Back from GUADEC 2014
Posted on August 5, 2014
| Andrea Veri
Coming back from GUADEC has never been easy, so much fun, so much great people to speak with and amazing talks to watch but this year has definitely been harder as I totally felt in love with the city that was hosting the event. Honestly speaking I’ve been amazed by how Strasbourg looks like: alsace houses and buildings are just delightful, the cathedral is stunning and people have been so welcoming during my whole stay.
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Adding reCAPTCHA support to Mailman
Posted on May 3, 2014
| Andrea Veri
The GNOME and many other infrastructures have been recently attacked by an huge amount of subscription-based spam against their Mailman istances. What the attackers were doing was simply launching a GET call against a specific REST API URL passing all the parameters it needed for a subscription request (and confirmation) to be sent out. Understanding it becomes very easy when you look at the following example taken from our apache.log:
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Fedy’s installation of Brackets bricks your Fedora installation
Posted on April 2, 2014
| Andrea Veri
I wanted to give Fedya try yesterday, specifically to install the **Brackets **code editor designed for web developers. I’m pretty lazy when it comes to install external packages (from the Brackets.io’s homepage it looked like only a DEB file was available) and after asking a few friends who made heavy use of Fedy in the past about its stability and credibility I went ahead and followed the provided instructions to set it up.
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Fedora 20 on a Samsung Chronos Series 7
Posted on March 20, 2014
| Andrea Veri
It’s been a while now since the very first time I posed my hands on this shiny new Samsung Chronos Series 7 laptop and oh dear… how much pain did my metallic-grey fellow take me in order to figure out how properly have every single piece of the hardware working as expected?
What I did right after unboxing it was dropping Windows 8 with a copy of Fedora 20 (yeah, stupid me, I could have booted Windows 8 at least once to check for UEFI / firmware updates) and setting everything up as usual.
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Manage passwords with ‘pass’
Posted on December 24, 2013
| Andrea Veri
Fighting with passwords have always been one of my favorite battles in the past and unfortunately the former always won. I never liked using the root user that much for administering a machine and made a massive use of sudo, I won’t list all the benefits of using sudo, but the following wiki pagehas a pretty nice overview of them.
Said that, when using sudo it’s definitely ideal to combine a strong password that is also easy to remember and type again when prompted.
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Configuring DNSSEC on your personal domain
Posted on November 13, 2013
| Andrea Veri
Today I’ll be working out how to properly configure DNSSECon a BIND9 installation, I’ll also make sure to give you all the needed instructions to properly verify if a specific domain is being correctly covered by DNSSEC itself. In addition to that a few more details will be provided about adding the relevant SSHFP‘s entries on your DNS zone files to be able to automatically verify the authenticity of your domain when connecting to it with SSH avoiding any possible MITMattack.
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Back from GUADEC 2013
Posted on August 12, 2013
| Andrea Veri
I wanna be really honest, getting back home from this year’s GUADEC has been very painful for me but not because of the trip back home. I had such a very good time at Brno that I actually wanted to stay there for way more days! I must admit that I’ve been missing the italian food for a while until Mattias Bengtsson suggested me to try having a dinner at the “Flavours” indian restaurant.
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Two years later: Vim, Tmux and my Linux desktop
Posted on June 27, 2013
| Andrea Veri
It’s been two years since my latest blog postabout my Linux desktop and many things have changed since then. I completely moved all my machines to GNOME 3, switched my main editor from nano to vim and my terminal multiplexer from screen to tmux. What didn’t change at all except for a tweaks on the theme is my Irssi setup.
Switching from nano to vim has been a pain at first, nano is really a straightforward editor, it does what you actually need from a CLI editor but while it works just fine when modifying configuration or text files, it’s a bit limiting when it comes to programming.
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A second round of updates from the GNOME Sysadmin Team
Posted on June 14, 2013
| Andrea Veri
I haven’t been blogging so much in the past months as I actually promised myself I would have but given the fact a lot has been done on the GNOME Infrastructure lately it’s time for me to announce all the updates we did since my latest blog post. So here we come with all the items we’ve been looking at recently:
Our main LDAP istance was moved from a very ancient machine (which unfortunately died with a broken disk a few weeks ago) to a newer box that currently contains several other admin tools like Mango and Daily Reports.
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Setting up your SSL certificates on OpenLDAP by using a Mozilla NSS database
Posted on March 27, 2013
| Andrea Veri
I’ve recently spent some time setting up TLS/SSL encryption (SSSD won’t send a password in clear text when an user will try to authenticate against your LDAP server) on an OpenLDAP istance and as you may know the only way for doing that on a RHEL / CentOS environment is dealing with a Mozilla NSS database (which is, in fact, a SQLite database). I’ve been reading all the man pages of the relevant tools available to manipulate Mozilla NSS databases and I thought I would have shared the whole procedure and commands I used to achieve my goal.
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