About

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About me

An avatar representing Daniel Winzen

Hello, my name is Daniel Winzen, a German web developer and system administrator. In my free time, I like reading books, programming on my open-source projects and pole dancing, which I picked up during the covid pandemic and resulting home office because it's fun and keeps me fit.
Programming languages I use regularly are PHP, SQL and JavaScript, but I also know some basics of Perl, Python, C, C++ and more. With my experience, I'm able to quickly adapt and work with new languages, when necessary.
Before I got into coding and server management, I contributed German translation to various open-source projects since the end of 2011.

I'm Certified in Cybersecurity and have a good understanding of cybersecurity threats. I continuously broaden my knowledge in this field, because I consider this essential and fun. This site would probably not exist, were it not for my passion for cybersecurity and hacking. Like many good parents, mine were strict about my internet usage. So I had to become creative in finding ways of gaining access to the internet, even when the timer already expired. Thus I was learning about hacking, darknet and network security at a very early age.

Managing servers and email services and developing new web projects is what I thrive on. I like optimizing systems for performance and getting the best out of what I have. Do you need help with managing and optimizing your infrastructure or website? I'm available for hire.

Profiles on other sites that I am active on:

About this site

This is my site, that I develop in my free time. I started development of this site in August/September 2013 when I wanted to have a platform to host files on, to use at school.
Quickly the idea of using a chat at school came up, and I came across a simple Perl chat script called LE-CHAT. When I deployed that on my Raspberry Pi, it was running very slowly and wasn't usable for use by several people. So I decided to port some parts I needed to PHP.
This has been the start for me to get deeper into web development and I have since open-sourced that chat script and several other scripts of this site on my GitHub account. Since then, I have added many new features and improved reliability and my code a lot.
I used to offer free file hosting, an URL shortener, a chat and even a free darknet web hosting service. All these projects have taught me a lot about coding, security and server management. As of now, only the anonymous email and XMPP hosting, as well as the onion link list are still actively maintained.

About the setup

Hosting providers I use(ed) and servers hosted there:

A small network rack with 4 Raspberry Pis in it, a wifi router on top and a phone next to it

In the image on the left, you can see my current home server setup. I have 4 Raspberry Pi 4s, which all have a 500GB SSD attached to them. Each SSD has 16GB allocated to OS and applications while the rest of the space is used for Ceph OSDs. On top of my rack, I have an internet router, which is connected to the fastest broadband internet connection available to me. Although I hardly use my landline phone, I have a FeTAp 611-2 (yes it still works, in the 80s things were built to last). As my router no longer supports a pulse dial, I had to get a converter to translate pulse signals into modern DTMF.

The operating system I use is Debian sid. To share data between all servers, I deployed a CephFS for distributed and redundant file storage, as well as a MariaDB Galera cluster.
The clearnet gateways on danwin1210.de are an NginX Proxy that will forward all requests to the Raspberry Pis at home. Additionally, they run a Postfix instance only listening on the VPN network to send emails to clearnet.
All servers are interconnected with a Wireguard VPN.

Backups are very important too, thus I use BorgBackup on all my devices to regularly create an encrypted backup, stored on remote backup storage, which takes regular snapshots, ensuring recoverability in case of backup failures.