Technology Short Take 170
Published on 8 Sep 2023 · Filed in Information · 909 words (estimated 5 minutes to read)Welcome to Technology Short Take #170! I had originally intended to get this published before the long Labor Day weekend, but didn’t quite have it ready. So, here you go—here’s your latest collection of links from around the internet focused on data center and cloud-related technologies. I hope that you find something useful here.
Networking
- Brent Salisbury shares some code intended to help you “ChatGPT your project documentation.” What does that mean, exactly? It’s about indexing your project documentation so as to expose it—and the information within it—via a user-friendly natural language model.
- This is a slightly older article (from January of this year) in which Josh Saul of Hedgehog pays homage to the achievements of Cumulus Networks in the open networking movement.
- Michael Kashin has a good post on source IP address selection in Linux.
- Amit Gupta shows how to install Cilium in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) without
kube-proxy. - Here are some design considerations for Wi-Fi 6E (6GHz) networks.
Servers/Hardware
- I must admit that I always wanted to have a Sun workstation, and I’ve had an interest in SunOS/Solaris for years (check out this link if you don’t believe me). So, it’s natural that this post on reliving the glory days of Sun workstations would catch my attention.
Security
- Michael Tsai weighs in on the Microsoft signing key that was stolen, sharing several links with commentary on this matter.
- Exploiting cloud VMs via a remote serial/console service? Yikes. Fortunately, this Microsoft Security Response Center article not only shows how to use Azure Serial Console to compromise sensitive information, but also shows how to detect exploitation activity. What about preventing it?
- As detailed in this article, it turns out BitLocker can be bypassed—assuming physical access to the hardware—with a cheap logic analyzer.
- Daniel Stenberg rails about everything that is wrong about CVEs.
- Grafana recently had to rotate their GPG signing key.
- Time to update your iOS, iPadOS, and macOS devices! A new zero-click, zero-day exploit was announced and Apple has released an update for all affected systems. More details on the exploit are available here.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- I’ve long been a fan of Velero, the application formerly known as Heptio Ark. It was, therefore, very satisfying to see not one but two Velero-related posts emerge recently from the VMware blogging community. First, Stellios Williams talks about using Velero to back up and restore things on TKGm. Next, Bassem Rezkalla takes readers through backing up and restoring TKGS guest clusters using Velero (somewhat related to my own discussion of the topic here, but not focused on TKGS).
- This is a slightly older post (dates from 2021), but still useful, I think. In it, Christopher Lenard discusses the benefits of moving from Terraform to Pulumi.
- André Ilhicas shows how to run a sidecar container with Docker Compose. I must admit I was not aware of the
network_modesetting that makes this possible. Good to know! - Warren Parad discusses metrics, alerts, and determining what’s important.
- My colleague Lee Briggs (brilliant dude, by the way) wrote this article on structuring your infrastructure as code.
- Here’s another take on the future of Terraform following the license switch. And, while we are talking about “another take,” here’s another take on OpenTF (the proposed “truly open source” Terraform fork).
- Soham Dutta shares a handy trick to improve AWS EC2 security with a strong metadata block.
Operating Systems/Applications
- I started being a fan of Basic Apple Guy a while ago, and I use some of his wallpapers on my Mac and my mobile devices. (I’m weird/obsessive like this, but I like using matching wallpapers across all my devices.) Anyway, he released a couple a while ago that I’m just getting around to sharing here: a revamped version of his revamped macOS Tiger, and a “parody” wallpaper for OS X Rancho Cucamonga (there’s a story there). What’s that—which wallpaper of his am I currently using? I’m currently using the Twilight variation of macOS Tiger Redux.
- Howard Oakley talks about App Translocation (formerly known as Gatekeeper Path Randomization) in macOS. While I generally enjoy using macOS, sometimes the tight control that Cupertino exercises over the OS and its behaviors feels…constricting.
- Jeff Geerling walks readers through testing the Coral TPU accelerator using Docker (in order to work around some Python library dependency issues).
Programming/Development
- For what is perhaps an alternative viewpoint on the role of AI coding assistants, check out Rizèl Scarlett’s post on learning
p5.jswith GitHub Copilot. (Disclaimer: It’s my understanding that Rizèl works for GitHub as a developer advocate, so keep that in mind when reading the post.) - Troy Hunt provides some detail on how he fights API bots using Turnstile from Cloudflare. It’s a pretty interesting read; this is a Cloudflare feature I wasn’t really aware of.
Virtualization
- William Lam shares a quick tip for preserving some values when using VMware vCenter Converter (namely, the MachineGUID and the BIOS UUID). I didn’t think vCenter Converter saw much use anymore!
- Mateusz Romaniuk writes about upgrading an ESXi host from version 7 to version 8 using vLCM.
That’s all for now! I’m always open to reader feedback, so if you have feeback for me feel free to contact me. My e-mail address is not terribly hard to find, and you can also use either Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky to contact me. I also tend to lurk in a number of Slack communities, so you’re welcome to contact me there as well. I’d love to hear from you!