I would like to start a series about changing habits. In this series I want to ask a simple question about an habit I have and try to answer it from an economic point of view.
In this first post (and hopefully not the last) I would like to know if I should stop eating meat?
In my last post I have showed how to generate pkcs12 key- and truststores using openssl and keytool.
For this post we assume that we want to automate the store assembling with Puppet. Puppet is a configuration management tool that shares many ideas with Ansible. In the world of Puppet you define a manifest file that describes a state of how a file, service or any type of resource should look like. Puppet applies these manifests and makes sure that the targeted system reaches the defined state.
In my last post I’ve showed you how to create a custom certificate authority and sign a server cert using openssl without user interaction.
For this post I assume that we want to set up a webservice that requires a pkcs12 keystore. Using openssl and the java keytool we are going to create a pkcs12 store and add our ca cert, server cert and server key. Further, we assume that the application also requires a truststore containing the ca cert only.
Most of the times people want to get a certificate for the hostname localhost, let’s encrypt wrote a nice post about this, but sometimes people want a certificate for any hostname. And further, signed by a custom CA and if possible should the key material be generated without user interaction. In this post I have covered the less likely case.
Most IDEs provide workspaces that contain multiple projects and thus enable you to work on mutliple projects in one instance of the IDE. IntelliJ, which has becom the defacto standard for Java Devs, does not support workspaces. So, how is it possible to open mutliple projects in one IntelliJ instance?
The world is changing and so does it in 2019. Time to make so predictions for the new year.
I firmly believe that we will see huge progress in the field of secure user authentication. As you might know the current state of authentication is fundamentally flawed. Users set weak passwords, 2-factor authentication is a usability mess and accounts are compromised on a daily basis. These problems are well known and big tech companies have tried to tackle them on their own.
Let’s start the new year with some punk and rock.
This document is a proposal for a Puppet project setup. It covers the setup of masterless Puppet module and provides a layout for a proper project structure. It will give you an example for a nginx module that can be deployed locally and remote. Further the roles and profiles concept will be applied and coupled with the hiera configuration data.
The certificate expiration period should be kept as short as possible in a public key infrastructure. But the cost of resigning certificates must not be too high. This trade off causes a lot of problems. Every now and then a certificate expires without anybody noticing it or the same certificate is used for 10 years, which is obviously a security risk. In order to avoid this problem you either use Let’s Encrypt or another fully automated certificate management system. If this is not available you must know at least which certificates are going to expire soon.
State of JavaScript 2018 has just been released. It is one of the biggest survey about JavaScript development. If you wanna know what is going on in the confusing world of JS, make sure to pay a visit. They did a great job at visualizing and showcasing the results.