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Exposing Ports of a Running Container

When running containers with Docker Compose, I sometimes want to access an unpublished port from a dependency container. For example, I sometimes need to connect directly to a database running inside a compose stack. The usual solution is to edit (docker-)compose.yml and recreate the container with a published port. This works, but it is disruptive when the service is already running.

After experimenting a bit, I discovered two ways to expose container ports without recreating the containers. I'll document those in this post.

Method 1: Mapping Ports Through Standard Streams

[!NOTE]

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Shipping A TypeScript Frontend App Without a Build Workflow

I was once working with a client, and our team was facing a mix of technical and non-technical challenges in shipping a relatively simple web application. During one of our meetings, I cracked a silly joke: "At this rate, we might as well zip up the source code and send it to anyone who wants to try it." (note for the reader: our users were non-developer colleagues from the same organization)

Of course we chuckled and we moved on. But later, I found myself aching to try that silly idea out. Or a refined version of it:

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TIL: How to Create a Template VM Disk Image

While experimenting with dqlite, I needed to create multiple virtual machines from a custom template to manually test a few scenarios. cloud-init combined with one of the cloud images from here would have worked, but I wanted to avoid waiting for the VM to boot and configure itself each time I spun up a new instance.

After some research, I discovered virt-sysprep, which turned out to be the

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Files

NFS

Make sure network-online.target gets triggered correctly: https://systemd.io/NETWORK_ONLINE/

• /etc/systemd/system/nas-ping.service
• /etc/systemd/system/mnt-restic.mount

Run the following:

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The Fence Is in Your Mind

[!NOTE] This is a satirical depiction of an experience I had in an IT organization. The point is to share the same message with a broader audience. Obviously, convincing people to make big changes requires patience, perseverance, and long-term support.

Today, I had a conversation at work which reminded me of the 2000 animated adventure comedy, Chicken Run. Here’s how that conversation would look like if

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Taming an Onyx Tablet

Onyx tablets reportedly phone home and send "data" to some servers in China. The manufacturer apparently refuses to publish the source-code modifications to the OS and the open-source apps they are using and they even go as far as violating GPL.

Of course I learned all that after buying this tablet. To ease my mind, I spent some time debloating it and then blocked the outgoing traffic to

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Considerations for Running Postgres on NFS

Background

Over the weekend, I decided to try running a Postgres database in my Homelab. In my current setup, the most convenient option for storage is NFS. However, NFS is especially tricky for databases. A misconfigured setup can lead to performance or data corruption issues.

After watching

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Debugging and Authoring Helm Charts and Post Rendering Hooks with Viddy

Helm CLI comes with a template sub-command that outputs the YAML it generates without installing the Chart. This is very useful for debugging templates and writing Post Renderer scripts.

Here is a basic example to illustrate its usage:

helm template --generate-name /path/to/your/chart/directory --post-renderer /path/to/your/post-render.sh

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Steps

DOCKER_REGISTRY="registry.example.com"
PROJECT_NAME="hello-world"

# List the templates
faas-cli template store list --official --recommended --verbose=true

TEMPLATE="node18"

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Example

Requirements

• Node.js 18+
• tree-sitter
• tree-sitter-cpp

index.mjs