TLS_CERT (/path/to/cert.pem)
  SQUIRREL_TLS_KEY (/path/to/privkey.pem)
But wait, where do we get the cert? I wrote a really simple script to copy the Let’s Encrypt certs to Squirrel’s config location: get it here. Be sure to edit line 6! I run this once a night, with DSM’s Task Scheduler.
After you start up your Squirrel container, check the Docker logs by selecting your container, clicking the Details button, then the Log tab. You’ll see the Basic Authentication string that you’ll need to provide to your Munki clients. You can find out more information on the Munki wiki.

After that, you’re done! Your clients have a secure Munki repo, and you don’t have to bother with Apache config files, a reverse proxy for securing your web server, or any of that.

Securing Ubooquity with Let’s Encrypt on Synology DSM

By Mike

On March 26, 2018

In Tutorials

Update, 2020-06-11: I’m now using Synology’s built-in NGINX-based reverse proxy instead. The instructions below may not work.

Whew, that’s a very specific title. I don’t know if this will be useful to anyone else, but it took a fair amount of work to figure it out, so I figured I’d document it. There will be more Mac stuff soon, I promise!

If you haven’t heard, Let’s Encrypt is an excellent service, with the aim of securing the internet by offering free HTTPS certificates to anyone who requests one. In fact, I’m using one on this website right now. 🙂

With DSM 6.0, Synology added the ability to request a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt to secure your NAS. DSM handles renewing your certificate, which must happen every 90 days (one of the limitations of the free certificate, but nothing that can’t be automated).

Unrelated for the moment, but I’ve been using Ubooquity (through Docker!) for the past few months, and it’s been pretty neat. You can point Ubooquity to a directory of ePub and PDF files, and it’ll allow you to access the files remotely using reader apps like Marvin, KyBook, or Chunky. I have a habit of buying tech books and comics through Humble Bundle sales, but transferring the files to my iPad through iTunes/iBooks is clunky and requires a fair amount of disk space upfront.

Although Ubooquity supports user authentication, you’ll want that to happen over HTTPS, to keep your passwords secure. Luckily, Ubooquity supports HTTPS, but requires the certificate (and other associated files) to be in a format called a “keystore”. What?!

Here’s how to leverage DSM’s Let’s Encrypt support to secure Ubooquity, automatically.

First, you’ll want to set up Let’s Encrypt in DSM’s Control Panel. See Synology’s documentation.
Next, you’ll want to get Ubooquity up and running (I recommend the Docker image mentioned above). Synology’s documentation covers that, too. If your eBook library is a mess Calibre will make quick work of that.
For this to work, you’ll also need the Java 8 JDK installed. This will give you access to the ‘keytool’ command you’ll need to create your keystore. Once again, see Synology’s documentation.
Now, you’ll put all of this together. In a nutshell: you’re going to use the Let’s Encrypt certs that DSM has helpfully obtained for you, convert those to a keystore, put the keystore in Ubooquity’s config directory, and tell Ubooquity to use it to secure its interface. Here’s a script to get you started – note that you’ll need to edit lines 11, 12, and 15 for your environment. Thanks to Saltypoison on the Ubooquity forums for most of the code that became this script!
Once you’ve successfully run the script, I recommend using DSM’s Task Scheduler to have it run once a day. This way, Ubooquity’s certificate will always be up to date with DSM’s certificate. That’s right, I’m going to link you to Synology’s documentation.
Finally, you’ll need to tell Ubooquity where to find your keystore. Login to the Ubooquity admin interface, then click the Security tab. You’ll see two boxes – one for the path to your keystore, and one for the keystore password. Enter both. Click ‘Save and Restart’ at the top-right corner.
Now, try accessing your Ubooquity instance using https and your FQDN! If it doesn’t work, make sure you’re forwarding the appropriate ports from your router to your Synology server – you’ll need to do this for both the eBook interface, and the admin interface (which are accessible via two different ports).

I’ll probably post more Synology/Docker stuff in the future, as I’ve been spending a lot of time with both. They’re really awesome!