`updatebot` is a script I wrote that automatically opens Gitea Pull
Requests to update container image references in Kubernetes resource
manifests. It checks Github or Docker Hub for the latest release and
updates manifests or Kustommization configuration files to point to the
current version. It then commits the changes and opens a pull request
in Gitea. When combined with ArgoCD automatic synchronization, this
makes updating Kubernetes-deployed applications as simple as clicking
the merge button in the Gitea PR.
To start with, we'll automate Home Assistant upgrades this way.
This template sensor will be migrated to a helper, since Home Assitant
removed the `forecast` attribute of weather sensors and now requires
calling an action (service) to get those data.
Now that the reverse proxy that handles requests from the Internet uses
TLS pass-through, the Ingress for _ntfy_ needs to recognize both the
internal and external name.
Now that the reverse proxy for Internet-facing sites uses TLS
passthrough, the certificate for the _darkchestofwonders.us_ Ingress
needs to be correct. Since Ingress resources can only use either the
default certificate (_*.pyrocufflink.blue_) or a certificate from their
same namespace, we have to move the Certificate and its corresponding
Secret into the _websites_ namespace. Fortunately, this is easy enoug
to do, by setting the appropriate annotations on the Ingress.
To keep the existing certificate (until it expires), I moved the Secret
manually:
```sh
kubectl get secret dcow-cert -o yaml | grep -v namespace | kubectl create -n websites -f -
```
The VM hosts are now managed by the "main" Ansible inventory and thus
appear in the host list ConfigMap. As such, they do not need to be
listed explicitly in the static targets list.
There's obviously a bug or something in `mqttmarionette` because it
occasionally gets "stuck" in a state where it is running but does
not reconnect to the MQTT broker. In such situations, it has to be
restarted (and even then it doesn't shut down correctly but has to
be killed with SIGKILL, usually). I have been doing this manually, but
with this shell script and a corresponding "shell command" integration
in Home Assistant, it can be done automatically. This is similar to
how Home Assistant restarts Mopidy on the living room stereo when it
gets into the same kind of state.
Some machines have the same volume mounted multiple times (e.g.
container hosts, BURP). Alerts will fire for all of these
simultaneously when the filesystem usage passes the threshold. To avoid
getting spammed with a bunch of messages about the same filesystem,
we'll group alerts from the same machine.
I'm not using Matrix for anything anymore, and it seems to have gone
offline. I haven't fully decommissioned it yet, but the Blackbox scrape
is failing, so I'll just disable that bit for now.
This machine never worked correctly; the USB-RS232 adapters would stop
working randomly (and of course it would be whenever I needed to
actually use them). I thought it was something wrong with the server
itself (a Raspberry Pi 3), but the same thing happened when I tried
using a Pi 4.
The new backup server has a plethora of on-board RS-232 ports, so I'm
going to use it as the serial console server, too.
I've rebuilt the Unifi Network controller machine (again);
*unifi3.pyrocufflink.blue* has replaced *unifi2.p.b*. The
`unifi_exporter` no longer works with the latest version of Unifi
Network, so it's not deployed on the new machine.
Zigbee2MQTT commits the cardinal sin of storing state in its
configuration file. This means the file has to be writable and thus
stored in persistent storage rather than in a ConfigMap. As a
consequence, making changes to the configuration when the application is
not running is rather difficult. Case in point: when I added the
internal alias for _mqtt.pyrocufflink.blue_ pointing to the in-cluster
service, Zigbee2MQTT became unable to connect to the broker because it
was using the node port instead of the internal port. Since it could
not connect to the broker, it refused to start, and thus the container
would not stay running long enough to fix the configuration to point
to the correct port.
Fortunately, Zigbee2MQTT also allows configuring settings via
environment variables, which can be managed with a ConfigMap. Luckily,
the values read from environment variables override those from the
configuration file, so pointing to the correct broker port with the
environment variable was sufficient to allow the application to start.
Having name overrides for in-cluster services breaks ACME challenges,
because the server tries to connect to the Service instead of the
Ingress. To fix this, we need to configure both _cert-manager_ and
_step-ca_ to *only* resolve names using the network-wide DNS server.
It turns out, `step ca renew` _can_ renew certificates without mTLS; it
has a `--mtls=false` command-line argument that configures it to use
a JWT signed by the certificate, instead of using the certificate at
the transport layer. This allows clients to renew their certificates
without needing another authentication mechanism, even with the
TLS-terminating proxy.
