It’s been a while, let’s go! Any major fuckups lately or smooth sailing?
I had to change the local DNS setup yesterday. I finally installed my wife Linux Mint and wanted to set her up for Vaultwarden real quick which became an hour long debug session since apparently CNAME entries for hostnames don’t work as I thought. Never came up the recent year as all my machines took it, but resolved refused to and so I eventually deleted the entries in the Pihole and created them as A records pointing to the VM with the reverse proxy, hoping I won’t need to change the IP anytime soon. It’s always DNS!
In other news I think I moved all my local dockered services to forgejo+komodo now and applying updates by merging renovate MRs still feels super smooth. I just updated my calibre web automated with a single click. Only exception is home assistant where I have yet to find a good split in what to throw in a docker volume and what to check in git and bindmount.
On the topic of dns, I still use GoDaddy. People ask why, it’s because GoDaddy seems like a good idea in 2003 when I got my first domain, and 2006 when I got my current one. At that point it’s just inertia, I tend to buy several years in advance because I don’t like annual payments, I know it makes me a weirdo. That means I’m locked in for several years and it’s not enough of a problem to do anything about.
Anyone who uses GoDaddy knows that they turned off their dynamic DNS option quite some time ago. My system is pretty stable so I don’t usually need to change it, but if I have a power failure at home or I need to reboot my router, I obviously need to change my DNS at those moments.
When I’m away from home, I end up having to use TeamViewer to hop into a jump box vm I have set up for that purpose. The two obvious problems with that are first of that TeamViewer is a proprietary product, and the second of all that they see me hopping into a jump box regularly and they assume that I’m a commercial customer. There is apparently a way to tell them that you’re just a hobbyist, but I haven’t gotten around to filing that.
What I did do is set up a script that compares the current IP to my DNS IP, and if they are different then I send myself an email that contains the old IP in the new IP. This way, I don’t need to hop into my network to find out what the new IP address is. I also added a little bit there to save the last successful IP address sent by email to /tmp/ so that if I lose my IP address but I’m doing something where I can’t hop onto the GoDaddy website to fix it, I don’t get 100,000 emails with my new IP address.
I killed my house power a couple weeks ago, and the whole system worked exactly as intended. I was pretty happy to see that.
Oh, and for anyone who has never used it, Apache guacamole is a really neat tool for centralizing configuration. Effectively, you can set it up as a website with a username and password that will transfer through ssh, telnet, VNC, and RDP, so if you need to hop into something while you are outside the home, it’s going to be effective. That’s something that I wish I had known about earlier, it would have made a lot of rough days a lot easier.