Digital Ocean, Raspberry Pi HW RNG, and more!

A few months ago, I discovered Digital Ocean, which is the cheapest VPS provider I’ve ever found. I’m now paying $5 a month for 1 CPU core, 512 mb of RAM, and 20 GB of SSD space, as well as 1TB of transfer. Plenty for my needs!

Anyways, I’ve moved most of the stuff I’m hosting over to my VPS there, which is nice - because I have complete control over the HTTP server, unlike with bluehost.

But anyways, beyond that, I just finished hacking a small project together. One of my roommates introduced me to Diceware, which is intended to take a series of dice rolls and convert them into reasonably secure passwords. I remembered from playing around with it a bit that my Raspberry Pi has a Hardware Random Number Generator on it, so I decided to take advantage of it and write some code to generate passwords.

Enter Node.js. Using my very tiny knowledge of Javascript and Node.js, I managed to hack together in less than 3 hours a working script. Note that you’ll be on your own (for now) to get hwrng working on the raspberry pi. (not that hard!)

Anyways, it defaults to using port 9000, and without an argument, will currently give you 0 words for your passphrase. You’ll have to give it some form of argument (e.g. pi:9000/5 for 5 words.)

I hope to have it serving HTTPS at some point, but for now HTTP is good enough for my purposes.