I occasionally write blog posts where I talk about software, hardware, or even plants that I'm working on.
Recent Posts
Better Vault for Postgres access in my Home Lab
In my previous post on Vault, I showed how Hashicorp’s Vault can be used to protect important passwords, static passwords that don’t change frequently. Vault can do much more than this and can even automatically create temporary accounts and rotate passwords for database users.
Today, I’m using long-lived passwords that I generate once when I add a new service, I, along with most people, just insert those passwords into the environment like this:
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That’s not secure at all. While you can store them in Kubernetes Secrets, they’re not encrypted by default. Kubernetes can encrypt secrets, but they’re open to anybody with access to the cluster. The passwords are easily accessible to anybody with access to Kubernetes and are never rotated. This simply won’t do. In this post, I’m going to walk through how I switch to Vault for
Continue reading...Git pushes can be surprising
I was recently working on an open source project (tryfi/hass-tryfi - A Home Assistant integration for pulling data from my dog’s collar using the TryFi API and I found out that Git pushes can behave in a surprising way after I accidentally pushed a bunch of testing commits to the wrong branch.
Continue reading...A COE on why technowizardry.net went down
COE = Correction of Error
My previous employer, Amazon, was a big proponent of doing blameless analysis of outages and figuring out what could be done to fix it. I recently had an outage on my servers and wanted to share what went wrong and the fix.
Summary
Starting Thursday until Friday, all TLS requests to a *.technowizardry.net domain would have failed due to a TLS certificate expiration error. Then on Friday, all DNS queries to a *.technowizardry.net zone failed which also caused mail delivery to fail too. This happened because cert-manager had created the acme-challenge TXT record, but the record was not visible to the Internet because the HE DNS was failing to perform an AXFR Zone Transfer from my authoritative DNS server. This was because PowerDNS was unable to bind to port :53 because systemd-resolved was already listening on that port.
Continue reading...