Kubernetes and back - Why I don't run distributed systems

It’s almost outrageous to say that I don’t like distributed systems while working in a company that advertises as being cloud-native, headless and what not. And probably every SRE with some buzzword certifications may think I’m a complete idiot, but hear me out. Roughly a year ago, I decided to switch to a Kubernetes based multi-node environment with one of my side projects. The promise of doing zero-downtime deployments and node maintenance, better scalability and “self healing” if a node goes down sounded too good to not jump on the ever-growing train of tech marketing.

Suddenly, a homelab

Over the Christmas holidays, I somewhat fell into a rabbit hole. It started off by Ubiquiti announcing the Unifi Express and I thought: “Hey, I could use that and replace my Amplifi HD router”. Reality already was a bit more complicated, in fact the Amplifi HD is just my apartment router and Wifi AP, while in the basement I use a EdgeRouter X to separate networks for the two apartments in my house.

Finally switching from iOS: My GrapheneOS setup

It’s been more than 10 years for me writing about self-hosted infrastructure and systems that care about privacy, yet I have kept using Apple Smartphones for this whole time. While I always liked the idea of Android being fundamentally open source (as the AOSP), neither the hardware that it ran on nor the inevitable dependency on proprietary services from Google, a company that reportedly does not care about your privacy, were appealing to me.

Tesla Wall Connector: Calculate EV charging cost using Home Assistant

Tesla’s Wall Connector (3rd Gen) does not have a integration in the Tesla App and while the cost for your monthly charge can be displayed as part of the car’s charging details, it does not exactly do a great job of displaying details and stats. Since I’m running Home Assistant, I’ve integrated some sensors to read the energy consumption of the Wallbox and set up some automations to notify me about ongoing costs and to provide a monthly summary.

FreeBSD mail server: rspamd & DKIM

Now that we have our basic mail infrastructure working, we will add support for rspamd and enable DKIM signing of our messages. In this series we will set up a fully-featured mail server in a FreeBSD jail using OpenSMTPd, Dovecot and rspamd. In contrast to many other guides, this one is split into multiple posts that can either be read and followed individually, or as a whole. After each post, you end up with a fully working system (that might lack some features ;)).

FreeBSD mail server: Virtual users and LMTP

In this part of the FreeBSD mail server, we build on the recent two posts where we set up the IMAP and SMTP and extend our configuration to support virtual users, which means that we don’t autenticate with system users anymore and, alongside, hand over the incoming email management to Dovecot by providing email from OpenSMTPd to Dovecot using LMTP. Since both daemons will not work together more closely, we will also unify the login credentials in a single passwd-style file that can be read from both OpenSMTPd and Dovecot.

FreeBSD mail server: IMAP using Dovecot

This is a follow-up post to the initial FreeBSD mail server article that I posted a few weeks ago. In this step, we will build upon what we set up in the first part and add the possibility to fetch email from a mail client using IMAP. We will still use system users for authentication, before we switch to virtual users in the next step. In this series we will set up a fully-featured mail server in a FreeBSD jail using OpenSMTPd, Dovecot and rspamd.

FreeBSD mail server: Basic SMTP with OpenSMTPd

I run mail servers for many years now, but I was never brave enough to set up one from scratch for my daily mail. So I always fell back to pre-configured solutions like docker-mailserver, Mailcow, or in case of FreeBSD to iRedMail. My biggest pain point was the secure configuration of Postfix. When I discovered OpenSMTPd, I decided that it’s the right time now to finally build a fully-featured mail server setup from scratch including virtual users, spam filter etc.

Spatial Audio in tvOS 15 Beta 1 does not work on Apple TV HD

Since I wanted to verify whether or not Spatial Audio works on the Apple TV HD (non-4k) and did not find any answer, I tried it myself. So: Current state (tvOS 15 Beta 1) is that Spatial Audio does work on Apple TV 4K, but does not work on the Apple TV HD. I set up the beta on a 4K and a HD, and while the option is offered in the AirPods settings on the 4K version, it is not on the HD.

First workstation build in years

In the past fifteen years, I have used Macs and macOS became my operating system of choice. The first mac I got was a Mac Mini G4 and in the following years it was exchanged by a multitude of other devices. There are many things to love about the Mac, including the asthetics, silent operation, the fact that it all works out-of-the-box, alongside a neat UNIX-based operating system that can run both most proprietary applications alongside open source UNIX apps.