Your decoy site

When veilway.sh install panel sets up a web server (--domain or --no-domain), it also puts up a plain site. This page says what it is for and how to make it your own. It takes about 10 minutes.

What it is for

• Strangers see it. Anyone who opens your domain, or any path that is not the panel’s, gets this site. A server that shows an ordinary page looks like an ordinary server.
• Probers see it. The node’s tls, ws and fronted transports send anything that is not a real device to a decoy origin. By default that is this same site, served over plain HTTP on 127.0.0.1:8080. Only the server itself can reach that address.

So one page does both jobs. A page that looks real hides the server better.

Where it is

• The page is /var/www/veilway-site/index.html. Every file in /var/www/veilway-site is served, so you can add pictures, styles or more pages.
• The installer draws the first page for each server: a topic (a garden diary, a kitchen notebook, a walking log and so on), titles, dates, fonts and colors picked at random. It has no Veilway name or text. Two servers almost never get the same page.
• A server where you set up the web server yourself has no such site. Point the transport’s decoy at a site of your own in the JSON view (decoy.origin), see the config reference.

Edit it

1. Open the page on the server: sudo nano /var/www/veilway-site/index.html.
2. Change the text, or replace the whole file with a page of your own.
3. Save. There is nothing to reload: the web server reads the file on each visit.
4. Check both doors. Open https://your-domain/ in a browser, and on the server run curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8080/ | head.

To use a whole site instead, copy its files into /var/www/veilway-site and keep index.html as the first page. The files must be readable by everyone: sudo chmod -R a+rX /var/www/veilway-site.

What makes a good decoy

• Looks lived in. A small personal site, a portfolio or a hobby blog with a few pages and dates works well. A blank page or “under construction” stands out.
• Plain and static. HTML, CSS and pictures only. No login forms and no code that runs on the server.
• Your own words. Do not copy a famous site: a copy is easy to spot.
• Nothing about Veilway or VPNs, in the text, the file names or the page title.

What the installer does with your page

• update never overwrites a page you edited. It only replaces the one page that every install shared before v0.3.3, and only if you never changed it.
• uninstall web removes /var/www/veilway-site only if it still holds just the drawn page. An edited site stays.