The simplest CI setup ever

This weekend I started to go back and look at a few projects of mine. A few years ago I setup most of those using a mix of Travis CI for building/testing, docker hub for image building/hosting and then somehow wiring this all together with a custom stack. Today this feels outdated and overly complex. As an SRE I’m allergic to complexity. So I spent a few hours checking out the new Github packages and actions. Pricing Both packages and actions come with a unlimited option for open source projects and a nice free tier for private repositories. For actions you get 2000 build minutes per month. For packages 500MB in storage is included. There is more fine print for data transfer but that seems really generous and will mostly suffice for any small to medium size project. (Don’t mine bitcoin in the Github actions runner please :-D) Setup Github has a somewhat unfair advantage here: their stuff is build right into the UI. But that is exactly why its nice. Github has been amazing at creating clear and understandable user interfaces. Compare to the mess that docker hub is, I can only applaud them for a job well done. […]

Operating your own mail server is a pain

tl:dr; I’m going to tell you all the reasons you shouldn’t run your own mail server. I actually wanted to name this post “Thinking about running your own mail server? Here is why this is a bad idea” but I’d like for everyone to opt out of click bait titles. I stopped clicking on anything that sounds like click bait (Youtube, Twitter, News) as my brain got trained to see those as low quality time stealers. Anyway, I wanted to talk about my experience of running a mail server. Over the last 10+ years I’ve operated my own mail server on VMs hosted by netcup.de. (Not a paid ad, I promise) Their servers have decent performance and for just a few euros they are a steal. So I went and setup ispconfig – a management interface for basic web, mail and dns servers – to have a more simpler interface for configuration. Till Brehm (the maintainer of ispconfig) is doing an amazing job at developing that piece of software over the last decade. The interface is clean, neat and gives your customers basic settings to do self service if they want to. Configuring a mail server is complex Configuring your […]

Easily add your Github SSH Keys to any Server or Docker Image

The default way to copy your ssh key(s) to a remote server is to use the ssh-copy-id command. This will create a secure connection to the remote server over SSH and then check if the user exists, create the folder&files if needed and add your keys. Works, Easy, Simple. My problem is, that often I’m already in the shell and I logged in with some password combination, that I would need to enter a second time to copy my ids. Also I don’t always have all my keys on one machine. As I often get asked by my colleagues, what my SSH keys are, there is a nifty trick you can do, instead of sending them over via E-Mail. Github allows to get your public SSH keys with only your username: https://github.com/<username>.keys So with a little bit of magic we can utilize this and run the following command on an existing SSH connection to create a new authorized_keys file and download our keys from Github to the file. curl https://github.com/kordianbruck.keys > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys Easy! You can always use >> instead to append your keys. This can also be used in automated docker builds, where you have a SSH server running inside your container (which […]