Sunday Snafus

Two unrelated events lead to annoyance

I spent a portion of my Sunday working on my amazing hobby. In particular, I was rebuilding my backups after relocating everything back to locally hosted hardware. If I have not talked about this before, in short what I do is use Autorestic which is a wrapper for Restic to perform daily backups to Backblaze B2. This has worked for me time and time again and while I’ve never been in a “break glass” scenario, I have proven the backups work just through testing and migrations.

Like with anything the thought always enters to do it “properly”. Properly being, enough work that it should be easy to use and reliable. This isn’t to bring a day job mindset to the home hobby, but just good enough that future Evan won’t be cursing past Evan. After some research I noted that Backblaze has a Terraform provider. So I thought perfect, I’ll write up a very quick module for it and build the buckets I need for my backups through it. I’m not a huge fan of the UI on Backblaze so I figured it would be a two for one.

This is when I encountered my first issue. One of the things in my “I don’t want to self host that” list, is my Terraform module registry and state management. For that I just use Hashicorp’s managed offering. The issue was that it seemed their login service was bust. I couldn’t login with my existing account, numerous password resets and username / email combos still prevented me from logging in. I thought maybe they were moving accounts to the newer, Hashicorp Cloud Platform model, but did not seem to be the case. There was no notices on status pages and it did resolve itself later in the evening, but frustrating nonetheless.

The second snafu, was with my own status page. For some reason almost every single monitor started to flap up and down, all with different errors. In some cases it was a DNS fail, in others a ping timeout. I did a reboot of the VM which I will note, it took a bit longer than I expected to, to SSH to the droplet. But even after the reboot the flapping persisted. While things stabilised after a while, it was a mild annoyance, especially when I do have some folks who look at that status page. I don’t think it merits further investigation, maybe I experienced some form of noisy neighbour on the underlying host.

Somedays Sundays are just not simple!