Category: Linux

Jitsi for Just in Time Conferencing using Terraform on Vultr with Route 53

With everything going on in the world with COVID-19 and the social distancing that is happening, people are looking to connect with friends, family and co-workers via Video conferencing more than ever. Recent vulnerabilities in Zoom have made people more cognizant than ever that security needs to be considered when using these platforms no matter what you are using them for.

Jitsi is an open source video conferencing platform that I’ve been hearing about a lot lately, and finally had a chance to look into. In this post I’ll explain how to use Terraform to provision a Jitsi instance when you need a conference and tear it down when you are done. We’ll be using Vultr and their Jitsi “application” and AWS Route 53 for DNS.

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Set Up Enpass With HTTPS Protected WebDAV and Ditch LastPass

Set Up Enpass With HTTPS Protected WebDAV and Ditch LastPass

It’s time to ditch cloud based password managers. There.. I said it. What we are doing when we use them is giving ownership and management of our trusted secrets to someone else, and hoping that they will be able to protect them from bad guys, and make sure they are available when we need them.

Ubuntu Cosmic 18.10 – Use Ansible To Deploy Docker

Ubuntu Cosmic 18.10 – Use Ansible To Deploy Docker

As it turns out, Docker doesn’t officially support any version of Ubuntu past Artful. This is a bit of a challenge if you want to use a state configuration manager such as Ansible to deploy Docker, or even if you want to install it manually. I was able to get this working by using the test branch of the docker release for Ubuntu Cosmic.

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Thin Provision VMs on Workstation Pro using the vmrun Command

Thin Provision VMs on Workstation Pro using the vmrun Command

Continuing my series on provisioning VMs on workstation pro outside of the GUI, I’ve got a functional script that will create a linked clone using the vmrun command.

It allows you to specify the following options on the command line:

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Prompt For A New Hostname on Boot

Prompt For A New Hostname on Boot

I’ve been brushing up on a few technologies in my home lab, and have found myself using VMware workstation for some simple tasks that don’t require a whole virtualized environment. Workstation didn’t set the hostname of my Ubuntu 18.xx VMs properly after they booted. Maybe I’m a little spoiled by guest OS customization or missing something, but either way, I needed a way to quickly spin up a whole VM and have it’s hostname set correctly. It’s definitely not the cleanest, and I realize I would be better off using the Workstation Pro REST API, but I’m not there yet.

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Set Up A Headless Raspberry Pi

Set Up A Headless Raspberry Pi

I find myself setting up Raspberry Pi’s more frequently than I’d like. I never ever have a monitor connected. Below is the method I use to get wireless network connectivity without connecting an Ethernet cable or a monitor and keyboard. This is here because I’m tired of sifting through incorrect articles to find this information.

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SSH Local Port Forwarding Made Easy

SSH Local Port Forwarding Made Easy

I’ve been using this for a while now, and have found it a great little trick for accessing services that are blocked due to a firewall.

It’s pretty simple, you just have a few parts to the command string.ย  The first command argument tells ssh to forward a local port (LP) to a remote machine Remote) on a remote port (RP).ย  The second part is something you’re probably familiar with, the destination that you’re connecting to (Destination).

An example with the abbreviations above would be:

Say for example, you ran the command “ssh -L 1234:myInternalServer.com:80 myExternalServer”.ย  In order to access port 80 on myInternalServer.com you’d open up your web browser and point it to http://localhost:1234.ย  It’s as easy as that!

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