Topic
26 matching entries across Articles, TIL and Projects.
Long-form writing tagged Automation.
A username rename looks like one command and touches a dozen things. What a Linux account is actually referenced by, how to change it remotely without locking yourself out, and why changing the UID is a different job entirely.
I used Terraform to fetch public domain feeds, turn them into Cloudflare Zero Trust lists and enforce them with a Gateway DNS policy that remains reviewable as code.
A small Cloudflare Worker can provide a controlled front end for Gateway allow-list changes while KV supplies recovery, synchronization and operational visibility.
A practical PowerShell workflow for inventorying GitLab projects, collecting only CI-relevant files and identifying copied pipeline drift.
How I turned successful sandbox pipelines into narrow, reviewable GitLab merge requests without allowing automation to rewrite source repositories blindly.
How to mirror GitLab repositories into an isolated group, preserve release history and prevent test pipelines from affecting production.
A practical approach to container CI/CD: prove the build, registry and deployment path manually, then automate the same operations with GitLab.
A practical standard for PowerShell that makes production automation predictable, testable, supportable and safe to change.
How to design backup automation that converges configuration safely, proves each run, controls retention and keeps restore testing separate from job success.
How to model, validate and deploy Cloudflare device posture checks as reusable configuration without coupling policy intent to environment-specific object IDs.
A safe pattern for automating PKI inventory, expiry monitoring, CA health checks, maintenance evidence and certificate lifecycle tasks without hiding risk.
A practical DevSecOps pipeline for infrastructure changes: validate early, protect credentials, inspect plans, approve risk and retain deployment evidence.
Practical lessons from an enterprise ZTNA deployment: foundations, staged migration, policy automation, legacy applications, change management, and measurement.
A practical pattern for consuming AWS/Azure network feeds, calculating desired state and safely synchronising Cloudflare Zero Trust lists with PowerShell.
As Zero Trust policy grows, the engineering problem shifts from configuring a dashboard to safely compiling, validating and deploying policy across environments.
Short notes and fixes tagged Automation.
A start target that checks whether a socket path exists will skip starting the daemon after a crash, then report success. Test for a live listener, not for a file.
Agent start-up logic in ~/.profile works when you log in at the machine and silently does nothing when you connect over SSH. Which startup file runs depends on how the shell was invoked.
A rebuildable demo environment should not destroy the backend that stores its state, so I manage the S3/DynamoDB backend as a separate Terraform project.
An HTTP data source can retrieve an external domain feed, but the useful pattern is to validate and normalize it before Terraform materializes enforcement objects.
When Terraform already knows the cloud subnets, those values can become inputs to WARP routing instead of being copied into a second manually maintained list.
In my Gateway allow-list Worker, Cloudflare lists remain the enforcement state while Workers KV stores backup and synchronization metadata.
When learning a new platform, proving the deployment manually first turns CI/CD into automation of a known-good process.
Projects and implementation patterns tagged Automation.
Turning an undocumented Raspberry Pi media box into something that can be rebuilt from a written kit: a full configuration survey, systemd-managed networking with a fail-closed tunnel, and a verification checklist that tests the failure path.
A Cloudflare Worker that provides a narrow, Access-protected workflow for validated Gateway allow-list changes with DNS/HTTP targeting and Workers KV backup.
A Terraform project that consumes remote domain feeds, normalizes them into Cloudflare Zero Trust lists and builds a Gateway DNS blocking policy from the generated data.
An end-to-end learning project covering a minimal Node.js service, containerisation, local testing, registry publishing, managed deployment and GitLab CI/CD automation.
