As I mentally prepare for my new role and the new computer that will come along with it, it seemed like a good time to do some digital housekeeping. At Food52 I never had a company owned laptop so I was able to be a little more lazy about keeping work and personal things separate. But a new shiny M2 MacBook Pro showed up a few hours ago and I want to try to do things a bit cleaner now. In addition to that I wanted to improve some security and identity items.
Overall the setup went pretty well taking only a few hours. I’m sure I missed some things, but I am ready to get started!
SSH Keys
For the longest time I was a bit inconsistent with SSH keys. I wandered between them representing my person as an identity and having them represent me as a user on a particular computer. With the advent of being able to store and use SSH keys via 1Password, I wanted to clean things up. Using 1Password, it made more sense to treat keys as something that represented me personally without regards to the computer I am on. I reverted to having 2 keys stored in 1Password, a big (4096 bit) RSA one and a newer ED25519 one. I prefer the newer key but I have found that some systems can’t handle them so having both is nice. I cleaned up my access to various SSH based system and now have a simple authorized_hosts file with just 2 keys in it everywhere. (GitHub just gets the ED25519 one as they support it just fine.)
API Keys
I don’t have a lot of API keys right now but I assume I will have more in the new role. Another new 1Password feature (can you tell I am a fan) is command line integration for API keys. I had read about this when I was at Food52 but had not gotten around to setting it up. I did so this morning for a few keys I still have and it works really well. Excited to see how it works when I have a bunch more.
Software
You may already know about brew for installing UNIX-y software. But did you know about using a Brewfile? You can use them to install all kinds of applications automatically with one command. This simplified the vast majority of installs on the new laptop.
File Synchronization
The convenience of tools like Dropbox and iCloud Drive is pretty obvious. But for one like me who is very concerned with privacy (and likes futzing with tech and occasionally making things more difficult for myself), I don’t like the idea of keeping my sensitive data on someone else’s infrastructure in an unencrypted format. So, a number of years ago I started using Resilio Sync (at the time it was BTSync). This is a sync product that operates in a similar way to Dropbox but it is peer-to-peer between any number of computers you control. It also has the ability to set up read-only and (more interestingly) encrypted copies. This means I can have a replicated server that has all of my data but it is inaccessible to anyone who breaches that machine. This has allowed me to set up a few remote servers outside of my house that provide disaster recovery but are also safe from a privacy perspective.
As part of my cleanup, I made a new shared folder specifically for work files separate from my personal synced folders.