Tips and tricks: CS 166 Information Security taught by Mark Stamp

Tue, 13 May 2025 15:27:00 -0700

A collection of troubleshooting notes, general tips and tricks, or personal thoughts on the CS 166 Information Security class taught by Mark Stamp at SJSU.

Part of this, dealing with specific homework problems, is written with the intention of being a last-resort rescue manual. I only include information you need to get out of potential deep water. No solutions to hard problems. No hand holding, especially no “here is how you solve this problem”.

Setting up SJSU VPN for connection to home server

Wed, 01 May 2024 23:34:13 -0700

Note this intended for relative networking novices, so I will try to explain every term used. Skip over them if you find it verbose. If you don’t care about anything else and just wants to replicate my setup for your home server, go to this section. Read the TL;DR’s in there if that section alone is too long for you too.

Motivation

Virtual mesh networking software, like Tailscale, ZeroTier, tinc, Hamachi and else, practically¹ cannot establish a direct/p2p connection between a machine on the SJSU wifi and a machine somewhere else, running on a common residential internet. This situation is an example of a hard-NAT to easy-NAT connection (I’m using terminology from Tailscale’s article on NAT traversal). I really only use Tailscale, so that’s what I’m concerned with here.

SJSU on rtk0c's hut

Tips and tricks: CS 166 Information Security taught by Mark Stamp

Setting up SJSU VPN for connection to home server

Motivation