¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

At Google we had a prodaccess command used to log in and authenticate in all sorts of internal corp systems¹ for 20 hours. It became a daily ritual to run prodaccess first thing in the morning when logging in upon unlocking our physical workstations².

During the pandemic, when heavily using our virtual workstations (dubbed cloudtops, think of an EC2 instance or a VPS) it was common to hook prodaccess into ssh. There was a prodcertstatus command that would tell you when prodaccess would expire. A common pattern was to modify your ssh startup command to automatically run prodaccess whenever prodcertstatus indicated that access would expire within 2-4 hours, depending on the user’s preference.

Given my trained muscle memory, I wanted to continue to use this alias even in environments other than Google:

[...]
prodaccess() {
	echo "--> VPN"
	vpn_login

	echo "--> Teleport"
	teleport_login

	echo "--> AWS"
	aws_login

    echo "--> Azure"
    azure_login

	case "$1" in
		-u|--update)
			echo "--> mr"
			# Update all well-known corp repositories
			(cd ~/Corp && mr update && mr run git world)

			# Package manager upgrade
			echo "--> sd-world"
			sd-world

			shift
			;;

		-a|--all)
			echo "--> Atlas Mongo"
			atlas_login

			shift
			;;
	esac
}
[...]

Notes:

• mr is https://myrepos.branchable.com/ (“a tool to manage all your version control repositories”)³
• sd-world was introduced in a previous post: it performs a full system upgrade
• --all holds services I only need / use from time to time.
• shift is not really needed, but IMHO it’s a good practice (and another ingrained habit of mine), especially when inside for loops
• git world is an alias in my ~/.gitconfig that runs git fetch --all && git remote prune origin

Every morning I invoke prodaccess -u when starting my work day. A few password prompts and touch IDs later and I do not need to worry about logging in anymore during the middle of the day, which reduces overall context switching and stress.