SETKEH

About

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +1000

Who am I ?#

My Name is James Griffis, I am a DevSecOps Engineer and have been working in the field for more than 10 years.

I am primarily a fully remote contractor working on multi-million doller infrastructure projects from regional NSW Australia and always hunting for the next big oportunity.

In my spare time im an avid Fisherman and Hunter and im currently working on getting my licencing sorted out to do these things semi profesionally as well, I enjoy the outdoors and camping somthing DevSecOps is not always conducive to so the goal will be to use it as a method of potential working holidays.

Hire Me

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +1000

I build and secure the platforms that other engineers ship on. Kubernetes, cloud networking, delivery pipelines and the security controls that sit across all of them. Available for contract work.

in the field

14+ yrs

engagements

cloud platforms

The pitch#

I have been doing this since 2011, starting in backend development and datacentre hardware and moving through systems engineering into what is now called DevSecOps. That path matters: I have written the services, racked the servers they ran on, built the pipelines that deployed them, and then been on call when they broke. I speak developer, operator and security in the same conversation, which is usually where platform work succeeds or fails.

How Kubernetes taught me im an idiot

Sun, 27 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +1100

I Have been a DevSecOps Engineer / Computer Systems Engineer for roughly 12 years now and i love my job there is always somthing to learn including humbling lessons about being pigheadded and this is one of those times technology got the better of me and made me feel like an idiot.

Background#

I have recently just upgraded my office to make it a much more suitable WFH environment as Covid has really eliminated the concept of working from an office for me, Part of that upgrade included a nice fancy new server rack with a 1080KG weight capacity and 27U’s of rack space which is awesome but the servers i have to put in it are quite antiquated now being Dell Poweredge 1950’s, I learned very quickly that in the rack they get hot and use 7 tonns of power per minute and like everyone i try to be frugal and save money where i can so i decided ill only use the 1950’s for lab testing and shut them down when not activly testing to save some power and heat in my office. Thats great but what about the services i run like this site and discord bots and all those kinds of things i enjoy hosting/working on ?.

Setting up Arduino IDE in NixOS

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +1100

I have recently installed some smart lights in my house in the form of some cheap Mirribela RGB LED bulbs that are powered by ESP32 chips so i can automate some of the lighting functions in my house as my family are shocking for leaving lights on all the time, These arnt the interesting part of this post though, Thanks to my darling Fiance hating all things technology (but yet being engaged to a DevSecOps Engineer and Tech enthusiast) because Hey google turn on x light is so inconviniant i have had a chance to flex my creative muscles and make an OTA esp-01 motion sensor that uses MQTT and a PIR sensor to trigger lights in Home Assistant.

NixOS Fully Encrypted ZFS Install Guide

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +1000

I have been using NixOS for about 2 months now and a good friend Armageddon has been wanting to try it out for some time so i figured i would use my knowledge i have learned so far and help him generate a config for his new workstation in a VM.

One of the Issues we ran into is that ZFS does not encryopt metadata and we wanted to solve that problem with Luks and encrypt the entire volume so this is how we managed to do it.

NixOS Setup GnuPG Git Commit Signing

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +1000

I have recently installed NixOS as i needed a slightly easier to manage work environment for work, And of course as i backed up my old Gentoo installation in preperation of this change i forgot to backup my GPG key and Git config like the silly saussage i am.

In this post ill show you how i recovered my GPG key from Keybase and configured Git to use that GPG key with home manager in NixOS, I am going to Assume in large parts you know how to use GPG, NixOS, Home-Manager and Git otherwise this post might end up taking a week.