Tech-tips and News
Intro Since my previous workhorse laptop was showing it's age, I had been looking for a replacement for a while. After much deliberation, I got the choice down to 2 options; The Frame.Work 13 with AMD Ryzen and 2.8K display (which is still in pre-order phase), and the Thinkpad T14 AMD Gen5 which can also be had with a 2.8K OLED display. I've always been a Thinkpad user (at least for the last 20…
Automatically requesting TLS/SSL certificates using the ACME protocol is quite nice. Usually to just get a regular TLS certificate, you just have to run an ACME capable tool or webserver, which will place a textfile in /.well-known/acme-challenge on your webserver, which is then used to validate control over the domain. Alternatively you can use DNS based validation. This is even required when…
At Sig-I/O we have (mostly) been using OpenProvider for DNS registrations and hosting over the last few years. This has mostly been fine, but OpenProvider has been having some issues every now and then, and is changing things, but not allways for the better. After a period of stagnation, they now seem to be developing new features again, but none of those appeal much, while important bugs and…
Upto this week (end January 2020), a friend of mine used to run a couple of SSL/TLS related websites (cipherli.st, certificatemonitor.org, ssldecoder.org) which I used quite frequently. Sadly he has decided to no longer host these sites, for reasons undisclosed. I've taken it apon me to host alternative versions of these services, as I myself use them a lot, and also think they shouldn't disappear…
As in earlier years, Sig-I/O takes care of some of the lecture recordings at various conferences like CfgMgmtCamp, LOADays, HackerHotel, Eth0 and Techtalks at IT-Gilde, Revspace and Bitlair. During one of these recording sessions, JJ Asghar (@jjasghar), asked about the video setup and asked if there was a blog-post about how it worked. This will be that blog-post. Basics The basics for the…
With the release of the first beta version of RHEL-8, and more Linux trainings coming up in the coming months, I've decided to start writing some educational documentation for Linux System Administration on modern versions of CentOS, RHEL, Debian and Ubuntu. The plan is to do this as an Open-Source project and modern open-source methodologies. The book is begin written using reStructuredText (just…
IPv6 I value IPv6 access as quite important, however T-Mobile Thuis doesn't offer any official form of IPv6 on their network at this time. I looked into various options to get decent IPv6 for my home network: 6to4 HE.net tunnelbroker VPN based access 6in4 6to4 is a deprecated form of IPv6 access, but something that would work for any connection with a fixed IPv4 address. Configuring 6to4 on…
I have been using Tweak.nl as my ISP for a few years now, since getting fiber-to-the-home, but Tweak doesn't have their own (non-KPN (incumbant dutch telco)) infrastructure in my area. This means they are limited in offering products provided by KPN, at prices mostly dominated by what they have to pay KPN to get access to the last-mile. In area's where they do have their own fiber infrastructure…
This week marks the 9th year in Sig-I/O's existance. Looking back over the past nine years shows a nice growth in the number of clients and a collection of interesting assignments Sig-I/O has been involved in. While the services that Sig-I/O provides have shifted somewhat over these 9 years, some have also remained the same, with some clients already with us from the very beginning. The past few…
As you might have noticed if you visited my site before, the entire look and feel has been changed. The site is now powered by the Nikola static-site-generator. The most-recent articles have been migated over, the older articles from the previous website will be restored when they are still relevant. I had been thinking about using a Static-Site-Generator before, but wordpress was working quite…