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.

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.