Monoliths & Microservices

An opinionated overview

 Posted on 2022-07-18

Ever since diving into the software development world I was troubled by a duality: On the one hand I have built and operated many services described as monolithic with relative ease, on the other hand I’m always told I, and others, should build microservices because they are better in a variety of ways. With this post I’m going to compare both software architectures by looking at the key benefits often associated with microservices and additional considerations I think are important. [Read More]
software architecture  infrastructure  devops  microservices  monoliths 

The WSL Onion

Calling powershell.exe from PowerShell inside WSL

 Posted on 2022-04-06

The other day I was playing around in WSL with a colleague of mine and we did this: # We start out in WSL Debian and enter PowerShell Core marco@box:~$ pwsh PowerShell 7.2.2 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. https://aka.ms/powershell Type 'help' to get help. # Then we get the major version of the active PowerShell session PS /home/marco> ($PSVersionTable.PSVersion).Major 7 # Then we call powershell.exe and get a completely different version! PS /home/marco> (powershell. [Read More]
powershell  wsl  debian  windows 

Windows Subsystem For Linux 2: Debian+Podman

 Posted on 2022-04-04

The problem: Docker itself can’t be run in WSL2 as it requires the docker daemon, usually run though sysemd. The solution: Podman works just fine and can easilly be installed, allthough we will need to configure some things to make it work properly. Install Podman The official installation instructions are a great place to find out how to install on your distro. On my Debian 11 (bullseye) system I used apt: sudo apt install podman [Read More]
wsl  debian  docker  podman 

Going Part Time

(Re)starting my indie journey

 Posted on 2022-04-03

Starting on the first of March 2022 I no longer work full-time in my day job. That sentence has been about a year in the making and makes me both happy and a bit scared about the future. I have been doing some side-hustle and projects since I’ve been 16 building websites with my dad, so you could say it has been a long time coming. Right now I have set myself three mid-term goals to build up something that brings me joy and financial independence. [Read More]
personal 

Simple HTTP Status Monitor Using Curl

 Posted on 2022-03-16

Using some output redirection and the --write-out parameter we can produce a script that simply outputs the status code of a curl request. This script can then be used as the basis for a simple monitoring of a URL. #! /bin/bash # Description: Returns the HTTP response code obtained by curl on the URL using the specified HTTP method # Usage: script.sh GET https://example.org # Usage: scripts.sh POST https://example.org # Author: marco@kamner. [Read More]
curl  monitoring  bash 

Local S3 with MinIO in Django

 Posted on 2021-11-06

In production I would consider it best practice to use a S3 solution for serving assets. Namely static files and user-generated media. This describes my setup on how to do this locally too. The main benefit for me is that there is less of a difference between environments and I can test S3 specific features in my app. Setup I will assume a already working Django project and MacOS with [[brew]] installed, but brew specific parts are easilly replicated on different systems using their native package managers. [Read More]
python  django  s3  minio 

Hidden WSL Fileshare

 Posted on 2021-08-30

WSL file systems get exposed as a hidden share network share: \\wsl$\<WSL Name>\<path\to\file>

For example, my Debian home folder is at: \\wsl$\Debian\home\kamner

wsl  windows 

Windows Terminal: Open New WSL Tab In Linux Home Folder

 Posted on 2021-08-30

The path you are in when opening a new WSL tab is determined by startingDirectory. This parameter needs to be a valid Windows path, which isn’t great if we want to end up in /home/kamner inside WSL. The nice thing about WSL is that it will resolve windows paths into their equivalent WSL/linux path if possible. For example, C:\Scripts would resolve to /mnt/c/Scripts. Using this and the neat trick that the WSL filesystem is exposed as a a hidden fileshare ([[technology/windows/wsl-hidden-fileshare]]) we can get to where we want. [Read More]
wsl  windows  windows-terminal 

Resolve .local Through Nameserver With Netplan

 Posted on 2021-08-13

When using netplan it is easy to force .local DNS requests to go to you nameservers instead of being only resolved locally (the default and standard).

This also works with all other strange .WHATEVER domains you may have lying around in your organization.

Snippet from netplan configuration:

 nameservers:
        addresses:
          - X
          - Y
        search:
          - local
          - myotherstupiddomain
dns  netplan  linux  sysadmin