Hello everyone! I got some interesting bits to share with you all this week, including how to get free custom email addresses! I also share my opinions on Jest after writing a lot of tests recently. My server migration plans are pretty spicy, and I really need some help setting up K3OS on my Pi with Rancher.
Free custom email addresses with Cloudflare & Postmark!
(assuming you already have a custom domain and email address)
Cloudflare recently launched a new service called Email Routing, it lets you forward emails on your domain, to any other email address outside your domain.
It's free to use with any domain connected to their platform, and when combined with Postmark, can create a free and fully-functional custom email address!
The reason we require Postmark, is that Cloudflare currently doesn't support sending email, only receiving it. It's good to know though that Postmark only allows 100 emails to be sent per month for free, and after that you'll have to pony up.
Super quick how-to
Log into Cloudflare and select your domain
In the sidebar, click “Email”
Follow the walkthrough to configure Email Routing
Test that you receive incoming emails to your new address
Go to postmarkapp.com and create an account for Postmark
Add your domain and follow the steps to configure your DNS records
Create an SMTP token following this help article for the “Transactional” message stream: https://postmarkapp.com/support/article/811-what-are-the-smtp-details-api-tokens-i-should-be-using
In Gmail settings, configure a “send mail as” account, using the credentials you just obtained. Follow the help guide above to get the URL, port, and TLS settings.
You should be receiving and sending email on your custom address!
Thoughts on Jest
I recently have been writing a lot of tests for a web scraper to make sure it doesn't break on me.
It's been pretty painful, as I'm not implementing any new or interesting features, just testing old ones. Jest does a great job at making it easy, providing plenty of tools, but even it can't make writing tests exciting.
I'll give a quick shoutout to Snapshots though, as they check element by element on a webpage to see if anything has changed, which is pretty awesome for my use case.
Other than that, tests are boring, but they play a vital role in keeping software maintainable and reliable.
Server migration plans!
I am soon going to be migrating from Proxmox, my current hypervisor, to Harvester, a hypervisor created by SUSE Rancher. What's different about Harvester is that it uses Kubernetes at it's core to handle the orchestration of all these VMs. This allows me to manage my virtual machines the same way I manage my containers, which is pretty awesome. The best part is that it is integrated right inside my Rancher dashboard, so I can manage my workloads and my VMs from a single pane of glass. I haven't done it yet, so we'll see how it goes, but I am super excited!
Help please!
I've been trying to set up K3OS on my Pi 4 and get Rancher installed. I got an Arm overlay installation working on top of Ubuntu Server 20.04(?), but every time I install Rancher I get a Crashloopbackoff error. If you have any ideas, please email in, I am desperate.
FYI I tried both rancher-latest and rancher-stable, Helm command below:
helm install rancher rancher-stable/rancher \
--namespace cattle-system \
--set hostname=rancher.mgmt.box \
--set bootstrapPassword=admin \
--set replicas=1That's all folks
Sorry for the late newsletter again, been super busy lately.
Cya next week!
--reese