Writing your own Static Site Generator
Dec 31, 2023
The background Static site generators (SSGs) are engines1 that use text input files to generate static web pages, these generated sites do not require a backend afterwards, making them primary entities on content delivery networks (CDNs). Further, since the lack of a backend, static site generators inherently have a reduced attack surface2, minimizing potential vulnerabilities. I’ve been using Hugo3 since I started writing a tech blog, which has proved to be great on it’s own along with a cool ecosystem.…
Saving VPS Costs with Bash and Cloudflare Workers
Dec 14, 2023
What is a VPS? Well, it expands to Virtual Private Server1, which is often a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service. In our case, it is a tiny Linux box running a WireGuard2 VPN (Virtual Private Network) service, set up in minutes with Algo3. How did you do it? Before we get into the how, let’s start with the why :) Running virtual machines in the cloud incur costs, also, some of these are running inside datacenters not powered by 100% renewable energy.…
Upgrading Portable Visual Studio Code
Dec 03, 2023
The background I have been using vscode on Ubuntu/Windows1 as my primary text editor for quite a time. When “installing” vscode, I usually download the tar.gz and add a shortcut in gnome dock on my own. This method brings portability to the application. However, for all data to be contained2 within the vscode directory, we need to create a new directory named data in the same location where the binary reside.…
Networks That Connect Us with the Past
Nov 16, 2023
No matter if you think so or not, some days are just different. Like today, when I was1 troubleshooting the seemingly unrelated issue of setting up a VPN tunnel on my laptop the VPN client unnecessarily dumped the names of all networks that are saved in network manager in it’s log which I was following. For a moment, I was hit with a fair dose of nostalgia, reading the names of the networks from days gone by among the ones that I use on a daily basis took me on a journey across time and distance.…
Exclusively Installing Security Updates on Ubuntu
Oct 23, 2023
When new versions of software are released, we happen to need to update the local versions to the latest. This post looks into how we could install only the security updates for packages on a system running Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS. sudo apt update sudo unattended-upgrade -d Above will install only security updates1 on a machine running Ubuntu. https://askubuntu.com/a/412/953808 ↩︎
Terraforming Cloudflare DNS Records
Oct 19, 2023
The background Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) software tool by HashiCorp, which had a recent license change1. Cloudflare is a company providing multiple network-and-security related services. We had multiple records configured on Cloudflare DNS for a domain that we’ve set up partially2. The said records were configred via the Cloudflare dashboard. Adhering to IaC practices, we wanted to begin managing these records with Terraform. However, it can only manage configuration it created or was explicitly told about after the fact, the reason for this limitation being that Terraform expects to be authoritative for the resources it manages.…
Certified Kubernetes Administrator Exam
Oct 02, 2023
A messy begining It all started when my good friend Pandula suggested we buy the CKA certification exam with the CyberMonday discount applied. So I complied, however, I did not have a credit card (debit cards weren’t accepted) to my name, which was required for paying for the purchase. That’s when I suggested he buy the exam for me as well with his credit card. He bought the exam bundle, except to our confusion he’d been logged in with his account at the time of purchase, resulting in two purchases of the same exam bundle sitting in his LF account.…
Setup Nagios Alerts to Monitor SSL Certificate Expiry in Java Key Store
May 14, 2022
The background Nagios is a monitoring tool1 for systems, networks, and infrastructure. The expected outcome was to add a Nagios alert for SSL Certificates stored in a Java Key Store file. Since the Nagios server was already set up and functioning, we’ll cover only for setting up the alert. The procedure Considering security and efficiency, it was decided to set up a cron triggered script to read the certificate expiry dates, write them to a location accessible by the Nagios Remote Plugin Executer (NRPE)2 agent.…
Updating VirtualBox on Ubuntu
Dec 01, 2021
How was it installed? The official apt repositories are known to have old (read thoroughly tested and stable) versions for some software packages. In that light, VirtualBox was installed through the latest stable .deb installer downloaded from the official website, with the version number at the time being 6.1.28-147628. When the new stable version 6.1.30-148432 became available, following are the steps that were followed to set it up. The Process First, we need to obtain a copy of the .…
Installing Gnome Shell Extensions Manually on Ubuntu
Nov 30, 2021
The Background The usual method to install Gnome extensions on Ubuntu is using a browser with the relevant browser extension installed among other requirements. However, as in almost all things involving Linux, this method is not necessarily the only way toward accomplishing the same. What follows are the steps that may be followed to manually download and install the extensions without browser integration. The Procedure We can get started by navigating to the Gnome Extensions webpage1, finding the extension we need installed, and downloading the extension package matching our Gnome shell version2.…