Ramblings

  • Tripping North

    Tripping North

    After a week of on-call post Christmas, I had a week of PTO with K visiting (we spent Christmas with her parents in Germany). The weather was variable, as it usually is in Ireland, but we got in a few nice walks; we had a rental car for the week, so we were able to…

  • Doubling up on 2FA

    Doubling up on 2FA

    I haven’t used passwords to log in to my server for years; I’ve been using key-based authentication. This works pretty well, and I can even use 1Password’s integration as an SSH agent to hold the keys so that wherever I go, the keys are available to me. As a “learn how to do it”, I’ve…

  • LXD, dnsmasq, IPv6 reverse lookups

    LXD, dnsmasq, IPv6 reverse lookups

    My residential ISP doesn’t offer reverse lookups for their IPv6 blocks that they delegate out with the PD flag to consumer routers. This causes some annoying slow-downs when talking to the various services I’m running in LXD containers, since a lot of them do reverse DNS lookups. Under the hood, LXD relies on dnsmasq to…

  • Breaking my energy monitoring setup

    Breaking my energy monitoring setup

    The ESP8266 module for the emonTx runs what I’d describe as a pretty basic sketch. It’s functional, but it’s not very good at telling me what’s gone wrong. On Monday, I re-imaged the router to upgrade it. A side effect was a setting I’d changed for the DHCP options (what the local DNS is) wasn’t…

  • Running emoncms in a Linux container

    Running emoncms in a Linux container

    When I was renovating the house I currently live in, I picked up an EmonTx v3 and some clip-on current sensors from OpenEnergyMonitor.org so that I could monitor the house power consumption more accurately than just getting a bill every 2 months from my energy supplier (even with a smart meter installed, they only provide…

  • Rebuilding Cricalix.Net – Part 4

    Rebuilding Cricalix.Net – Part 4

    While on holiday, I read a forum post that mentioned a “new” web server called Caddy. I took a look at it, and was intrigued by the integrated TLS certificate renewal using Let’s Encrypt. With NGINX or Apache, I have to run Certbot or similar to maintain the certificates, and I have to deal with…