Showing 61—90 of 111.
Recently, I started setting up a new application on my docker host. It was late in the day, and I just wanted to get something up and working to play around with. Just my luck, I was met with wonderfully cryptic error:ERROR: could not find an available, non-overlapping IPv4 address…
I recently had a far from fun morning. I had my website cloned on my desktop, with some commits which weren’t upstreamed. Having done some work on my laptop, upstream was ahead of my desktop, which needed rectifying. git pull -r is a great feature of git, which does a…
The internet is a wild place, filled with well, everything. There are many ways of exposing an application to the internet, but no matter how secure an application claims to be, or how confident you are with your infrastructure, sometimes you may just be more comfortable keeping it internal. Historically,…
After recently deploying a ZFS pool, I realized I had little insight into the health of my drives. I can run SMART stats now and then, but that’s not quite the same.Scrutiny Scrutiny is a tool to help you with just that. It presents a web UI which shows you…
I’ve been using Traefik for a while now, and I’ve helped quite a few people with it, but I still see a lot of people scared off it. This isn’t helped by a lot of guides being incredibly verbose, and not explaining what’s going on very well. Most people I…
Traefik’s dashboard is a great tool to diagnose routing issues, and check services are being detected correctly, but it can’t do much more than that. It doesn’t show any metrics. Instead, it relies (arguably correctly) on external monitoring tools for metrics. Traefik supports 4 metric backends: Datadog, Prometheus, StatsD and…
ZFS is a pretty sweet filesystem, an opinion shared by the majority of the internet it seems. BTRFS (No Wikipedia, it’s not “butter fuss”) is also a nice filesystem, and the fact it’s built-in to the kernel makes it far safer to use as a root filesystem. One of my…
Clickhouse is a column oriented database engine, mostly designed for analytics. It was developed and deployed by Yandex in their analytics offering, but Plausible, my analytics provider of choice, uses it to store the analytics data, as it’s more suited to this than PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, the official docker container is…
Recently, I bought myself a new server from Kimsufi, to function as an off-site backup server. And after fighting with both their management interface and customer services, I finally got it booted. Kimsufi have a respectable list of OS options, however not especially recent. The latest version of Ubuntu they…
Docker containers, and containers as a whole, are really just a regular program wrapped in some extra protections provided by the kernel (namely cgroups etc) to create isolation, and other interesting features. Unlike VMs, containers run closer to the host operating system, so close they use the same kernel, meaning…
The majority of England (where I live) is being hit by quite a heatwave. It’s hot here, like really hot! Us brits are incapable of handling the heat, and enjoy nothing more than telling each other how hot and unbearable it is. I’m definitely guilty of this, and as a…
I only recently talked about using GoAccess as an analytics tool. Over the last couple months, I’ve been more interested in how many hits this website actually gets. GoAccess was a really simple solution which worked on log files and only captured the bits of information I really cared about:…
Last year, I switched all of my hosting from arbitrarily installed packages to Docker. This made installing and configuring incredibly simple, but updating a little less defined. Whilst Docker itself is updated through the system package manager (probably), the containers themselves aren’t. Docker container versions are known as “tags”, and…
Django already does some pretty incredible things when it comes to performance, especially in the ORM layer. The lazy loading, fluent interface for querying means it’ll only fetch the data you need, when you need it. But it can’t handle everything for you, and often needs some help to work…
I write quite a lot. Whether it be coursework, blog posts, or any other random thing. Most of my time is spent in either VSCode or QOwnNotes, neither of which have any kind of spelling and grammar checking. It’s rare I’ll actually go back over something and fully check its…
Storing passwords is a pretty simple problem in software development, right? Wrong! Storing passwords correctly is pretty complicated. With that said, it’s very simple to just lean on work someone else has done, and the libraries available for your language of choice. In reality, you should never do it yourself.
Duplicati is one of my favourite backup system. It’s pretty fast, supports numerous backup sources, and has a nice configuration web UI. Unfortunately however, it can’t be used to back up remote files. In fact, I can’t find a nice fully-features backup solution which does do this, which sucks. Another…
Traefik is a cloud native reverse proxy, which is basically a fancy way of saying it’s a reverse proxy with some fancy features. Specifically it has fancy features around auto-discovery, and deep integration with technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.Basic concepts Traefik has four fundamental concepts: Entrypoints, routers, middleware and services.
In the current lockdown situation, a lot of people are starting to eye up that old desktop machine, or Raspberry Pi they bought for a project and just left on a shelf, and thinking of putting it to use, as a server! Naturally, once you’ve got something set up in…
As a part of Nextcloud 17, Nextcloud released Text, a fancy new WYSIWYG editor for markdown with support for collaboration. Personally, I quite liked the old interface: A simple plaintext editor with syntax highlighting, paired with a side-by-side preview. Nextcloud Text was a step in the wrong direction for me,…
A few days ago, I was sharing a blog post to someone on the self-hosted podcast discord, and they asked if I was self-hosting my website. Unfortunately, and rather ironically, I had to answer no. I’ve been intending to move it over to my own server for a while, so…
Recently, I decided to put some analytics on my website. Would be nice to see what view number are like and what pages get the most traffic. Most people would just stick Google Analytics on and be done with. But the privacy implications off that are huge and terrible, not…
Last year, I wrote a post on setting up a gateway to a private network, powered by OpenVPN-AS. I ran this network setup for quite a while with a lot of success, exposing services on my home network to the public internet, securely. Unfortunately, there were a couple issues with…
What is WireGuard? The website defines it as “… extremely simple yet fast and modern VPN that utilizes state-of-the-art cryptography.”. Which basically means it’s a VPN, but sane. The point of a VPN is to allow two machines to talk to eachother, no matter how the network inbetween is set…
When disabling a user account on a Linux box, it is good practice to also change the shell to something which, well, isn’t a shell. The point of these shells is rather than presenting the user with a prompt to execute further commands, it returns a failure code, and log…
This year marks the 3rd year of my pattern for publishing a “My Stack” post, noting down how I get work done both professionally and personally (2018 / 2017). This year, I’m stealing borrowing inspiration from CGP Grey / Cortex and their “State of the Apps” episodes, and also talking…
Yesterday, an email was sent to django-announce, informing of an upcoming security update, labelled “high” severity. Previous notifications like this have been one week before the actual disclosure; This email, just 12 hours. The updates were scheduled to be released 12:00 UTC the next day (today). Already, not the best…
This is year number three of my participation in Hacktoberfest, the initiative from DigitalOcean, and new this year, Dev.to. In previous years, the objective was to submit five pull requests to an open-source project. This year, the number was reduced to four, for some reason. In 2018, I submitted a…
For the last four years, I’ve been spending every working day off a Dell Optiplex. With an after-market SSD upgrade, and a little extra memory, it makes a pretty good work machine. When it comes to needing to work away from my desk, it’s a little annoying having only a…
WireGuard is taking the VPN world by storm, coming very close to the current champion OpenVPN in simple, small-scale deployments. It’s just unfortunate few people know about it, and quite how incredible it is!What is WireGuard?WireGuard® is an extremely simple yet fast and modern VPN that utilizes state-of-the-art cryptography. It…