Part 2 got Vault holding every secret behind a trusted TLS endpoint, with CI jobs able to authenticate using nothing but a short-lived GitLab-issued JWT. Now we put that to work. This is the Terraform layer — the code that actually turns "I want a VM" into a running

I got tired of clicking through the Proxmox UI every time I wanted a VM. Not because clicking is hard — because clicking isn't reproducible. I'd spin up a VM, install Docker, add my SSH key, set up a user, and a month later I'd

If you've ever tried to issue a wildcard TLS certificate — the kind that covers *.yourdomain.com — you've run into a hard requirement: the DNS-01 ACME challenge. And if you want to automate that challenge without handing your entire DNS zone over to a script, acme-dns is

Running a Containerized Postfix SMTP Relay to Microsoft 365 with Certbot and Docker Compose If you manage a Microsoft 365 tenant and need internal applications, printers, UPS units, or other devices to send email through Exchange Online, an SMTP relay is the standard solution. This post walks through building a

Over fifteen years of managing enterprise infrastructure, I've accumulated a specific kind of knowledge that rarely shows up in documentation: the workarounds, the edge cases, the "this should work but doesn't on Alpine Linux" moments that cost real hours to figure out. This blog