icanhazip.com has a new owner! 🎉 Starting in June 2021, icanhazip.com is now owned and operated by Cloudflare! Read more about it in the blog post: A new future for icanhazip. All of the remaining sites are unchanged. Which sites are available? You have a few to choose from: icanhazip.com - returns your IP address icanhazptr.com - returns the reverse DNS record (PTR) for your IP icanhaztrace.com - returns a traceroute from my servers to your IP address icanhaztraceroute....
In the summer of 2009, I had an idea. My workdays were spent deploying tons of cloud infrastructure as Rackspace acquired Slicehost and we rushed to keep up with the constant demands for new infrastructure from our customers. Working quickly led to challenges with hardware and networking. That was a time where the I Can Has Cheeseburger meme was red hot just about everywhere. We needed a way to quickly check the public-facing IP address of lots of backend infrastructure and our customers sometimes needed that information, too....
Emojis brighten up any message or document. They also serve as excellent methods for testing whether your application handles strings appropriately. (This can be a lot of fun.) 🤭 I constantly obsess with efficiency and shortening the time and effort required to get my work done. I noticed that I could type short text emoticons like :) and ;) so much faster than I could use emojis. This simply would not do....
The latest release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) was published last week. This release is Version 1, Release 3, and it contains four main changes: V-77819 - Multifactor authentication is required for graphical logins V-77821 - Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) kernel module must be disabled V-77823 - Single user mode must require user authentication V-77825 - Address space layout randomization (ASLR) must be enabled Deep dive Let’s break down this list to understand what each one means....
I opened up a noVNC console to a virtual machine today in my OpenStack cloud but found that the console wouldn’t take keyboard input. The Send Ctrl-Alt-Del button in the top right of the window worked just fine, but I couldn’t type anywhere in the console. This happened on an Ocata OpenStack cloud deployed with OpenStack-Ansible on CentOS 7. Test the network path The network path to the console is a little deep for this deployment, but here’s a quick explanation:...
The OpenStack Summit wrapped up today in Boston and it was a great week! There were plenty of informative breakouts and some interesting keynotes. Keynotes Beth Cohen shared some of the work that Verizon has done with software-defined WAN on customer-premises equipment (CPE). She showed a demo of how customers could easily provision virtual network hardware, such as firewalls or intrusion detection systems, without waiting for hardware or cabling changes. I’m less familiar with the world of telcos, so I found this really interesting....
DISA’s final release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) came out a few weeks ago and it has plenty of improvements and changes. The openstack-ansible-security role has already been updated with these changes. Quite a few duplicated STIG controls were removed and a few new ones were added. Some of the controls in the pre-release were difficult to implement, especially those that changed parameters for PKI-based authentication....
Welcome to the fourth post in the series of What’s Happening in OpenStack-Ansible (WHOA) posts that I’m assembling each month. OpenStack-Ansible is a flexible framework for deploying enterprise-grade OpenStack clouds. In fact, I use OpenStack-Ansible to deploy the OpenStack cloud underneath the virtual machine that runs this blog! My goal with these posts is to inform more people about what we’re doing in the OpenStack-Ansible community and bring on more contributors to the project....
IBM Edge 2016 is almost over and I’ve learned a lot about Power 8 this week. I’ve talked about some of the learnings in my recaps of days one and two. The performance arguments sound really interesting and some of the choices in AIX’s design seem to make a lot of sense. However, there’s one remaining barrier for me: Power 8 isn’t really accessible for a tinkerer. Tinkering? Google defines tinkering as:...
Welcome to the third post in the series of What’s Happening in OpenStack-Ansible (WHOA) posts that I’m assembling each month. OpenStack-Ansible is a flexible framework for deploying enterprise-grade OpenStack clouds. In fact, I use OpenStack-Ansible to deploy the OpenStack cloud underneath the virtual machine that runs this blog! My goal with these posts is to inform more people about what we’re doing in the OpenStack-Ansible community and bring on more contributors to the project....