Software Engineering

VPN’s have traditionally been slow, complex and hard to set up and configure. That all changed several years ago when Wireguard was officially merged into the mainline Linux kernel (src). I won’t go over all the reasons for why you should want to use Wireguard in this article, instead I will be focusing on just how easy it is to set up and configure. For this tutorial we will be using Terraform to stand up a Digital Ocean droplet and then install Wireguard onto that. The Digital Ocean droplet will be acting as our “server” in this example and we will be using our own computer as the “client”. Of course, you don’t have to use Terraform, you just need a Linux box to install Wireguard on. You can find the code for this tutorial on my personal Git server [here](https://git.hackanooga.com/Mike Conrad/wireguard-terraform-digitalocean). ...

TDLR: If you just want the code you can find a convenient script on my Gitea server [here](https://git.hackanooga.com/Mike Conrad/random_scripts/src/branch/master/allow_only_cloudflare_traffic.sh). This version has been slightly modified so that it will work on more systems. I have been using Cloudflare for several years for both personal and professional projects. The free plan has some various gracious limits and it’s a great way to clear out some low hanging fruit and improve the security of your application. If you’re not familiar with how it works, basically Cloudflare has two modes for DNS records. DNS Only and Proxied. The only way to get the advantages of Cloudflare is to use Proxied mode. Cloudflare has some great documentation on how all of their services work but basically what happens is that you are pointing your domain to Cloudflare and Cloudflare provisions their network of Proxy servers to handle requests for your domain. ...

I recently decided to set up a Docker swarm cluster for a project I was working on. If you aren’t familiar with Swarm mode, it is similar in some ways to k8s but with much less complexity and it is built into Docker. If you are looking for a fairly straightforward way to deploy containers across a number of nodes without all the overhead of k8s it can be a good choice, however it isn’t a very popular or widespread solution these days. ...

These are some handy snippets I use on a regular basis when managing containers. I have one server in particular that can sometimes end up with 50 to 100 orphaned containers for various reasons. The easiest/quickest way to stop all of them is to do something like this: docker container stop $(docker container ps -q) Let me break this down in case you are not familiar with the syntax. Basically we are passing the output of docker container ps -q into docker container stop. This works because the stop command can take a list of container ids which is what we get when passing the -q flag to docker container ps. ...

In our previous post we got to the point of displaying an OTP in our card component. Now it is time to refactor a bit and implement a countdown functionality to see when this token will expire. For now we will go ahead and add this logic into our Card component. In order to figure out how to build this countdown timer we first need to understand how the TOTP counter is calculated. ...

In part 1 of this series we built out a basic backend using KeystoneJS. In this part we will go ahead and start a new React frontend that will interact with our backend. We will be using Vite. Let’s get started. Make sure you are in the authenticator folder and run the following: $ yarn create vite@latest yarn create v1.22.21 [1/4] Resolving packages... [2/4] Fetching packages... [3/4] Linking dependencies... [4/4] Building fresh packages... success Installed "[email protected]" with binaries: - create-vite - cva ✔ Project name: … frontend ✔ Select a framework: › React ✔ Select a variant: › TypeScript Scaffolding project in /home/Mike Conrad/projects/authenticator/frontend... Done. Now run: cd frontend yarn yarn dev Done in 10.20s. Let’s go ahead and go into our frontend directory and get started: ...

In this series of articles we are going to be building an authenticator app using KeystoneJS for the backend and React for the frontend. The concept is pretty simple and yes there are a bunch out there already but I recently had a need to learn some of the ins and outs of TOTP tokens and thought this project would be a fun idea. Let’s get started. Step 1: Init keystone app Open up a terminal and create a blank keystone project. We are going to call our app authenticator to keep things simple. ...

While working for Morrison I had the pleasure of building a website for Hoots Wings. The CMS was Perch and it was mostly HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript on the frontend, however I built out a customer store locator using NodeJS and VueJS. I was the sole frontend developer responsible for taking the designs from SketchUp and translating them to the site you see now. Most of the blocks and templates are built using a mix of PHP and HTML/SCSS. There was also some JavaScript for things like getting the users location and rendering popups/modals. ...

Back around 2014 I took on my first freelance development project for a Homeschool Co-op here in Chattanooga called Hilger Higher Learning. The problem that they were trying to solve involved managing grades and report cards for their students. In the past, they had a developer build a rudimentary web application that would allow them to enter grades for students, however it lacked any sort of concurrency meaning that if two teachers were making changes to the same student at the same time, teacher b’s changes would overwrite teacher a’s changes. This was obviously a huge headache. ...