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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 21st, 2021

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  • I also had a bad experience where I had a test website under a megabyte in a storage bucket. It was under the free tier and sat there for a few years. Then one month they sent me a bill (it was small, a handful of cents). Contact support saying that this use is under the free tier. They said that data was added then removed from the bucket. I hadn’t logged into the account, no living API keys. They wouldn’t forgive the charge.

    Luckily my credit card had expired so they just locked my account.


  • With ansible you need to change the relevant step to use apt remove instead of apt install and to change the config file step in a step that removes the file.

    Wait until you have 2 services that use the same resource. Now you need:

    1. When both are enabled the resource is set up.
    2. When either one is enabled the resource is still set up.
    3. When neither is configured the resource is removed.

    Doing this with Ansible is a nightmare. And 99% of the time you don’t even realize that you have this problem until your configs don’t work for some reason.






  • If you haven’t used any configuration management before it would definitely be valuable to learn.

    However I would also recommend trying Nix and NixOS. The provide much better reproducibility. For example using Ansible-like tools I would always have issues where I create a file, then remove the code to create the file but the file still exists or the server is still running. I wrote a post going into more detail about the difference a while ago https://kevincox.ca/2015/12/13/nixos-managed-system/. However this is more involved. If you already have a running server it will be a big shift, instead of just slowly starting to manage things via Ansible.

    But I would definitely consider using something. Having configuration managed and versioned with history is super valuable.









  • I ended up creating my own because I couldn’t find something that did what I want a few years ago when I started looking. My main requirement was easy scaling of ingredients. It has a handful of features around that such as scaling by specifying servings, scaling by setting the amount of a particular ingredient (example making pancakes with leftover buttermilk, pour the buttermilk into the bowl then scale the recipe based on how much was left) and ingredient conversion. In most other ways it is pretty basic and free-form but it does the job. It stores data in a user-provided provider so other people never send me their recipes.

    https://recipes.kevincox.ca/




  • I do it the simple way. I just stick nginx in front of everything. If I don’t want it to be publicly accessible I stick nginx basic auth in front of it.

    The advantages is that I can easily access the services from anywhere on any device with just the password. I only need to trust nginx’s basic auth to keep me protected, not various different service’s authentication.

    The downside is that some services don’t work great when you have basic auth in the front. This is often due to things like public links or APIs that need to be accessed with other auth.

    I just use nginx because I’ve always used it. I’ve heard that there are newer reverse proxies that are a bit easier to configure.