Technical Tools I Use

During my business and personal life, I’ve become very familiar with a large number of software tools and some related services. This page lists those I use very regularly. If I get round to writing up reviews, tips, tricks etc for certain tools I will link to them from this page.

Operating systems

Ubuntu – I use Ubuntu desktop on my PCs at work and home, and also on my home server and various cloud servers I use for both work and pleasure.

Linux – as well as Ubuntu, I’ve a lot of experience using embedded Linux (e.g. custom “distributions” made with Buildroot) in my day job.

Cloud hosting

My personal servers are hosted by OVH and Hetzner.

At work I’ve used various services from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Servers

I set up my own email server running Postfix, Dovecot and Roundcube.

I run my own web servers using Nginx,

I host my own DNS servers running Bind (including a dynamic DNS service).

My web, mail and DNS servers now all operate on IPv6 (dual stack) – see my series of posts about setting up bind AAAA records and nginx for IPv6, setting up bind for full IPv6 DNS functionality and setting up Postfix for IPv6. (Sadly most UK residential ISPs don’t seem to support IPv6 yet, though the ISP at work does).

My home file server runs Nextcloud.