jjpk.me

Linux systems and networks administrator, SRE & DevOps engineer, perpetually tinkering with way too many things at once.

The occasional write-up

Every now and again, whenever a subject tickles my fancy, or I've been working on something fun, I may do a little write-up about it. Admittedly this does not happen as often as I had set out for, but at least the feature is there when I need it!

The hassles of proxying HTTPS transparently

Published 2 months ago

Proxying HTTPS transparently in a network has always been a bit of a pain. Intercepting such traffic and rerouting it tends to go against the initial goals behind TLS. Let's have a look at those issues and introduce tls2httpconnect, a little tool to work around them.

Stilgar: a lightweight, no-fuss, drop-in replacement for Rudderstack

Published 2 months ago

Introducing Stilgar, a self-hosted user analytics solution inspired by Rudderstack, minus the hefty, hair-pulling Cloud overhead.

Web applications behind nginx: signing trusted headers with HMACs

Published 3 years ago

A look at how the set-misc nginx module can be used to sign request headers before forwarding to upstream applications.

Google Compute Engine: handing GCP maintenance events without Live Migration

Published 3 years ago

Live Migration is GCP's approach to moving around VMs when maintenance needs to take place on the underlying hosts. When using GPUs or Confidential Computing however, such a migration is impossible and VMs need to be terminated. This article briefly introduces workarounds to handle those downtimes smoothly.

Homemade system provisioning and dotfiles management: SetMeUp!

Published 4 years ago

A quick article to introduce my latest toy: SetMeUp! It is an Ansible-based provisioning tool which makes it easy (for me) to set up systems when I don't have much more than an Internet connection.

Combining LaTeX, Jinja2 and Babel for a multi-version, multi-language Curriculum Vitae

Published 5 years ago

Keeping a CV up to date when you have to deal with several variants and translations can be a little repetitive. Here's a way to simplify the process using templates and Babel for i18n!

Continuous integration and deployment using Gitlab, Webhook and Ansible

Published 5 years ago

For this personal website, I am using Gitlab, Webhook and Ansible to automate everything between my git pushes and the production update. This is a small article which describes the approach.