The Tale of Handjob Alley

Graphic design by Peg-me Amidala (pegme@handjoballey.net)

Have you ever made a joke with your nerd friends, and to further the joke you bought a domain based upon that joke? This is the tale of one such domain, and how I decided to do something halfway useful with it instead of just letting it expire.

The Beginnings

The domain in question is handjoballey.net. For the purposes of this blog post, the name itself really isn’t that important, but the whole tale can be explained in the “About” section of the website. Basically it was a goofy name that was tied to a specific place that kind of stuck, and as I relayed this to a few friends it became a running joke of sorts, and I bought the domain for the hell of it. I sat on it for a while, but then decided to use it when the need for a domain came up.

The first use involved Cloudflare Tunnel. For the NMRC members I wanted to set up remote access to the shell server for access to email and whatnot, and decided that Cloudflare’s tunnel service would do the trick. The initial offering had a decent number of features for free, with more advanced features available for a price. Since the only thing being routed over it was encrypted traffic (SSH), I wasn’t too concerned about leaking secrets or anything, plus it was fairly quick to set up. However due to a credit card auto-renewal problem (my fault) both the nmrc.org and handjoballey.net domains expired and I had to manually renew them. Both were only down for a few hours, but for Cloudflare this was long enough to kill the service. When I got back into Cloudflare I was going to have to reconfigure the tunnel setup as it was long gone, and when I tried it seems some of the features that were initially free were no longer free, so I simply opted not to pay for it. I had been leaning towards Wireguard anyway, and I simply went ahead and set that up to replace it.

The Current Setup

What I thought would be funny would be to set up Handjob Alley as an actual halfway useful server for the public so that other security professionals could use it, but then they’d have to access this work-related resource that just so happened to have an offensive name. I decided on a web server that monitored a number of security-related news and blog websites via their RSS feeds and aggregate them onto a single server. Now that isn’t exactly all that useful, it is simply a website populated with data from an RSS reader, but that was hardly the point.

So the code for the “project” is here which is now public and you can see it in all its glory. The code is written in Python and the RSS data itself is a yaml file. Full documentation of the various components are covered in the project, which is housed online. I guess one could simply use the project to add RSS feeds to an existing web page that’s not on a potentially NSFW-sounding domain, and use the Handjob Alley website as an example of it running… whatever.

Final Note and Next Steps

I guess the final note on this project is that a couple of good friends of mine and I decided that we needed to come up with joke names for the Contact page. I have no idea why, but we decided the names should be somewhat related to the theme of the underlying domain name, be extremely filthy, and for reasons I cannot explain nor remember they are all apparently based off of Star Wars character names.

Anyway I hope you enjoy it!