Pedal to Empower 2024

The Pedal to Empower 2024 event is a wrap. I finished the 250 mile ride yesterday afternoon after 16 hours in the saddle. My folks came down to provide support and a delicious lasagna post-ride meal. My fundraiser brought in $2,553 of the $4,125 goal — that’s 15 Buffalo bicycles going to empower women and girls.

I made a checklist of more than 60 items. I don't do a lot of night riding, so I put a lot of effort into preparing. The weather was 55 - 65 °F and drizzly, which was fine with arm and knee warmers while riding, but chilly when stopped. Visibility through beads of water on my glasses and low fog was a challenge. I tried to minimize surprises by riding a route that I've done many times before.

I rode a S-Works Roubaix SL8 with SRAM Red AXS groupset. It's not a plush ride, but comfortable enough. I had two rear tire punctures during the ride, and didn't even notice but for the small amount sealant that sprayed out before it healed.

My parents came down in their RV to support me at the start/finish. Having a hot cup of coffee and homemade cookies at sunrise after cycling through the night was amazing. 

I am extremely grateful for the support I've received this year. I'm considering a 24-hour challenge next time. How far do you think I can ride?

SSH to private EC2 instances using AWS Session Manager

I like launching AWS EC2 instances on inaccessible private subnets for safety. That makes connecting with Ansible using SSH a pain. Instead of using a bastion/jump host or bringing up a VPN, here’s a handy procedure that supports a dynamic collection of client configurations. It uses AWS CLI to setup an SSH proxy. As long as the instance already has an Instance Profile and attached policy to use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager, this works great.

Install the AWS Systems Manager Session Manager plugin for AWS CLI by running brew install --cask session-manager-plugin on macOS. Installation instructions for lesser operating systems may be found in the AWS docs.

Given two clients, I configure sections for them in my ~/.ssh/config with a suffix following the AWS EC2 InstanceId:

Host i-*.client-a
	User ec2-user
	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/client-a-servers
	ProxyCommand sh -c "aws ssm start-session --profile client-a --region us-east-1 --target $(echo %h | sed s/\.client-a//) --document-name AWS-StartSSHSession --parameters 'portNumber=%p'"

Host i-*.client-b
	User ec2-user
	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/client-b-servers
	ProxyCommand sh -c "aws ssm start-session --profile client-b --region us-southwest-8 --target $(echo %h | sed s/\.client-b//) --document-name AWS-StartSSHSession --parameters 'portNumber=%p'"

With that in place, I can connect to either client’s instances by adding a suffix to the AWS EC2 InstanceId. For example: ssh i-hexhexhexhexhexhe.client-b

Within my Ansible inventory and configuration, I can override the username, private key, and other SSH options when needed.

I suppose I could also create a subshell to resolve tokens in the host value to dynamically choose the profile and region.

Postfix Log Stats

I made some changes to my Postfix server configuration to update my Spamhaus DNSBLs recently and I wanted to see if more junk was being blocked than before. A long time ago, I used AWStats to parse my Postfix logs and generate web pages with pretty charts. This was neat because it would build a database for long-term trend discovery. However, I no longer have the patience to mess around with a CGI scripts in Apache HTTP Server.

So, I reached for pflogsumm.pl. This Perl script has been kicking since 1999. It processes log lines on STDIN and outputs a text report. I found a GitHub project that had containerized the script at github.com/panubo/docker-pflogsumm and I forked it to add multi-architecture support so I could run it on a modern Mac. My repo fork is at github.com/jlamoree/docker-pflogsumm and the images are pushed into Docker Hub at jlamoree/pflogsumm, if you’d like to run it too.

Here’s how I grab log files and create a report:

I like to review the report in Sublime Text — it’s got my favorite monospace typeface and color scheme configured for maximum pleasure.