I remember the good times, when I had a single password for all (the two?) services I used. Then came a phase of managing passwords on sticky notes stuck below the keyboard (much more secure than stuck to the monitor!), until I migrated to one of the first note-taking apps and had passwords written in clear like on the sticky notes but copy/pasteable. Those were the days! Then came the first…
A few years ago I began using Emacs Org-mode and reveal.js to generate slide decks I use in trainings, and I’ve been pleased with the results. (I believe it was Carsten who got me hooked.) It took me a bit to get the settings just the way I wanted to have them, but since then it’s been a matter of typing make in a command line to generate the HTML from the .org file using this in my Makefile , and…
LeoMoon Wiki-Go calls itself a modern, feature-rich, databaseless, flat-file wiki platform built with Go , and it is all that. Wiki-Go is a single-binary Go program, but there is a docker image for those who want it. I download the binary for my platform and launch it; this creates a data/ directory and its configuration file. If need be I configure a port number for it plus a timezone and the odd…
If all you have is a hammer … It occurs to me that we can deploy SSH host keys and their certificates to nodes using Ansible , as it has two existing modules we can use for the task: community.crypto.openssh_keypair generates OpenSSH private public key pairs community.crypto.openssh_cert generates OpenSSH user or host certificates Assuming we want a host’s private key to be generated on a node and…
When I ssh into a server for the first time, I’m confronted with a dialog which asks me to verify I’m actually talking to the machine I expect to be talking to. $ ssh -l jp 192.0.2.65 The authenticity of host '192.0.2.65 (192.0.2.65)' can't be established. ED25519 key fingerprint is SHA256:4WTRnq2OR1m03TpnHCfkFdlh1gN/PBXE4vDi0WnjFEc. No matching host key fingerprint found in DNS. This key is not…
When I first wrote about discovering Netbox DNS I mentioned that the combination of Netbox and the DNS plugin don’t actually create a DNS server and zone transfers directly from Netbox are thus impossible. I also went on to describe how there exist programs which can export the data into, say, zone master files for further provisioning DNS servers, but the times, they are changing. Sven Luethi has…
It is the year 2021, and I use an Albert Heijn shopping bag, one of the old ones obtained years earlier, when the ultimate nightmare occurs: upon leaving the supermarket I hear a ripping sound and the side of the bag tears open. I post about the disaster and my distress on social media, but I am actually amused: I’d normally have no qualms in just ditching the bag and using something else. Somehow…
I need to generate TSIG key files for a DNS server using Ansible , and while I could use something like the community.general.random_string lookup, due to Ansible’s lazy evaluation of lookups, using that in a vars would cause the lookup to be re-evaluated upon use meaning I cannot actually use it more than once in a playbook. So I create a lookup plugin which generates BIND -compatible TSIG key…
I’ve been looking a bit more closely at Semaphore UI and was curious how secrets I can configure for it are stored. There are two distinct kinds of secrets as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, and they’re in either variable groups or in one or more key stores (one key store for the CE edition, more than one for the Pro). I create three such secret values, using the UI: a secret in a variable…
Three years ago, a friend of mine purchased a server (one of those horrendously loud things most of us mere mortals thankfully seldom or never get to hear) from a hosting company. The server held a to-him precious application served by a proprietary content management system. He abandoned the CMS at the time because, as I understand it, the monthly price of the CMS was to increase four-fold. Stuck…