# davegallant.ca — Blog

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## Setting up Gitea Actions with Tailscale

2023-12-10 by Dave Gallant
gitea gitea‑actions github‑actions tailscale self‑hosted

In this post I’ll go through the process of setting up Gitea Actions and Tailscale, unlocking a simple and secure way to automate workflows.

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## Using AKS and SOCKS to connect to a private Azure DB

2023-05-22 by Dave Gallant
aks aws azure bastion cloud‑sql‑proxy database eks k8s kubectl‑plugin‑socks5‑proxy proxy socat socks

I ran into a roadblock recently where I wanted to be able to conveniently connect to a managed postgres database within Azure that was not running on public subnets. And by conveniently, I mean that I’d rather not have to spin up an ephemeral virtual machine running in the same network and proxy the connection, and I’d like to use a local client (preferably with a GUI). After several web searches, it became evident that Azure does not readily provide much tooling to support this.

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## Watching YouTube in private

2022-12-10 by Dave Gallant
invidious youtube yewtu.be tailscale privacy self‑hosted

I recently stumbled upon yewtu.be and found it intriguing. It not only allows you to watch YouTube without being on YouTube, but it also allows you to create an account and subscribe to channels without a Google account. What sort of wizardry is going on under the hood? It turns out that it’s a hosted instance of invidious.

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## Virtualizing my router with pfSense

2022-04-02 by Dave Gallant
pfsense router openwrt router‑on‑a‑stick proxmox vlan self‑hosted

My aging router has been running OpenWrt for years and for the most part has been quite reliable. OpenWrt is an open-source project used on embedded devices to route network traffic. It supports many different configurations and there exists a large index of packages. Ever since I’ve connected some standalone wireless access points, I’ve had less of a need for an off-the-shelf all-in-one wireless router combo. I’ve also recently been experiencing instability with my router (likely the result of a combination of configuration tweaking and firmware updating). OpenWrt has served me well, but it is time to move on!

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## Backing up gmail with Synology

2022-03-13 by Dave Gallant
synology gmail backup ransomware

I’ve used gmail since the beta launched touting a whopping 1GB of storage. I thought this was a massive leap in email technology at the time. I was lucky enough to get an invite fairly quickly. Not suprisingly, I have many years of emails, attachments, and photos. I certainly do not want to lose the content of many of these emails. Despite the redundancy of the data that Google secures, I still feel better retaining a copy of this data on my own physical machines.

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## Running K3s in LXC on Proxmox

2021-11-14 by Dave Gallant
k3s proxmox lxc self‑hosted
It has been a while since I’ve actively used Kubernetes and wanted to explore the evolution of tools such as Helm and Tekton. I decided to deploy K3s, since I’ve had success with deploying it on resource-contrained Raspberry Pis in the past. I thought that this time it’d be convenient to have K3s running in a LXC container on Proxmox. This would allow for easy snapshotting of the entire Kubernetes deployment.
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## Replacing docker with podman on macOS (and Linux)

2021-10-11 by Dave Gallant
docker podman containers

There are a number of reasons why you might want to replace docker, especially on macOS. The following feature bundled in Docker Desktop might have motivated you enough to consider replacing docker:

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## Automatically rotating AWS access keys

2021-09-17 by Dave Gallant
aws python security aws‑vault
Rotating credentials is a security best practice. This morning, I read a question about automatically rotating AWS Access Keys without having to go through the hassle of navigating the AWS console. There are some existing solutions already, but I decided to write a script since it was incredibly simple. The script could be packed up as a systemd/launchd service to continually rotate access keys in the background. In the longer term, migrating my local workflows to aws-vault seems like a more secure solution.
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## Why I threw out my dotfiles

2021-09-08 by Dave Gallant
nix dotfiles home‑manager

Over the years I have collected a number of dotfiles that I have shared across both Linux and macOS machines (`~/.zshrc`, `~/.config/git/config`, `~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf`, etc). I have tried several different ways to manage them, including bare git repos and utilities such as GNU Stow. These solutions work well enough, but I have since found what I would consider a much better solution for organizing user configuration: home-manager.

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## What to do with a homelab

2021-09-06 by Dave Gallant
self‑hosted proxmox tailscale

A homelab can be an inexpensive way to host a multitude of internal/external services and learn a lot in the process.

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