Password Management

Almost everybody has a plethora of usernames and passwords to keep track of for all the different sites, machines, and applications. A few years ago, I started using an algorithm instead of a memorized password or a slight variant when necessary. This worked nicely for most things. Another thing that I used for a period was chemical formula combined with some name variant of the chemical. Benzene ring compounds provided numerous combinations. I probably would have continued using this method, but I'm an electrical engineer and there is a reason I did not become a chemical engineer.

Today, I just tell my password manager to generate a random password and it takes a good part of a day for the new password to be stored in my overworked brain synapses. 

So what password manager can one use? I use one called 'pass' which is totally command line based on one of my Linux machines. It can be downloaded from https://www.passwordstore.org and took me about 10 minutes to get completely functional.

The https://www.passwordstore.org web site gives example usage. This seems to work for me, but it probably won't be for everybody. The one thing that is almost certain... Today, people have so many different usernames and passwords to maintain with different requirements that one definitely needs a safe place to store all their credentials.

Mail Server Access

There are probably not too many people that experience this issue, but if you have a mail server or even a web server on your LAN then you have probably encountered this issue.

You have a domain that allows you to connect from external locations via the WAN IP address. Now your device is on your LAN and you need to connect via a LAN IP instead of the resolved WAN IP. When you think about it, this becomes clear that the role of DNS needs to provide the answer. In my case, I simply added an entry for my domain to point to a LAN IP on my router. My router's IP is the first DNS entry for connected devices. Problem solved...