A friend mentioned OriginStamp to me. NB There are 2 sites: originstamp.com and originstamp.org. It’s an interesting project. It’s a solution for providing auditable proof that you had a(ccess to) some digital thing before a certain date. OriginStamp provides user-|developer-friendly means to submit files|hashes (of your content) and have these bundled into transactions that are submitted to e.g. bitcoin. I won’t attempt to duplicate the narrative here, review OriginStamp’s site and some of its content.

Until today, I’d not accessed a Google Container Registry repo from a non-GKE Kubernetes deployment. It turns out that it’s pretty well-documented (link) but, here’s an end-end example. Assuming: BILLING=[[YOUR-BILLING]] PROJECT=[[YOUR-PROJECT]] SERVER="us.gcr.io" If not already: gcloud projects create {$PROJECT} gcloud beta billing projects link ${PROJECT} \ --billing-account=${BILLING} gcloud services enable containerregistry.googleapis.com \ --project=${PROJECT} Container Registry IMAGE="busybox" # Or ... docker pull ${IMAGE} docker tag \ ${IMAGE} \ ${SERVER}/${PROJECT}/${IMAGE} docker push ${SERVER}/${PROJECT}/${IMAGE} gcloud container images list-tags ${SERVER}/${PROJECT}/${IMAGE} Service Account Create a service account that’s permitted to download (read-only) images from this project’s registry

I think it would be valuable if Google were to provide volumes in Cloud Build of package registries (e.g. Go Modules; PyPi; Maven; NPM etc.). Google provides a mirror of a subset of Docker Hub. This confers several benefits: Google’s imprimatur; speed (latency); bandwidth; and convenience. The same benefits would apply to package registries. In the meantime, there’s a hacky way to gain some of the benefits of these when using Cloud Build.

The prolific Alex Ellis has a new project, Inlets. Here’s a quick tutorial using Google Compute Platform’s (GCP) Compute Engine (GCE). NB I’m using one of Google’s “Always free” f1-micro instances but you may still pay for network *gress and storage Assumptions I’m assuming you’ve a Google account, have used GCP and have a billing account established, i.e. the following returns at least one billing account: gcloud beta billing accounts list If you’ve only one billing account and it’s the one you wish to use, then you can:

The FBI Portland published an interesting advisory with several, sensible recommendations including firewalling IoT devices from other devices on a home network. I decided to deploy a redundant Trendnet TEW-812DRU version 2.0 for this purpose. Caveat Developer: Before I go further, I don’t recommend installing DD-WRT on a Trendnet TEW-812DRU unless you’re willing to brick the device irrecoverably. I read the DD-WRT instructions several times (“peacock thread”,router database – do not use v3.

I’ve spent a few days exploring [Google Fit SDK] as I try to wean myself from my obsession with metrics (of all forms). A quick Googling got me to Robert’s Exporter Google Fit Daily Steps, Weight and Distance to a Google Sheet. This works and is probably where I should have stopped… avoiding the rabbit hole that I’ve been down… I threw together a simple Golang implementation of the SDK using Google’s Golang API Client Library.

I’m obsessing over Prometheus exporters. First came Linode Exporter, then GCP Exporter and, on Sunday, I stumbled upon a reverse-engineered API for Google Home devices and so wrote a very basic Google Home SDK and a similarly basic Google Home Exporter: The SDK only implements /setup/eureka_info and then only some of the returned properties. There’s not a lot of metric-like data to use besides SignalLevel (signal_level) and NoiseLevel (noise_level). I’m not clear on the meaning of some of the properties.

I think (!?) this interesting learning experience started with Envoy Go Extensions. IIUC, Cilium contributed this mechanism (Envoy Go Extensions) by which it’s possible to extend Envoy using Golang. The documentation references BPF. Cilium and BNF were both unfamiliar technologies to me and so began my learning. This part of the journey concludes with Weave Scope. I learned that Cilium is a CNI implementation that may be used with Kubernetes. GKE defaults (but is not limited to) to Google’s own CNI implementation (link).

Earlier this week I discussed a Linode Prometheus Exporter. I added metrics for Digital Ocean’s Managed Kubernetes service to @metalmatze’s Digital Ocean Exporter. This left, metrics for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) which has, for many years, been my primary cloud platform. So, today I wrote Prometheus Exporter for Google Cloud Platform. All 3 of these exporters follow the template laid down by @metalmatze and, because each of these services has a well-written Golang SDK, it’s straightforward to implement an exporter for each of them.

Yesterday I discussed a Linode Prometheus Exporter and tantalized use of Prometheus AlertManager. Success: Configure The process is straightforward although I found the Prometheus (config) documentation slightly unwieldy to navigate :-( The overall process is documented. Here are the steps I took: Configure Prometheus Configure AlertManager Revise Docker Compose Configure Prometheus Added the following to prometheus.yml: rule_files: - "/etc/alertmanager/rules/linode.yml" alerting: alertmanagers: - scheme: http static_configs: - targets: - "alertmanager:9093" Rules must be defined in separate rules files.