Tools like Claude Code and Antigravity have made it really easy to write competent apps. Our CEO at Speakup even started building internal dashboards and tools himself. I think this is super cool. These tools give normal people the ability to build applications with their own vision and in their own way.
But I noticed something: he still needed the NOC team to help deploy the app and get stuff like e-mail and DNS working.
Happy New Year!
Recently, I learned about a thing called ‘Catalog Zones’. A relatively new thing in DNS that helps simplify your DNS architecture. A Catalog Zones contains one or more ‘real’ zones. And it can be useful for configuring slave / secondary DNS servers.
(I would rather not get into the naming thing; I just want people to understand what I am writing.)
Before catalog zones, you had to provision each new zone to your slave DNS servers. Updates are no problem, most of the time. Just issue a NOTIFY and your slaves will AXFR the zone from the master. But configuring new zones onto slaves used to be a pain (unless you were using the superslave feature).
Some say it couldn’t be done, I’d like to prove you otherwise.
I recently did a project where the combination from the title would come in handy. A secure VPN server that uses an existing Windows Active Directory setup.
After everything is setup. You have an OpenVPN server that authenticates using Active Directory and requires a TOTP token, all running on OPNsense
Alright, let’s get to work! First, go to System > Access > Servers and click Add. Use the following info, replace data to fit your enviroment.
Everyone makes backups, right? Yeah, me neither. I mean, I do make backups, but not as regularly as I should.
Every Mac that was sold in the last 15 years (or thereabouts) comes with an excellent piece of software called Time Machine. It’s set and forget, You do need a place to backup to, though. I own a NAS that runs Debian 10 and it currently has about 💾 12TB worth of storage space and there is still a few TBs free. Perfect place for my 🔄 Time Machine backups, right?