Setting up a page to authenticate and protect an unauthenticated page using Authentik, from a kubernetes cluster isn’t as well documented if your primary ingress is nginx. Traefik seems to be more popular and better documented. Authentik does have some documentation but there are a couple clarifying steps missing.

docs.goauthentik.io/docs/add-secure-apps/providers/proxy/server_nginx

For starters, create the group that will be assigned the app, users do not need to be assigned yet. Then create an application and a provider using the Wizard. We can use the embedded outpost that’s provided alongside the Authentik helm install. When supplying details on the Provider, “Advanced flow Settings->Authentication flow” should be set. While still within Authentik’s admin panel we need to add the application in question to the outpost that will be used or create a new one as needed.

I want to authenticate to work on my kubernetes (k3s) cluster not for any particular reason but specifically for knowledges sake. Following this I was able to get most of the way but there were a couple caveats and it doesn’t seem to be documented that many places. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s a bare metal situation and most k8 clusters are run on hyperscalers or if it’s just not something that’s usually done.

Some silly little powershell notes from a silly little man.

Mapping network printers

This one is super duper straightforward. Can probably use it remotely through the command line option on a UEM (Unified Endpoint Management) tool.

Add-Printer -ConnectionName \\printer-server\PRINTERNAME

Fetching an installer from a URL and install it

This one we create a temporary directory, set the URL where the installer can be located, download, then install it. If there’s any switches you want applied to the installer, place them after the /i <installer> portion.

The other day while watching Plex it would reliably stop playback 2 minutes before the end. When it did this an error would pop up “Conversion failed. The transcoder exited due to an error.” Helpful.

Not a problem. We’ll log onto the log server and see what it spat out. Well much to my dismay, Plex doesn’t seem to log to the typical I/O streams. While I’m not overly surprised it definitely was something I didn’t think about.

I was investigating what it would take to create a docker container and have the logs go to their appropriate log files in addition to being available via the docker logs command (don’t remember why). During the course of doing that I didn’t accomplish my goal but I did learn that the typical I/O streams of STDOUT and STDERR are the defaults. So it’s essentially just piping those output streams directly to the command.