lukelafountaine / dotfiles

Luke LaFountaine's Dotfiles

Computer Setup

This is a basic description of my computer setup:

• Cloud Storage: After experimenting with a few different services, I landed on Proton Drive for cloud storage. I use Proton Mail and am generally pretty happy with it.
• File Organization: I have a pretty simple directory structure. I really only have five top-level directories in my home folder:
  • code: This is where all of my code lives.
  • data: This is where temporary data lives. Sometimes I'll be working with a dataset that I don't really want sitting around in a repository, constantly making sure that I don't commit it, etc. But I also want it around long enough that /tmp is not the right place for it either.
  • notes: This directory is symlinked into my cloud storage directory, so it's backed up and accessible across my devices. There are more details on this directory below.
  • projects: These are files that I access somewhat frequently. This is where I store documents for my long-running responsibilities and other non-code and non-note projects.
  • archive: This is all of the things that were probably in projects at some point but haven't been used in a long time. It also contains old files that I'm just not ready to throw away yet.
• Notes: I keep all of my notes in plain text and mainly use Obsidan for viewing them. I also use the Helix text editor which is very convenient for working with Markdown. I sync these notes to my phone using Obsidian Sync, and as mentioned above, my notes directory actually lives in my cloud storage directory. So, my notes are backed up to the cloud.
• Bookmarks: In the past, I've worked across multiple machines and always found it a pain to synchronize bookmarks between machines and browsers. That made me interested in looking at different solutions. I tried to use the 1Password browser extensions as a bookmark manager, but found that logging into 1Password all the time for non-secret things was a pain. So ultimately, I landed on using Tailscale and my own golink service. So, across all browsers on all devices that are on my tailnet, I can access my usual sites using go/<short-code>.

TODO: Add documentation about how to install everything.

Using Tailscale while using corporate VPN

1. Get the IP addresses of the name servers that are used when on your coporate VPN:

   • Make sure Tailscale and your corporate VPN are both off
   • scutil --dns > normal.txt
   • Turn on your corporate VPN
   • scutil --dns > vpn.txt
   • diff normal.txt vpn.txt

2. Add /etc/resolver/ files for each search domain used by your corporate network:

   • sudo mkdir /etc/resolver
   • For each name server found in in step 1:
     • sudo echo "nameserver <IP FROM PREVIOUS STEP>" >> /etc/resolver/example.org
   • If some of the *.example.org subdomains should be publicly available (i.e. you should be able to access them when you are not connected to the corporate VPN), then you may want to add /etc/resolver/ files for those subdomains and make the nameserver the Tailscale DNS IP address- 100.100.100.100. That way, those subdomains will still be handled by Tailscale but DNS requests for the rest of the *.example.org subdomains will be routed to the private nameservers.

There probably is a better/easier way to do this via Tailscale split DNS but from what I've tried so far, it hasn't worked like I expected. Here's a resource that seems promising and might deserve another look: https://forum.tailscale.com/t/tailscale-and-local-dnsmasq/1480

TODO: Add more detailed explanation of how and why this is needed.