colmena VS aws-vault

- rpi nas

I also wipe my entire rootfs every boot with a zfs snapshot rollback[2] using the impermanence module[3] to keep specific stateful data one one of two datasets with regular snapshots: one is backed up with zfs send, the other is just for cache between reboots.

It took a little puzzling to get started, because I didn’t know about the impermanence module, so I built my own hacky solution. But I really love this setup. And the way I don’t have cruft to clean.

Also my backups are so much smaller now :’-)

[1]: https://colmena.cli.rs/

Answering your broader question (secret management) colmena does that for me outside the Nix store. I also use git-crypt to store secrets in the repo. There are also more Nix-y alternatives like agenix.

There are 4 tools I'm taking into consideration right now, but every suggestion is welcome: 1. deploy-rs - I don't know anything about it, heard about it like a day or two ago 2. NixOps - the official one, I don't know what to think, but I have concerns about Flakes compatibility 3. morph - I understand this as "NixOps, but better", no more toughs. 4. colmena - seems to be pretty straightforward with quite nice docs

They shouldn't be, Colmena stringifies the keyFile values which is the same approach as NixOps uses to avoid this. Apparently I implemented that part myself, haha.

I myself use colmena's apply-local. Anyway, totally relate to the meme. Using the same tool to manage your servers and workstations, and reusing stuff between them is amazing.

Undying fondness for aws-vault to securely cache my session credentials.

you might want to check https://github.com/99designs/keyring and https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault

You install aws-vault (https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault), configure it according to the README and make sure you have an SSO entry that is compatible, i.e.:

I use a aws-vault to switch thought all profiles on all aws account. It support SSO with 2FA.

Nice! Do I understand this correctly?

You use aws-vault(https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault) and configure it with IAM and MFA with YubiKeys. You configure e.g. the profile jonsmith.

When you run

aws-vault exec jonsmith -- aws s3 ls

it will ask you, e.g. every hour to confirm with YubiKeys and cache the key for one hour. After that the temporary keys expire. Can you also store keys different from AWS?

Don't know about kube, but awscli and a few others decouple the idea of getting credentials and doing the actions. You can use the password every time, but a better way is to either use the preconfigured profile or some wrapper which does use the keychain. For example https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault/ supports one-off commands and shell sessions with pre-populated tokens.

It sounds like you have AWS SSO enabled and need a way to run scripts manually in the terminal. Take a look at the aws-vault project that makes it easy working with multiple AWS accounts.

A tool called aws-vault can fix the "insecure" part.

Take a look at aws-vault, which has support for SSO and running in a docker container.

I read the docs on: https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault