Posts

The other day I was unable to decrypt a few of my Ansible Vault encrypted host_var files in a playbook. As best I can tell, the problem was related to my use of an executable vault-password-file and the 1Password CLI for fetching passwords. Follow along for a frightening story and some interesting technical tidbits. Background on how I stored Vault passwords I rely on Ansible Vault to encrypt sensitive data in my homelab Ansible playbooks. I stored the Vault password in 1Password, and retrieve it using the 1Password command line interface (CLI). ...

Last Friday the endpoint security company CrowdStrike had a little oopsie: On July 19, 2024 at 04:09 UTC, as part of ongoing operations, CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems. Sensor configuration updates are an ongoing part of the protection mechanisms of the Falcon platform. This configuration update triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems. The sensor configuration update that caused the system crash was remediated on Friday, July 19, 2024 05:27 UTC. ...

Need to spin up some virtual machine’s using Proxmox / QEMU? Below is my approach for using a cloud-init Debian image to make the creation of those VM’s nice and simple. Create the template VM image Start with a cloud-specific image. Each distribution has it’s own set of these. For Debian, you can find them at https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/. Read the instructions on that page for which image to download. I’m using the generic Debian 12 Bookworm image for an Intel (AMD64) processor in the qcow2 format. ...

Excellent reporting here by Ben Sandofsky about the fall of coding school / boot-camp Lamda School. In the past, I had believed in the idea of Income Share Agreements (ISAs) which allowed a student to effectively sell “equity” in themselves in exchange for an education. Once the education was complete and the student landed a job, they would pay back X% of their income for Y years up to a maximum cap of $Z. This was in contrast to taking out a loan which would be a fixed dollar amount and have to be re-paid regardless of what that student ended up earning post-graduation. ...

From Federico Viticci’s overview of challenges facing iPadOS: Out of all the apps I’ve mentioned so far, I want to shine a spotlight on Files. It’s a bad product that needs a fundamental rethink from a design and performance perspective. Files has only marginally improved since its debut in iOS 11 (!), and we’re well past the point of arguing that, well, iPads aren’t meant to have a file manager. Apple has offered a native iPad file manager for exactly half the iPad’s lifetime; that ship has sailed. It’s time for Apple to take the Files app seriously, because this version just doesn’t cut it. ...

Asks Matt Levine in two columns on April 30 and May 2: People could take out new life insurance policies specifically to sell to investors. Go to an insurance company, get a $5 million policy, have it pay out to a trust, make an investor the beneficiary of the trust, have the investor pay the premiums, and charge the investor a fee for the exposure. This is called “stranger-originated life insurance,” or STOLI, and it is largely not allowed. ...

I enjoy riding bicycles, and I understand the risks of leaving a bicycle unattended pretty much anywhere includes the chance of it getting stolen. Most bicycles are lightweight and don’t have the same sort of protections that personal passenger vehicles do in the US (mainly etched VIN / serial numbers). A bicycle does not have the defense of a locked door and a keyed mechanism to get it moving; most of the time its as simple as picking it up or riding off on it. Therefore, if you ride a bicycle to do any normal activities such as visiting a store or a park or going to school, you need a way to secure that bicycle once you have reached your destination. ...

In my homelab, I have a handful of services which are never exposed to the open internet and therefore do not need a domain name such as myservice.mydomainname.com. Instead, I can get by with a domain name that only resolves within my home network such as myservice.local.1 Let’s talk about how we set this up. tl;dr You can use a self-hosted certificate authority with Traefik to generate SSL certificates for homelab domains such as myservice.local. ...

I’ve been drinking 8-8oz cups1 of water per day for the past 1,000 days. I feel…good about that. The actual Day #1,000 occurred on Monday this week, but I was traveling for work and did not have the time to get this post written. Here’s my Streaks (iOS app store link) screenshot from the day just before I crossed 1,000: Woo-hoo 1,000 straight days of water consumption. ...

Following a recent upgrade within my homelab to Proxmox VE v8.0 I had a need to refactor my Terraform configurations.1 This was necessary because my previous Proxmox provider for Terraform, Telmate/proxmox, has not been kept up to date and would fail to work properly with Proxmox VE’s API following the v8 upgrade. Luckily, a second provider bpg/proxmox exists and is seeing regular updates so I can move over to that. This post is not about that migration, but instead about a neat little trick I picked up during it. Credit to the various blogs and Mastodon posts that got me to this solution, which I assure you I did not discover all on my own, but nevertheless want to document here for posterity and to help others searching for this solution. ...