Weekly Journal 36 - Migadu, Social Media, RDS Import from S3, GuardDuty

Synopsis

Some quick reflections on moving my email to Migadu and my current thinking around social media, and a few quick updates on some of my recent AWS projects.

Migadu

I have been using Migadu to host my personal email for a little over a month now. So far the experience has been fairly positive, with a couple of exceptions. First, I have been forced to use a GUI email client like Thunderbird to ,read the HTML emails I get. Unfortunately many of these emails do not offer a plain text option, and they are important so I can’t go without them. Thunderbird is a nice email client but I was hoping to use a CLI email client like mutt. Second, near as I can tell Migadu does not offer any server-side filtering of new messages. This means I get notifications on my phone for every email message I receive. With Google Mail, I had filters for all my newsletters, mailing lists, and other non-critical messages that moved them out of the inbox so that I would not receive a notification about them. Other than those two minor issues, I have been very happy with Migadu’s services.

Social Media

I am still on the fence about what to do with my Fosstodon account. The number of internet randos posting garbage seems to be increasing daily, but I still see a decent number of worthwhile posts that make me want to stick around. Some aggressive blocking and filtering has helped, but I see it as an ever-escalating war to try and remove the garbage from my timeline. I think I might be more interested in joining a social network comprised of people I know offline. Maybe something based on the Scuttlebutt protocol like Manyverse.

RDS Import from S3

The process for importing data into an Aurora RDS database from an S3 bucket is tedious and prone to error. Near as I can tell, you have to use the MySQL tools manually run import queries to load data from S3. I have not seen any information on automating the process outside of writing some hairy shell scripts to drive the MySQL CLI.

GuardDuty

Similar to my challenges with setting up AWS Config, GuardDuty does not have good support for automation tools like Terraform. After some trial and error, we have decided to setup GuardDuty using the console/CLI and document that process instead of trying to force it into Terraform code. Clearly the AWS tooling is doing more behind the scenes than making normal API calls. We may even go back and redo our Config and Security Hub configurations to ensure we aren’t missing anything by doing it through Terraform.

What’s Next?

I will be switching gears to help with some performance testing to help identify limits within our system.