The Problem#

At work we’re in the middle of a large lift and shift migration from VMware to AWS (for the same reason everyone is). Hundreds of servers across multiple departments, moved in waves.

The firewall rules for these servers come from everywhere. Palo Alto firewalls, host-based firewalls, department-specific switches, department-specific IT teams, random appliances that predate much of the current staff. Years of accumulated rules from multiple sources, and now they all need to become AWS security groups.

Issue#

Royal Road likes to annoy pirates. This is (arguably) good.

Royal Road doesn’t care if they annoy RSS users. This is bad.

Here’s a walkthrough of the problem and the fix.

The Problem:#

First, let’s look at the full picture of why this is happening.

The Original Website HTML (Simplified)

When you visit the Royal Road chapter in your browser, the full page’s HTML looks something like this. Your browser loads thesection and the section.

What is this?#

Let’s say you wanted to buy a domain like edfig.dev. You can host a personal blog at this address. Once you buy the domain, not only can you host content, but with a bit more tinkering you can send and receive emails with it.

You can email eddie@edfig.dev or admin@edfig.dev and that email will make its way to my inbox. You can set up rules to handle specific addresses too.

RSS - Still Very Useful#

I like having a centralized curated list of content. I’d rather go to a single page to catch up on new content instead of visiting or remembering to visit a bunch of different sites. I also don’t like having to deal with cookies and sites tracking my every move.

I use: FreshRSS, RSSHub, and RSSHub-Radar

I used to only use RSS for blogs and other text based content but with the above tools I can RSS-ify most anything.

NOTE. This has not been updated in a long time.#

This is just a general overview of what I’m running. Updated sporadically, only includes things I’m actively using or have deployed.

Networking#

In Production#

• Unifi
  • UDM Pro
  • 3 APs
  • PoE and non-PoE switches
  • Various cameras

Services#

Self-hosted:

• NGINX Proxy Manager
• Immich. Photo Backup.
• Paperless-NGX. Document storage
• Recipes. Recipes I’ve saved.
• DokuWiki. Personal wiki.
• MicroBin. “paste bin” share.
• FreshRSS. RSS aggregator
• Forgejo. Git repos.

Cloud#

I came from an Azure shop years ago, currently on AWS. I’ve had personal projects on Oracle and AWS but pulled everything down to my local server.