Posts

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Trying out headscale (tailscale vpn stuff)

For sometime, I’ve been using Wireguard for a VPN to use when I’m out and about etc.

As I’m fairly stupid, I used wg-quick to generate the config – however when the config looks a bit like this –


[Peer]
PublicKey = cm+t2u0giNynMkcX1+afPu6SlKyLMeTe8iWKhT1FsDk=
AllowedIPs = 10.0.0.13/32
Endpoint = 192.168.122.13:51820
....

I began to find management became a problem – i.e which computer is that exactly ?

wg show does give you something a bit like this –


...
peer: cm+t2u0giNynMkcX1+afPu6SlKyLMeTe8iWKhT1FsDk=
endpoint: 192.168.122.13:51820
allowed ips: 10.0.0.13/32
...

which is sort of useful, but it still doesn’t tell me a human name. I’ve tried leaving comments in the config before, but they just get wiped out.

I’ve often thought about using TailScale, but wasn’t overly happy with the idea of some third party being involved. Eventually I came across headscale – which offers a self-hosted option for the backend (so your devices use the tailscale frontend).

After a bit of poking around over the weekend I now have this: headscale nodes list

which is a bit nicer –

I’m still pretty new to using Tailscale for a VPN, but I did at least eventually get my phone to join the network, and everything seems to work.

It’s sort of interesting that tailscale doesn’t add an entry into your routing table – but instead adds a few iptables rules in (nat) to mess around with things.

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Initial foray into Terraform / OpenTofu

So over the last couple of weeks at work, I’ve been learning to use Terraform (well OpenTofu) to help us manage multiple deployments in Azure and AWS.

The thought being that we can have a single ‘plan’ of what a deployment should look like, and deviations will be spotted / can be alerted on.

I was tempted to try and write a contrived article showing how you could create a VM in AWS (or Azure) using Terraform, but I’m not sure I’ve got anything to add over the 101 other articles on the internet.

Vaguely useful things :

  • The tofu configuration is much quicker to write than e.g. trying to talk to AWS using it’s SDK (something I did do about 7-8 years ago)
  • You can split the config up into multiple .tf files within your working directory, the tool just merges them all together at run time
  • Having auto-complete in an editor is pretty much necessary (in my case, PHPStorm)
  • tofu is quite quick to run – it doesn’t take all that long to check the state of the known resources and the config files, which is good; unfortunately Azure often takes sometime to do something on its end…
  • I’ve yet to see any point in writing a module to try and encapsulate any of our configuration as I can’t see any need to re-use bits anywhere

I’m not sure how we’re going to go about reconciling our legacy (production) environment with a newer / shiny one built with tofu though.

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New Computer Time? Perhaps not quite yet

Well, I almost went ahead and bought a Beelink SER8 – after my current desktop (Beelink SER6 Max) kept crashing at random intervals (normally between 3 and 6 days apart).

Of course, since I threatened to replace the SER6 with something else, it’s behaved itself…. typical hardware

ALMOST as annoying as a printer.

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Animal Licensing – Paws On the Doors

Last Monday saw the launch of Paws On the Doors – Animal Licensing – which aims to have animal licensing data for England – providing the public with a single place to lookup animal licensing inspections / data.

Under the hood it’s using PHP/Laravel, TypeSense and some magic fairy dust.

It’s kind of related to ScoresOnTheDoors – UK Food Hygiene Ratings – but with a refreshed code base (we felt it was time to move on from a code base that’s probably 20 something years old and start from a cleaner slate without legacy baggage).

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atuin – console shell history search

As a random, useful, console tool … try atuin for some magical shell history searching.

I’m too lazy to try and record a semi-useful demo of it, but it’s replaced my ‘ctrl+r’ lookup thingy and has a good search interface.

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LetsEncrypt + Azure Keyvault + Application gateway

A few years ago I setup an Azure Function App to retrieve a LetsEncrypt certificate for a few $work services.

Annoyingly that silently stopped renewing stuff.

Given I’ve no idea how to update it etc or really investigate it (it’s too much of a black box) I decided to replace it with certbot etc, hopefully run through a scheduled github action.

To keep things interesting, I need to use the Route53 DNS stuff to verify domain ownership.

Random bits :

docker run --rm -e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="$AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID" \
-e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="$AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY" \
-v $(pwd)/certs:/etc/letsencrypt/ \
-u $(id -u ${USER}):$(id -g ${USER}) \
certbot/dns-route53 certonly \
--agree-tos \
--email=me@example.com \
--server https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory \
--dns-route53 \
--rsa-key-size 2048 \
--key-type rsa \
--keep-until-expiring \
--preferred-challenges dns \
--non-interactive \
--work-dir /etc/letsencrypt/work \
--logs-dir /etc/letsencrypt/logs \
--config-dir /etc/letsencrypt/ \
-d mydomain.example.com

Azure needs the rsa-key-size 2048 and type to be specified. I tried 4096 and it told me to f.off.

Once that’s done, the following seems to produce a certificate that keyvault will accept, and the load balancer can use, that includes an intermediate certificate / some sort of chain.

cat certs/live/mydomain.example.com/{fullchain.pem,privkey.pem} > certs/mydomain.pem 

openssl pkcs12 -in certs/mydomain.pem -keypbe NONE -cetpbe NONE -nomaciter -passout pass:something -out certs/something.pfx -export

az keyvault certificate import --vault-name my-azure-vault  -n certificate-name -f certs/something.pfx --password something

Thankfully that seems to get accepted by Azure, and when it’s applied to an application gateway listener, clients see an appropriate chain.

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ssh signed git commits

git config –global gpg.format ssh
git config –global user.signingkey ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
git config –global commit.gpgsign true

Hopefully that’ll result in my github commits being signed…. and when I forget how to do it …