My Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net Adventure

I've been hearing about the Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net project for quite awhile and it sounded like something that'd be right up my alley: a large-scale VPN for #RetroComputing fans designed to replicate the Internet of the dot-com era. About a week ago I finally got to work on getting connected.

You connect to #CGHMN by running WireGuard on a modern PC, or a router that supports it. I decided I wanted to use a Debian Linux VM, so the first step was to apt install wireguard. Easy enough. Following the instructions on their wiki, I created a public/private key pair. Next, I had to fill in the sign-up form. After a few hours I received an email with my config information for WireGuard. I filled in my private key from earlier then saved it to /etc/wireguard/wgcghmn0.conf.

The welcome email also gave me my assigned subnet. In my case it was 100.68.39/24, meaning that I needed to give all the machines on my retro LAN IP addresses in the 10.68.39.0-10.68.39.254 range, replacing the addresses I had been using before. I did have some trouble finding the DNS server I needed to use, but the folks in the IRC chat let me know it was at 100.64.11.1.

Setting up Debian for routing was fairly simple. First I set it to run WireGuard on boot with systemctl enable [email protected]. To enable IP forwarding I created a file called /etc/sysctl.d/ipforward.conf with the line:

net.ipv4.conf.default.forwarding=1

After that I just had to reboot and everything was ready. At least as far as client access, that was it. I could connect to people's websites, streams, and whatnot from any machine on my retro net. Of course, that wasn't all I wanted to do; I wanted to host stuff too!

First thing I had to do was set up an authoritative DNS server. I chose NSD by @[email protected] since it seemed like it'd be easy to set up. It was indeed, though there were a few details I didn't get right the first time. At first no one on CGHMN could ping the server, which ended up being because it wasn't binding to the right address. I had to specify ip-address: 100.68.39.1 under the server section in /etc/nsd/nsd.conf. Then it was time to fine-tune my zone file. For an experimental environment like this TTLs need to be short; an hour or less. On the "real" internet it's more common practice to set them to a day or so. In the IRC chat, I asked the admins to point the root record for n8fq.retro to my server at 100.68.39.1, under the name ns.n8fq.retro. To support it on my end I needed to set up my zone like so:

$ORIGIN n8fq.retro.
$TTL 1800

n8fq.retro. IN SOA ns.n8fq.retro. jill.n8fq.org. (
10068390 ;Serial
1800 ;Refresh
1800 ;Retry
1209600 ;Expire
1800 ;Negative response caching TTL
)
NS ns.n8fq.retro.

ns.n8fq.retro. A 100.68.39.1
n8fq.retro. A 100.68.39.30
www.n8fq.retro. CNAME n8fq.retro.
n8fq.retro. MX 1 n8fq.retro.
This meant that I had NSD running on my router VM at 100.68.39.1, while my web and mail servers would be on another machine at 100.36.39.30. CGHMN does offer email service, but I'm a masochist so I decided to run my own. Some tests with the IRC folks confirmed that everything was resolving, so now I could start working on my services.

I chose OpenBSD 3.0 for my retro server OS, mainly since I owned a physical copy that I'd bought from BSD Mall back in the day. Web was easy since Apache HTTPD comes pre-installed as part of the base system. Email was trickier. I balked at trying to get sendmail configured (I'm not that masochistic!) so I went with Exim instead. At first it was failing to deliver local mail, which I fixed by fiddling with /var/mail write permissions. I wasn't able to get any IMAP server to work but I did eventually have luck with POP3 using solid-pop3d. More tests with the IRC gang confirmed everything was working. Then I decided I wanted webmail, which posed another challenge. SquirrelMail was out since that requires IMAP, so I tried Postaci. To get that to work I had to recompile PHP from ports with IMAP support enabled (even though I was using POP3), which required me to track down some old source tarballs. Napalm FTP Search helped with that. After that was settled I just followed the setup instructions in the Postaci package and we were off.

After all that, I've earned the pleasure of sitting back with an old laptop and surfing the 'net like it's 1999! Or maybe somewhere around 2003. Whatever. If you decide to give it a try, visit my site at http://www.n8fq.retro or maybe drop me an email at [email protected].