The lead developer at Mosaic, Brighton with a passion for web application development and motorcycles.

Nodester environment variables for sensitive data and passwords

When I began using Cloudno.de recently to have a go at Node.js and CouchDB I stored my username and password in plain text in a configuration file. If you are also looking to get CouchDB going with CloudNo.de then my earlier Getting started with Node.js and CouchDB post may be of interest.

The configuration file was fine for testing as nobody who came across the database login details could do any real damage, but as the project got more interesting I wanted to send it live and these details would need to be kept private.

Thankfully the Nodester platform, which CloudNo.de is using, has environment variables built in and you can use them to store sensitive data such as passwords. It is also good to know that the variables will persist even after the host machine is cycled.

Set up a new port forward on a Draytek Vigor over the telnet interface

I needed to add a new port forward to a router, but I did not have access to the web interface through a graphical browser. Attempts to get in using Lynx stalled as it seems the router will not serve up the frames in the interface independently of each other and it kept issuing 404 errors.

Either way I had to use the telnet interface using the following command (replace 192.168.1.1 23 with the IP address of your router):

telnet 192.168.1.1 23

This is fine except that Draytek have absolutely no documentation available for the commands. So to discover the correct command I had to go through all the available options (and sub options and sub sub options) as it was not immediately clear to me which option port forwarding was hiding under. To give you an idea here is a list of the top level options (run the `?` command to get this view):

> ?
% Valid commands are:
adsl         bpa          csm          webf         ddns         ddos
urlf         kw           exit         fe           internet     ip
ipf          log          mngt         port         portmaptime  prn
quit         show         srv          sys          tsmail       upnp
vigbrg       vlan         vpn          wan          wol          qos

The option we are interested in is `srv` which has a number of sub options but we are only interested in `nat`. Now we have yet more options but lets just stick with `portmap`.