As everybody, I have a smart phone. But half of the last year, I was using a "not so smart" phone on daily basis. And I was surprised, but I kinda liked it. What was my experience? What unique features did it offer? Was there anything that I was missing? And how does it compare to the life with a smart phone.

I actually had a smart phone as my main phone for quite some time. My first smart phone was Palm Centro probably sometime around 2008. Even before that I had various Palm PDAs and phones with either infrared port or Bluetooth. Back then, combining PDA and Phone made a lot of sense. You got a really cool features. Like silent mode when there was an event in your calendar. MP3 ringtones and different ringtones for different groups of people. And limitless storage for SMS. Internet connectivity was much more stable and having full QWERTY keyboard in your pocket really helped.

Lately I blogged about how am I managing my DNS entries via SaltStack. So far it was about being a great time saver, but nothing that you couldn’t do manually with considerably more effort. This time, let’s take a look at something that would be in some setups almost impossible manually - adding TLSA records for your webs.

In my last post, I showed how we can combine SaltStack and Knot to have some basic records filled your zone. As I was introducing the concept, I picked the most obvious and basic entries. But since we have a hammer now, everything starts to look like a nail. And there is much more that can be stored in DNS apart from IP addresses. Let’s take a look at some other examples and how to get them automatically filled in by SaltStack.

Running services online without domain is hard. More services you run, more DNS entries you need to manage. More services you run, more servers you need to manage. And when you manage several servers, it’s time to use some orchestration. But what about all those domains associated with those servers and services? Can’t that be also part of the orchestration? Somehow automated? Of-course it can. Let me tell you how am I handling it for my domains and servers.

This post will be about my approach to something that is almost obsolete. It is about orchestration. Back in the old days, people used to have a real computers or virtual machines and used to install and configure software. And also maintain it for years to come. I know that nowadays, you just create a bunch of pods, each one consisting from multiple containers you downloaded from DockerHub and whenever you need to reconfigure or update something, you just throw them away. Or even the whole datacenter. But I’m old and I still maintain individual systems with multiple services running. And jokes aside, when you do that, you want to have some automation to make it easier. That is what orchestration is for - to manage multiple machines from one central point and to make sure that everything is up to date and configured consistently.

Some time ago, I joined the Fediverse. Why and why now? I actually gave it a try few times already I tried it many years ago with Friendica. I actually run it for a while and posted there but I can’t find any traces of it anywhere so it was a really really long time ago (sometime before 2015). It was nice, but social network by myself is kinda boring so it eventually died out.

I’m using Password store for a long time and I love it. It is simple, intuitive and it just works. Recently I started adding some more formulas into my Saltstack and I started searching for a way how to store some password that are going to be set via Salt. It stand to reason to check whether I can use Password Store with Salt somehow. I found that there is pass renderer already part of Salt itself. I checked it out, but in the end, I ended up forking it. Continue reading to find out how, why and what is the result and what is my final setup.

This is mostly a note to myself. Once in a long while I need to add a new computer as Salt minion. And I always forget how to verify the fingerprints of the key. I know the probability of somebody intercepting the handshake is low, but it is possible nevertheless.

Long time ago, I started writing a blog. Nowadays it is kinda old fashion. People just watch TicTok at best. Nobody reads anymore.

I also write less and less. Kinda because it is hard to find the time and hard to finish. I have few articles that I haven’t finished in my old Wordpress instance just lying around. I just can’t get around to finish them. Part of the problem is that I don’t have a time in front of of computer. When I’m in front of computer, I have a ton of work that I need to do and finishing article and publishing it is quite down the list.