Invoice Ninja allows attaching documents to invoices, payments,
expenses, etc. Tabitha wants to use this feature to attach receipts for
her expenses, but the photos her phone takes of them are too large for
the default nginx client body limit. We can raise this limit on the
ingress, but we also need to raise it on the "inner" nginx.
The Invoice Ninja container is not designed to be immutable at all; it
makes a bunch of changes to its own contents when it starts up.
Notably, it copies the contents of the `public` and `storage`
directories from the container image to the persistent volume _and then
deletes the source_. Additionally, being a Laravel application, it
needs write access to its own code for caching, etc. Previously, the
`init.sh` script copied the entire `app` directory to a temporary
directory, and then the runtime container mounted that volume over the
top of the original location. This allowed the root filesystem of the
container to be read-only, while the `app` directory was still mutable.
Unfortunately, this makes the startup process incredibly slow, as it
takes a couple of minutes to copy the whole application. It's also
pretty pointless, because the application runs as an unprivileged
process, so it wouldn't have write access to the rest of the filesystem
anyway. As such, I've decided to remove the `readOnlyRootFilesytem`
restriction, and allow the container to run as upstream intends, albeit
begrudgingly.
In-cluster services can now get certificates signed by the DCH CA via
`step-ca`. This issuer uses ACME with the HTTP-01 challenge, so it
can only issue certificates for names in the _pyrocufflink.blue_ zone
that point to the ingress controllers.
Passing port 5671 through the ingress-nginx proxy to the `rabbitmq`
service will allow clients outside the cluster to connect to it.
While we're at it, we'll move the definition of the `tcp-services`
ConfigMap to its own file to make it easier to maintain.
RabbitMQ is an AMQP message broker. It will be used by `xactmon` to
pass messages between the components.
Although RabbitMQ can be deployed in a high-availability cluster, we
don't really need that level of robustness for `xactmon`, so we will
just run a single instance. Deploying a single-host RabbitMQ server
is pretty straightforward.
We're using mTLS authentication; clients need to have a certificate
issued by the *RabbitMQ CA* in order to connect to the message broker.
The `rabbitmq-ca` _cert-manager_ ClusterIssuer issues these certificates
for in-cluster services like `xactmon`.
`xactmon` is a new tool I developed to parse transaction notifications
from banks and automatically import them into my personal finance
tracker. It is designed in a modular fashion, composed of three main
components:
* Receiver
* Processor
* Importer
Components communicate with one another using an AMQP exchange.
Hypothetically, there could be multipel implementations of the receiver
and importer components. Right now, there is only a JMAP receiver,
which fetches email messages (from Fastmail), and a Firefly III
importer. The processor is a singleton, handling notifications from the
receiver, parsing them into a normalized format, and passing them on to
the importer. It uses a set of rules to decide how to parse the
messages, and supports using either a regular expression with named
capture groups or an Awk script to extract the relevant information.
The `xactfetch` script now uses a helper tool, `secretsocket` to
handle looking up secrets. This tool supports various secret source
types, including files, environment variables, and external commands.
Separating this functionality out of the main script makes it a lot
more flexible and pluggable. It's main purpose, though, was actually
to allow `xactfetch` to run in a container while communicating with
`rbw` outside that container, specifically for development puposes.
The `secretsocket` tool reads its configuration from a TOML document.
This document defines the secrets the tool handles, and how to look
them up.
Note that the `xactfetch` container image no longer defines the
`XDG_CONFIG_HOME` environment variable, as it uses Chromium instead of
Firefox now, and the former does not work with a read-only config
directory. As such, we have to mount the `rbw` configuration in the
default location.
Usually, `xactfetch` will only fail for one bank or the other. Rarely
do we want to redownload the data from both banks just because one
failed. The latest version of `xactfetch` supports specifying a bank
name as a CLI argument, so now we can define separate jobs for each
bank. Then, when one Job fails, only that one will be retried later.
It's kind of a bummer that it's so repetitive to define two CronJobs
that differ by only a single command-line argument. I suppose that's
a good argument for using one of the preprocessor tools like Jsonnet
or KCL.
When the `xactfetch` CronJob is triggered manually, it will now skip
the `sleep` step. Presumably, whoever triggered it wants the script
to run _right now_, probably to diagnose a problem.
After the incident this week with the CPU overheating on _vmhost1_, I
want to make sure I know as soon as possible when anything is starting
to get too hot.
Dustin
bot
bot