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Using AKS and SOCKS to connect to a private Azure DB

I ran into a roadblock recently where I wanted to be able to conveniently connect to a managed postgres database within Azure that was not running on public subnets. And by conveniently, I mean that I’d rather not have to spin up an ephemeral virtual machine running in the same network and proxy the connection, and I’d like to use a local client (preferably with a GUI). After several web searches, it became evident that Azure does not readily provide much tooling to support this.

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Virtualizing my router with pfSense

My aging router has been running OpenWrt for years and for the most part has been quite reliable. OpenWrt is an open-source project used on embedded devices to route network traffic. It supports many different configurations and there exists a large index of packages. Ever since I’ve connected some standalone wireless access points, I’ve had less of a need for an off-the-shelf all-in-one wireless router combo. I’ve also recently been experiencing instability with my router (likely the result of a combination of configuration tweaking and firmware updating). OpenWrt has served me well, but it is time to move on!

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Backing up gmail with Synology

I’ve used gmail since the beta launched touting a whopping 1GB of storage. I thought this was a massive leap in email technology at the time. I was lucky enough to get an invite fairly quickly. Not suprisingly, I have many years of emails, attachments, and photos. I certainly do not want to lose the content of many of these emails. Despite the redundancy of the data that Google secures, I still feel better retaining a copy of this data on my own physical machines.

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Running K3s in LXC on Proxmox

It has been a while since I’ve actively used Kubernetes and wanted to explore the evolution of tools such as Helm and Tekton. I decided to deploy K3s, since I’ve had success with deploying it on resource-contrained Raspberry Pis in the past. I thought that this time it’d be convenient to have K3s running in a LXC container on Proxmox. This would allow for easy snapshotting of the entire Kubernetes deployment.
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Automatically rotating AWS access keys

Rotating credentials is a security best practice. This morning, I read a question about automatically rotating AWS Access Keys without having to go through the hassle of navigating the AWS console. There are some existing solutions already, but I decided to write a script since it was incredibly simple. The script could be packed up as a systemd/launchd service to continually rotate access keys in the background. In the longer term, migrating my local workflows to aws-vault seems like a more secure solution.
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Why I threw out my dotfiles

Over the years I have collected a number of dotfiles that I have shared across both Linux and macOS machines (~/.zshrc, ~/.config/git/config, ~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf, etc). I have tried several different ways to manage them, including bare git repos and utilities such as GNU Stow. These solutions work well enough, but I have since found what I would consider a much better solution for organizing user configuration: home-manager.

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