Posted on by patrick

Sustainable PirateBox Part 2

Some notes:


Tokumei is the image board I’m playing with.

Unfortunately the installation scripts are stale & depend on deprecated cert-bot software from eff. I have to hack together an update for making this thing work.

There are instructions for installing Tokumei.co in a self hosted environment.

They call a script that can be obtained with

wget https://tokumei.co/privclear.sh.

The script accepts input from the user and then tunes various configuration files for the image board & nginx. For example, you can specify the domain of a page. This is useful because we’ll have to set a hostname for the captive portal.

The script fails first because it expects to install ssl certificates using certbot.

Certbot is deprecated. If you run this script, you get 404’d.

So the first thing I need to do is create my own self signed certificates.

Then I need to hack the nginx.conf and sites-available/default pages.

I put a lot of effort into figuring out how to carve out a page to host static pdfs and MP3s. I tried very hard to document the edits. If you decide to do any work with nginx and creating static content, you might find this material helpful.

This is the sites-available default page.

The key points of this config:

  1. Shows you how to create a self signed certificate in the comments of the script
  2. Shows you where you put the cert and key file so that nginx can access it.
  3. Shows you how to reduce noise in the config by using snippets pointing to self-signed.conf and ssl-params.conf
  4. Shows you how to configure nginx to limit file uploads on the tokumei board.
  5. Shows you how to create the /offgrid uri that vends a directory listing within the skinning of Tokumei
  6. A minor hack to help you debug if nginx locations are not getting triggered because of aggressive / location definitions

I have a major //TODO:

If you look around here you see the reference to werc.

It references a fastcgi server running at localhost on 3333.

That cgi server is invoked with the following command:


sudo /usr/local/go/bin/cgd -f -c /var/www/ansibledest.local/bin/werc.rc > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Cgd is a daemon that can serve a CGI script over HTTP or FastCGI.

Useful to run CGI scripts that serve a whole domain (like werc) without need for a “real” HTTP server, or to wrap CGI scripts so they can be served by fcgi-only web servers like nginx.

//TODO: implement a startup script for launching the cgd daemon on boot in the final ansible playbook.