Ramblings of a Unix Geek

I was asked to describe the stuff I use for my not-so-smart home and how it fits together.

If you’re anything like me then you sometimes miss the doorbell ringing.

Previously I modified a cheap electric safe to work with an Arduino, because the original controller board had failed.

Previously I described a relatively modern set of TLS settings that would give an A+ score on SSLtest.

Working in Cyber Security I’m frequently reminded that the reason we do all the things we do is, ultimately, to protect the data.

Back in 2016 I documented how to get an A+ TLS score.

As I was rebuilding my network I came across a problem.

3 years ago I replaced OpenWRT with a home grown router.

What is a firewall?

Here’s a common requirement: We want to transfer a file containing sensitive data to a partner; they want us to put the data in their S3 bucket.

I was asked a question around the Capital One breach.

I was at a conference the other week and the discussion turned to DevSecOps, and the comment of “it should have remained SecDevOps” was made.

Every day we hear of yet another data breach.

I have a Friedrich aircon.

My garage door is controlled my a Lynx 455 Plus garage opener This is a pretty traditional opener; a door-bell type button inside the garage to open/close the door and a remote control for wireless access.

This post isn’t in my normal theme.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been building out an Alexa skill for my media center.

I get email… What are your thoughts about making a career out of specialising in Unix?

It’s an article of faith that the development process starts in the part of the network set aside for development work.

In a well controlled environment you typically do not want people logging into servers with privileged access (absent of additional external processes, such as a keystroke logged session manager).

I’ve written about Dad’s service.

Every so often I get asked to do something that’s not related to my employer, or is stuff that results from my activities for my employer.

Reducing the number of personnel with access to the production environment and cardholder data minimizes risk and helps ensure that access is limited to those individuals with a business need to know.

One of the “hot” things around today is the concepts of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

One of the exciting parts of the “new world” of cloud is the ability to green field solutions.

This blog post is gonna be a little different; it’s more philosophical than most of what I write.

I’ve spent the past far-too-many years working in the finance industry, in mega-banks and card processors.

Even after all this time I hear statements like “Oh, we can just run our code in the cloud”.

This is an odd post for me.

Whenever a new “critical” vulnerability is found, the cry goes out across the land; Patch!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you may have heard of two panic panic panic bugs, known as Meltdown and Spectre.

My Dad died, at the age of 79, in Tenerife doing what he loved… falling asleep in the sun while on holiday.

“To summarise the summary of the summary; people are a problem” - Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe The above quote is one of my favourite jokes (I’ve used it in a previous post); it highlights how people can complicate any situatio…

It’s a fairly common design in enterprise networks; a three tier network architecture, with firewalls between the tiers.

A few weeks back I completed my Arduino hack for a digital safe.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked a question around the disposal of SSDs.

For a number of years I had one of these cheap electronic safes.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past couple of months, you’ll have heard that Equifax, one of the ‘big three’ credit reporting agencies, suffered a massive breach leaking privileged data on over 143 million US people (and millions outside the…

I was asked an interesting question: I am about to investigate Docker.

In previous posts I’ve gone into some detail around how Docker works, and some of the ways we can use and configure it.

WARNING: technical content ahead!

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana Default broken I was reminded, last week, of how old issues repeat.

One of the big problems with a cloudy environment is in how to allow the application to get the username/password needed to reach a backend service (e.g. a MySQL database).

As we’ve previously seen, Docker Swarm mode is a pretty powerful tool for deploying containers across a cluster.

In my previous entry I took a quick look at some of the Docker orchestration tools.

In earlier posts I looked at what a Docker image looks like and a dig into how it looks at runtime.

In the previous entry we looked at how a Docker container image is built.

Container technology, specifically Docker, is becoming an important part of any enterprise.

Last year I wrote about how I used Letsencrypt to handle the SSL certificates for this site.

I’ve previous written about encryption and hashing and why things like customer passwords should never be encrypted.