I recently ran into an interesting issue with my home Kubernetes environment that runs my blog. As I mentioned in a previous post, I run my blog on k3s and I use cert-manager to manage my SSL certificates provided by Let’s Encrypt. Let’s say that I’ve temporarily changed my Internet provider and along with it, my router. This router does not appear to support NAT Loopback. The cert-manager documentation acknowledges the issue but doesn’t provide much of a solution. Cert-manager couldn’t renew my blog’s certificate because its self-check kept failing. I managed to solve the issue through a fairly simple CoreDNS change. Let’s take a look.
Tag: blog
Redirecting Domains on a Traefik Ingress
I recently posted about my experience with k3s and how I’m now using it to run my blog. I also mentioned my blog’s new domain and how I’m keeping the old name working. That involved changing the Ingress resource for my blog, so I’ll show how I updated it to accept the old domains and automatically redirect to my preferred domain without needing to make WordPress itself do any redirecting.
Updating GoDaddy DNS Entries with Ruby
I bought a new (arguably better) domain for my blog now! If you’re reading this, you’ve probably noticed, but it is therubyist.org, because I’m a fan of Ruby. The old name won’t be going anywhere, at least for the time being. Given the purchase of this new domain, I have several domains I need to maintain. Since I run this blog (and a few other services) from my home server which has a dynamic IP, setting up the domain apex (i.e., “naked domain”) is tricky. I’ve been using a dynamic DNS service called duckdns.org which gets the job done for subdomains since I can just CNAME to my personal DuckDNS subdomain, but it doesn’t solve this apex problem.
I decided that I was tired of doing this manually and that I would try to write a script. It would be appropriate, given my blog’s new domain name, to write it in Ruby. I did a quick DuckDuckGo search and noticed that someone wrote a GoDaddy SDK for Ruby. Yes, I use GoDaddy for my DNS… not necessarily endorsing them, but they seem to work well for my needs, especially now that I’ve discovered that they offer RESTful APIs.
Blogging on Kubernetes
It has been a while since I last posted, but between college, work, and kids, I’ve been pretty busy. That said, I recently attended KubeCon 2019 and saw a lot of interesting presentations. As a fan of Rancher, I gravitated toward a lot of their talks. One that really caught my attention was Darren Shepherd’s talk on k3s. I really liked what I saw; it made setting up Kubernetes really easy, lightened the dependency load for small clusters, but still is very much the right amount of “batteries included” like most things made by Rancher.
I decided to move my home server (which runs, among other things, this blog) to k3s. Here, I’ll walk through how I did it — at least specifically for running a WordPress blog — just to demonstrate how easy it is. Fair warning though, there is a lot of YAML ahead!
Encryption Redux
In yet another exciting move for my blog, I’ve switched SSL providers from my previous provider to Let’s Encrypt. I’ve done so using a set of Docker containers, which also helped me move this WordPress blog to Docker as well. Now my blog is faster, encrypted for free, and easier to backup and maintain. I’ll probably post a brief article soon about how I set this up in more detail (including some docker-compose.yml snippets) soon.
Transport Layer Security FTW!
Thanks to the good people at SSls.com, my blog is now more secure than ever! And for only about $15… for a three-year cert! I’m not sure how they’re doing it, but I encourage anyone looking for an SSL certificate to check them out. Note that I am in no way affiliated with (and sadly not being paid to advertise for) SSLs.com. Along with this move to SSL, I have relocated this blog to an LXC container running on Ubuntu since the FreeBSD jail I was using couldn’t quite keep up with the demand (to be fair, I’m pretty sure that machine is plenty busy even without my tiny blog).