So in my previous post I mentioned that we were going to spend the Christmas period in the UK, which we did.
We spent a couple of days there, meeting my parents, and family. We also persuaded my sister to drive us to Scarborough so that we could hang out on the beach for an afternoon.
Finland has lots of lakes, but it doesn't have proper waves. So it was surprisingly good just to wade in the sea and see waves! Unfortunately our child was a wee bit too scared to ride on a donkey!
Unfortunately upon our return to Finland we all tested positive for COVID-19, me first, then the child, and about three days later my wife. We had negative tests in advance of our flights home, so we figure that either the tests were broken, or we were infected in the airplane/airport.
Thankfully things weren't too bad, we stayed indoors for the appropriate length of time, and a combination of a couple of neighbours and online shopping meant we didn't run out of food.
Since I've been back home I've been automating AWS activities with aws-utils, and updating my simple host-automation system, marionette.
Marionette is something that was inspired by puppet, the configuration management utility, but it runs upon localhost only. Despite the small number of integrated primitives it actually works surprisingly well, and although I don't expect it will ever become popular it was an interesting research project.
The aws-utilities? They were specifically put together because I've worked in a few places where infrastructure is setup with terraform, or cloudformation, but there are always the odd thing that is configured manually. Typically we'll have an openvpn gateway which uses a manually maintained IP allow-list, or some admin-server which has a security-group maintained somewhat manually.
Having the ability to update a bunch of rules with your external IP, as a single command, across a number of AWS accounts/roles, and a number of security-groups is an enormous time-saver when your home IP changes.
I'd quite like to add more things to that collection, but there's no particular rush.