Fall is finally here. There should be no more days over 90F for the rest of the year. Well, hopefully not. As with normal in Fall, school is back in session.

Well, life has been a bit busy since my last update with things like family and home upkeep and work.

Work

Ah, Fall. Smell the internal audits in the air! Enough to make one want to puke. Somehow, I have become the Compliance Person for my team which means I get to heard the cats trying to collect responses to Auditor questions about how we sling the bits and what documentation we have on said bit-slinging processes.

If this was something I wanted to grow up and do, I would have taken some training in the fine art of reading governmental regulations. Ug. I am an engineer/architect, not a regulation wonk.

Oh, and ThePowersThatBe(tm) still want us to go in at least 2 days a week, but with the fact that Spawn #3 does not have the vaccine yet, I am not going in unless it is to pick up Spawn #1 from the dorms for the weekend. So, not very often.

The Firewall

In an never ending saga, the firewall is still working. My two biggest complaints are the fact the UI only works for me in Firefox (odd, but easy to deal with) and the fact that the key players behind the firewall distro do not want to support either of the two VPN solutions (tinc and WireGuard) are crap and refuses to support them.

Given that attidue, I am going to be taking a spare box which has two NICs, and throwing down an distro I know and like, and changing that into my firewall. The second box is to make sure I know what I am doing before I subject the family to the new firewall.

Web Sites

Last week, I made a major change to how I was hosting my websites. No, I did not change the software (hugo), but rather how I was serving them out. I had been running a docker container with a small Go web server behind another docker container running a reverse proxy.

Whilst this set up was fast and easy to deal with, there were a couple of things I did not like. The first is that when I updated a site, I had to restart the docker container with web server to get it to pick up on the new files (all static content). The other is more of me not knowing docker well enough, but I did not feel comfortable running containers as root. This made scripting site updates harder/less secure, and I am sure my config was not the most secure.

So, I switched over to Podman to handle running the container without root privileges, and Caddy for the webserver. This all runs as my userm, the server does not have to be restarted when I update the websites, and with only one container, it is using less resources as an added bonus!

Other Projects

I have a few other things I am working on, or should be working on, but I have not found the time/motivation to work on. Sadly, photography is one of them. I am barely managing to post one photo a week, but recently they have not been super awesome (although, I do like last weeks’s). I know that when my $JOB is really dragging me down, my photography suffers. I need to change that.

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