Posts on A Personal Blog and Professional Portfolio for Connor Grout

Follow me on AllTrails

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:15:00 -0400

I have recently started getting into hiking and the outdoors as the weather is getting warmer. So I thought I’d share my AllTrails profile with anyone that’s interested in following me. I also added it to the sidebar of my blog below my Storygraph profile. I will try to post on here any really extraordinary trails I hit if I believe they are better than my average hike. I’ll also try to share any custom trails I make that I find really good.

systemd NSSwitch Confusion

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 16:10:00 -0400

The Setup

This was definitely a fun issue to run into over this week. So it started with an update to my openSUSE desktop and was greeted with a frozen plymouth screen forever. I tried reverting, and got my box to boot again so I knew it was an issue with this update. I don’t update very often so it didn’t do me much good to read the snapshot release notes because a lot had changed from the last time I updated and the latest.

Migrating from Grub2 to systemd-boot

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 20:41:52 -0400

I noticed that openSUSE MicroOS (and Aeon which is my daily driver) started supporting systemd-boot in 2024. Because of this I’ve read that systemd-boot is more efficient and faster than grub2 as a bootloader so I decided to migrate my Aeon RC1 to systemd-boot manually. It should be noted that when I installed my version grub2 was the only supported option, the newer RC of Aeon actually offers systemd-boot as an option during the installation process, but still defaults to grub2.

Securing my Blog with CSP

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick post that covers the steps it takes to enable Content Security Policy on a site hosted on Cloudflare Pages to further secure the site from XSS and clickjacking attacks. It also covers the new headers I’m using and briefly describes how they work and how to integrate them into your site.

Self-Hosting Email Experimentation

Fri, 09 May 2025 16:07:03 -0500

Today I decided that I will try setting up my own email service at home using a combination of Stalwart, SWAG (an NGINX w/ some extras baked in), and AWS SES. Now the method I’ve chosen mixes a lot of technologies; It also took me a few days of banging my head on the desk and running into numerous roadblocks, but I think I’ve found the solution that I’ve been after that is both functional and secure as well as low maintenance with minimal headaches.

A Quick Post About Migrating On-Prem GitHub Enterprise Servers

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 12:45:04 -0400

This will be a really quick post, because I’d like to share this with anyone who is dealing with a GitHub Enterprise Server (GHE) migration. This is for specifically a GHE -> GHE migration. The use case is we have an air-gapped GHE server in one domain and we are standing up a new one in another domain. We will have to migrate all of the repositories and the Actions as well.

Moving to RenderCV

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 12:23:38 -0400

I recently met with a colleague from Honeywell over the weekend to reminisce about old times working at Honeywell and see how things were going for him. While discussing our gripes, new tools we’ve used, and the current state of the job marked; he mentioned that he was going to try a tool that allowed you to write and generate a resume using only YAML. This intrigued me, because I had only seen tools that allowed you to write your resume in JSON.

Refinishing a Mantle

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 10:22:34 -0500

At my old home the living room had a mantle that was originally painted over white. With how white/beige the house was I wanted to restore the mantle to it’s original walnut stained glory.

Sharing my Literary Pursuits

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 17:06:55 -0500

I’ve decided that I need to use my blog more, unfortunately life has been really busy the last few days so I am decided to post about something small and quick today.. Books!

With recent news that Amazon is limiting everyone’s ability to Download your Kindle eBooks I am trying to move away from Amazon services where I can. Even though I don’t own or use a Kindle ( Let’s go Kobo!) or the amazon platform for eBooks, I still used Amazon’s Goodreads app to track my reading. Because of them further closing their environment even I have decided to move to The StoryGraph instead. It’s an Amazon competitor that, arguably, provides better book recommendations and a cleaner and more modern interface to Goodreads. So below is my StoryGraph Stats so that you can see what I’ve read, what I’m reading now. I also will have that on my menu bar above for easier future access.

Senior Capstone Project

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 12:45:04 -0500

This is a special blog post that will cover, drumroll please.. My Senior Capstone Project! In 2018 as part of my Bachelor of Science degree I had to complete a Senior Capstone Project, and present the project to my peers as well as attend the University of Cincinnati’s CECH (College of Education, Criminal Justice and Human Services) IT Expo.

New Blog Creation

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 17:06:55 -0400

Today I’ve taken it upon myself to create a new blog that I can use to show my proficiency in technologies as well as be able to say that I have a blog!

I’ve decided to use Hugo as the Static Site Generator because:

It’s written in Go (A language I’d like to start learning)
It appears to be one of the more popular static site generators

I previously tried going down this road with Pelican, which uses Python as the language to power it. But I found it rather clunky to get started with and lacking any themes that I liked. I will leave the old depreciated code up in my personal repo here: https://gitlab.com/retsnom513/retsnom513.gitlab.io. I will also be open-sourcing this blog as well, so the source code can be found here: https://gitlab.com/connorgrout/my-personal-site.