For a personal project I really need to write up, I’m using the HashiCorp Vault Agent to auto authenticate to AWS and write out some dynamic creds; for my use case I don’t have any need for the resultant Vault token outside of the Agent. I quickly ran into an outstanding issue trying to do that, in that you had to do something with the token; either write it out, or have the Agent act as a local cache for Vault queries.
My long weekend project was to finally get around to moving my website from 1997 to something a little more contemporary. I’ve been following Hugo for some time now and finally bit the bullet. I started reading in depth, but got much further when I just picked a theme, made a site and just started trying to add stuff, figuring out things as I went along. Moving my old pyblosxom content was relatively easy, and the other static content was trivial.
My husband and I just finished watching Into the Night, the Belgian sci-fi series which recently came out on Netflix. I want to say we were rage watching it, although once it finished I realized that it's very similar to 10 Cloverfield Lane in that I loved the story and want to watch it again, but some of the execution left me enraged. I would have completely changed the ending, however.
Recently I wanted to throw up a tiny little irc server for a small group of friends. I used this opportunity to finally create a sub-account in my personal AWS organization and host it entirely isolated. One of the things I wanted to do was a bog simple backup scheme for this system, but because this is completely isolated from all of my other normal infrastructure I can't use my standard restic backup setup.
From time to time I may post things which discuss technologies or products of HashiCorp, Inc. If you're reading that and are getting a link to this, that means: At the time of authorship of that post, I am an employee of HashiCorp. Said post is explicitly a personal project and is not an official HashiCorp product. The views expressed in that posting are entirely personal and are not statements made on the behalf of HashiCorp, Inc.
This weekend I've been noodling around with my perennial project of building a ersatz HSM (what are you using to protect your home CA root?) A fresh install of Debian 10 on a PCEngines APU2 later, I started some basic setup. One of the first things I started playing with was a source of randomness for the system. In "production" there won't physically be any network connections, and as an isolated box where presumably you'd boot it up, do one or two operations, and shut it back down, there's not a lot of chance to collect some entropy.
Inspired by this recent Chef John video. Prep a whole pork tenderloin as you normally would (I coat with a thin layer of vegetable oil and liberally apply kosher salt). Take a loaf of Italian bread (that's what my local store calls it, it's a long loaf of white bread with sesame seeds on the top), slice in half lengthwise, and coat with butter — I use one stick (1/2 cup) for a whole loaf split in two.
For ages, my psyche has marked the start of spring by having a dream about a tornado. At least back to high school, warmer weather, trees start budding and flowers start poking out and — boom, tornado dream. This year, however, I've had two dreams about tornados in the past week, which is the first time I can remember this happening. I'll have other dreams about weather, but just one with a tornado there ever spring.
See yubi-env in my 'one-offs' repository.
At home I make extensive use of both the Minio object storage server and the Backblaze B2 object storage service. I've also recently started making use of HashiCorp Vault. Given how useful it is to generate dynamic secrets with Vault, I wanted to extend that to my usage of Minio and B2, so writing a secrets engine plugin for Vault has been on my project list for quite some time.