10. August 2014
Cloning Pitfalls
It’s a simple enough task: Create a copy of an object and hand it off for some jolly processing. But there’s a few traps on the way.
03. August 2014
REST design summary
It feels like this has been done so many times, it could replace your favorite “Hello World” code. But since I’m a sucker for summaries, here goes.
28. July 2014
SSH and locked users
After the first release of hardening for SSH I sometimes ran into the issue, where I suddenly couldn’t log into an account anymore. Since hardening prohibits the use of passwords, the culprit isn’t found immediately. The client’s SSH key was authorized and there wasn’t an obvious reason why he shouldn’t be able to login.
09. January 2014
Gitlab 2.8 to 6.4
We’ve been happily running Gitlab for more than a year now, even though it was unmanaged and never upgraded. A few weeks ago I got my hands on it and decide to give upgrading a shot. “Can’t be that hard”. Fast-forward 3 weeks: I’m in the middle of an 1 hour automated upgrade procedure which is taking Gitlab from the stone age to the future.
05. November 2013
Securing reverse SSH tunnels
SSH reverse tunnels are a quick way to expose client services on a server, if you want to control access to this service without additional firewall rules. In cloud scenarios it’s especially difficult to configure firewalls without reverting to DNS names, since IP addresses may change at any time. But there are some hidden traps when using reverse tunnels that you may not be aware of.
28. October 2013
Wintersmith setup
There are some excellent tutorials for setting up Wintersmith out there. This is a summary for a quick and easy setup with Github Pages.
26. October 2013
A kitchen for your server
I have a few bare servers lying around, pre-installed with Ubuntu, not integrated in any chef/puppte/saltstack workflow, with a lot of power ready to go. They are a perfect place for some labour-intensive vagrant boxes, which have recently been eating up my SSD. Due to the lack of bootstrap, I have found myself installing and configuring the same components one too many times.
At this point I decided to revisit knife solo and take it out for a spin.
24. October 2013
Styling Jenkins
Jenkins has a nice theming plugin available. To use it you need to set up a stylesheet that is accessible to everyone user. I created a few themes found here.