YOU’LL NEED THIS

PC RUNNING DOCKER

Requires Ubuntu or Windows with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) enabled

ONLINE ATTACKS ARE on the rise and even your cloud-hosted password manager isn’t immune. Recent breaches at Norton Password Manager and LastPass are a reminder that even data secured with the strongest encryption is still vulnerable. Both services were targeted by credential stuffing attacks, which uses stolen username/password pairings from other breaches to bypass security. One solution is to store your passwords offline—either manually entering them each time or switching to an offline password manager with all its extra steps.

We’re going to give you all the convenience of a cloud-based password manager, Bitwarden, but without trusting your passwords to a third party’s cloud storage. This is done using an unofficial Bitwarden port called Vaultwarden and involves you hosting your own password server. Although we’ve written this tutorial around the NAS build we featured in the September 2022 issue, you can adapt it to your own ends (see boxout for more details). –NICK PEERS

1 OBTAIN DOMAIN

If you want to be able to access your password manager while away from your home network, you’ll need to set up a suitable domain. For this tutorial, we’re going to make use of a free dynamic DNS hostname courtesy of No-IP.com, but you can use your own domain if you wish by creating a dedicated subdomain for it, which you’ll need to pair with the ddclient docker instance to ensure the subdomain is always pointing towards your home network (see our docker tips tutorial on page 66 of the October 2022 issue for further details).

» For those wishing to use a free DDNS hostname, go to www.no-ip.comand choose your own hostname—for example, nickbw.hopto.org – before clicking Sign Up to register a free account and claim the name [Image A]. Once registered, visit

my.noip.com/dynamic-dns/duc via your account to download the Dynamic Update Client—this can be installed on any computer on your network, but if you do install the Linux client on your Ubuntu Server-powered PC, we’d recommend installing the beta v3 build— command-line instructions are provided.

» From there, head to www.noip.com/support/ knowledgebase/running-linux-duc-v3-0-startup-2/ to discover how to configure the DUC to start with your server and keep your DDNS hostname linked to your home network going forward.