IbnuNowshad

The journey from Chennai to Riyadh began not with plane tickets, but with a WhatsApp message on March 4th. “This is Sahil (name redacted for privacy) from XYZ Enterprises, Mumbai,” the message read. “We have received your contact number from Employer (my employer name)/visa sponsor Consultancy Name Co., KSA, regarding your medical and visa process.”

And just like that, my Saudi relocation adventure began.

Passport Renewal

The first challenge arrived immediately - my passport was in renewal. “My passport renewal is in progress,” I replied. “I am expecting it in my hand this week. In sha Allah!”

Yesterday, I had an experience that crystallized the kind of work culture I believe in. It wasn’t a complex technical problem or a groundbreaking new technology. It was a first-round interview for a DevOps Engineer position, but it was the human dynamic that made it truly memorable.

The atypical interview setup

On one side of the virtual table was me. I started my journey in the tech world 15 years ago as a Network Engineer right after graduation. Today, I work as a Cloud and Security Architect, carrying a decade and a half of experience.

Recently, I decided to enhance the security and user experience of my Grafana instance by implementing Single Sign-On (SSO) with Zitadel as the identity provider. I have written an article a year ago for something similar with Zitadel and Tailscale. In this blog post, I’ll share my experience following the process outlined in this helpful article, along with some additional insights and tips I discovered along the way.

What is Zitadel? (to those wonder)

Zitadel is an open-source identity management platform that provides authentication, authorization, and user management functionality. It supports various authentication protocols including OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (OIDC), making it an excellent choice for implementing SSO across multiple applications.

I recently implemented a solution to automate my Bind9 zone file updates in my private infrastructure using GitHub Actions with free runners, all secured through a Tailscale overlay network. This setup has significantly improved my workflow and provided me with both flexibility and security. In this post, I’ll share my approach and compare it with cloud DNS solutions like AWS Route53 and Google Cloud DNS.

The Setup: GitHub Actions + Tailscale + Bind9

What I’ve built

My solution uses GitHub Actions to automatically deploy DNS zone changes to my private Bind9 server whenever I push updates to my repository. Here’s how it works:

In today’s digital landscape, securing your web applications with HTTPS is not just a recommendation but a necessity. In this blog post, I’ll share how I setup automated SSL certificate issuance for my domains, including wildcard certificates, using Traefik, Let’s Encrypt, and Cloudflare.

The Setup

My goal was to automate the management of SSL certificates for various subdomains and wildcard domains like:

• co.example.com
• io.example.com
• *.co.example.com
• *.io.example.com

By combining Traefik (a modern HTTP reverse proxy), Let’s Encrypt (for free SSL certificates), and Cloudflare (for DNS management), I created a fully automated SSL certificate renewal system for my homelab setup.