Fixing random 502s with GCP load balancer and kubernetes (GKE)

So, last week our kibana dashboard kept crashing due to random 502 errors. The errors did not happen when using kubectl port-forward so I assumed something was wrong with the load balancer config but couldn’t find anything to tweak. After respose from support it’s most likely an error due to kibana server keepalive default was […]

Automated certificates with HTTPS Ingress on GKE and google-managed certificates

Ok, why this guide? There are lots of ways of automating HTTPS on Kubernetes and some apply on GKE. I was already a bit put off by cert-manager not being official/supported and when it appeared it wouldn’t work at all with godaddy as DNS provider I went digging and found this: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gke-managed-certs It seemed promising […]

How to push temperature and humidity from Telldus API to elasticsearch

Introduction After noticing that logstash now has a http_poller plugin and the fact that Telldus Live provides a JSON API i thought getting the data into elasticsearch for graphing in Kibana would be a piece of cake. It turns it wasn’t really piece of cake but I took the time to piece together the challenges […]

Keep track of your Zimbra 8.7+ server with an ELK stack

Kibana graphs are extremely useful for keeping track of server health! So why not use it to keep track of your Zimbra server? This article describes how to set up grok filters for parsing email relay (inbound, outbound, internal etc.) and spam rejection in the new and awesome postscreen which has really cleaned up spam […]

Sending dicts, lists etc. as arguments to a fabric task using json

A quick tip if you need to send more complex objects than strings to a fabric task. It’s basically just a matter of proper escaping and using python’s json library to parse. Keep in mind: Put single quotes around the “argument” (the whole json string) and use doublequotes in the json structure itself Escape all […]

How to get Linux NetworkManager to accept DNS servers from VPN

Linux NetworkManager is a great utility that usually “just works”, yesterday I did however notice that I was not able to access an internal network while using an OpenVPN connection through NetworkManager because the domain names were not resolved as they should (my normal DNS was used instead of the DNS that the openvpn server […]

How to host WordPress admin on a seperate domain and subfolder

Introduction So why would you want to do this when most posts on the Internet indicate that this is security by obscurity and a bad idea. Well, first and most important, at least for me – I wan’t my wordpress admin to be protected by HTTPS encryption but SSL certificates are expensive so I don’t […]

How to sync Notes and Tasks from Zimbra to Thunderbird

Introduction Are you using Zimbra to store your tasks or maybe just make notes online but want these to be available when you are offline as well? This guide describes how to set this up by using Mozilla Thunderbird on your computer. This guide was composed on Ubuntu Linux but will work on any operating […]