Weekly Journal 48 - nb, chezmoi, AWS Transit Gateway

tl;dr

Spent some time looking at a knowledge base tool I’ve looked at previously, and discovered some new tips for AWS Transit Gateway and chezmoi.

nb

nb is a CLI tool for managing a personal knowledge base. It works with git and other existing CLI tools, and is optimized for collecting and organizing notes and bookmarks. I’ve tried nb previously, with mixed results. On paper, nb is exactly what I am looking for. In practice, I find it clunky and awkward to work with. I’m using the feature list as a guide to what I am looking for in my own knowledge base, but I am continuing to look for a tool that works better for me.

chezmoi

A quick tip for chezmoi. I have been experimenting with using chezmoi to place a templated file into different locations based on the destination operating system. One thing I found frustrating is chezmoi was creating empty directories even though I configured it to ignore that file based on the target operating system. Even though I had configured chezmoi to put a file, my Neovim configuration, into a different location depending on if its running on Windows vs. Linux, it was creating the empty directory structure for the other operating system. This means it was creating an AppData directory on Linux, and a .config directory on Windows.

To work around this I had to add both the directory and the target filename to the .chezmoiignore file.

AWS Transit Gateway

Tripped over a small gotcha this past week. While I do a fair bit of our cloud networking architecture, I don’t have a background in carrier-grade networking. This week I learned that the ASN used by a Transit Gateway can’t be the same as the ASN on the Direct Connect connection. If they are the same, the routes won’t automatically propagate as expected.

As an aside, AWS will assign a default ASN of 65000. Most of the external services we’ve used with Direct Connect also use an ASN of 65000, so you probably want to choose a different value for your Transit Gateway.

Making a note of it here to help future me to not make this same mistake again.

What’s Next?

Starting to slow down for the holidays and preparing for end of year reflection and planning for 2022.