posts on james(bl)og

Go vanity imports with Caddy

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Go uses the full URL to a repo to fetch it with go get, i.e. go get github.com/username/module fetches it from exactly that repo.

It can be nice not to tie yourself to a specific repository host. The go command always fetches using a query string of go-get=1.

We can make use of this in Caddy to return an HTML meta tag understood by go get to point at the actual repo; or otherwise redirect to the module’s documentation on pkg.go.dev.

Setting up NixOS to use an SSH CA

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 21:00:00 +0000

In my previous post I described how to set up an SSH certificate authority using a YubiKey.

I’ve been experimenting with NixOS again recently — having had several failed attempts before due to the utterly impenetrable documentation — but I’m curious enough to spend a bit more effort on it.

Even though I’m only running it in test VMs right now I still want to get a good feel for running it on a server, so I want to be able to log in using a signed certificate.

YubiKey as an SSH Certificate Authority

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 16:00:00 +0000

This is a guide to setting up a YubiKey for use as an offline SSH certificate authority.

This assumes a brand new YubiKey with no prior configuration on it, to be used solely as a CA.

Why?

Typically a CA should be on a secured, isolated machine. Using a dedicated YubiKey means you can isolate your CA and keep it in a drawer so that it can’t be accessed. YubiKeys offer protections such as requiring a PIN and/or touching the key for PIV operations.

Hello, Hugo

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 17:01:22 +0000

I posted to my Tumblr blog that I had relocated to here.

Forgetting that I’d set Tumblr to automatically share new posts to Twitter, that post got tweeted and a few people picked it up. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there’s not much interesting here yet. :-)

Over time I might start to post some technical things here. I haven’t really decided yet. Largely I just wanted to play with Hugo.

FreeBSD on BigV - Now with VirtIO!

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 21:42:35 +0000

FreeBSD 8.4 was recently released. I noticed in the release notes that virtio is now enabled by default. Hurrah!

With this in mind, I decided to give Bytemark’s BigV another go. Previously I’d had to use a custom CD image and semi-manual installation process to use FreeBSD on BigV, or otherwise face the performance penalties for using KVM’s IDE emulation. (It’s really slow.)

The good news is that with 8.4-RELEASE you don’t have to do a thing to get virtio to work. It detected the disk and network adapter fine. The VM is flying along. Very happy with that.

SmartOS on Hetzner EX 4S

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 16:56:18 +0000

I recently decided to try SmartOS as it looks to be a very interesting virtualization platform. I didn’t have a machine to spare to trial it, so I decided to rent a Hetzner EX4S with a 16GB flash drive.

For the initial install I asked Hetzner to set up the server to boot to their rescue environment, rather than preinstall one of their OS images. From here I was able to wget the SmartOS USB image and dd it to the flash drive.