Although there are a few weeks remaining before Fedora 24 is released, you can test out the Fedora 24 Beta release today! This is a great way to get a sneak peek at new features and help find bugs that still need a fix. The Fedora Cloud image is available for download from your favorite local mirror or directly from Fedora’s servers. In this post, I’ll show you how to import this image into an OpenStack environment and begin testing Fedora 24 Beta....
Let’s Encrypt has taken the world by storm by providing free SSL certificates that can be renewed via automated methods. They have issued over 1.4 million certificates since launch in the fall of 2015. If you are not familiar with how Let’s Encrypt operates, here is an extremely simple explanation: Create a private key Make a request for a new certificate Complete the challenge process You have a certificate! That is highly simplified, but there is plenty of detail available on how the whole system works....
I’ve decided to start a series of posts called “Chronicles of SELinux” where I hope to educate more users on how to handle SELinux denials with finesse rather than simply disabling it entirely. To kick things off, I’ll be talking about dealing with web content in the first post. First steps If you’d like to follow along, simply hop onto a system running Fedora 21 (or later), CentOS 7 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7....
For those of you in the market for a cheap webcam for videoconferencing or home surveillance, the Logitech C270 is hard to beat at about $20-25 USD. It can record video at 1280×960 and it’s fairly good at low light levels. The white balance gets a bit off when it’s bright in the room but hey — this camera is cheap. ZoneMinder can monitor multiple cameras connected via USB or network....
Docker is a hot topic in the Linux world at the moment and I decided to try out the new trusted build process. Long story short, you put your Dockerfile along with any additional content into your GitHub repository, link your GitHub account with Docker, and then fire off a build. The Docker index labels it as “trusted” since it was build from source files in your repository. I set off to build a Dockerfile to provision a container that would run all of the icanhazip services....
I stumbled upon a helpful guide to securing an apache server via Reddit’s /r/netsec subreddit. Without further ado, here’s a link to the guide: Apache web server hardening & security guide The guide covers the simplest changes, like reducing ServerTokens output and eliminating indexes, all the way up through configuring mod_security and using the SpiderLabs GitHub repository to add additional rules. If you’d like a more in-depth post about installing mod_security, I’d recommend this one from Tecmint....
Changing my ssh port from the default port (22) has been one of my standard processes for quite some time when I build new servers or virtual machines. However, I see arguments crop up regularly about it (like this reddit thread or this other one). Before I go any further, let’s settle the “security through obscurity” argument. (This could probably turn into its own post but I’ll be brief for now....
It’s no secret that Google Reader is a popular way to keep up with your RSS feeds, but it’s getting shelved later this year. Most folks suggested Feedly as a replacement but I found the UI quite clunky in a browser and on Android devices. Then someone suggested Tiny Tiny RSS. I couldn’t learn more about it on the day Google Reader’s shutdown was announced because the site was slammed. In a nutshell, Tiny Tiny RSS is a well-written web UI for managing feeds and a handy API for using it with mobile applications....
It’s been a few years since I started a little project to operate a service to return your IPv4 and IPv6 address. Although there are a bunch of other sites that offer this service as well, I’ve been amazed by the gradually increasing traffic to icanhazip.com. Here’s a sample of the latest statistics: Hits per day: 1.8 million (about 21 hits/second) Unique IP addresses per day: 25,555 Hits per day from IPv6 addresses: 1,069 (a little sad) Bandwidth used per day: ~ 400MB The site is now running on multiple Cloud Servers at Rackspace behind a load balancer cluster....
My quest to get better at Python led me to create a new project on GitHub. It’s called mysql-json-bridge and it’s ready for you to use. Why do we need a JSON API for MySQL? The real need sprang from a situation I was facing daily at Rackspace. We have a lot of production and pre-production environments which are in flux but we need a way to query data from various MySQL servers for multiple purposes....