EddBeen a while since I blogged, so it's time for the latest installment in "Edd massively over-complicates things with SSH certificates" This time, a post about how I got rid of the need to create a new sub account on my #Hetzner Storage Box every time I wanted to create a new VM and back it up with #Borg. Definitely easier ways to have achieved it, but it shows of the versatility of ssh certificates, and #StepCA that's powering them in my home lab.
Adapting Step CA's SSH user certificates to safely automate provisioning Borg backups on Hetzner Storage Boxes
Intro Over the Christmas break, I suffered a complete NAS failure, and thanks to QNAP’s custom extensions to the standard Linux software RAID, I wasn’t able to recover any data off it. Now, of course, I had backups; and everything I had backed up (except for my Bluesky PDS, which I barely use) restored absolutely fine. However, I was not backing everything up. This was because my backup setup for a new server in my home lab was largely a manual process, and there were a number of services I decided weren’t worth the effort. Having now had to spend the time rebuilding them all, I regret that decision, and so now I wanted to fix the issue, so the backups were automatically setup whenever I deployed a host. This post will explain how I achieved that using SSH Certificates, because I am an unapologetic SSH certificate fanboy.
Frank B
Jeremy, aka Jaharmi
Julien Riou
Daniel S. Reichenbach