As mentioned to my friends many times I’m a huge fan of Hacker News and read it every day (make sure to not get fooled by the misleading name, it has nothing to do with hacking at all). It’s about IT news from various domains and sometimes from other domains of science. Today I stumbled upon an article about SOA and microservice while browsing HN. I personally struggled understanding the concept of microservices and its relations to SOA.
Pass is the standard password manager for Unix systems. It follows the Unix philosophy.
Pass saves passwords in text files and encrypts them using a gpg key. The folder structure containing the encrypted files is the pass store. Sharing a pass store without handing over the gpg key requires a gpg key exchange. Git is integrated into the pass cli and is used as version control system.
This document is a guideline for users which require access to a shared pass store and is also a documentation of how to set up a shared pass store. The first part elaborates the process of creating a shared pass store and the second part shows how collaboration from the perspective of a user looks like.
So far I mostly posted about technical aspects of IT. Mainly solutions for particular problems. In future I would like to change that a bit. Not only because I am currently working on confidential projects, but also because I believe I have developed some ideas worth to be shared. One of those ideas is about knowledge management. While I never dealt with the topic on a research level, I made some experience while applying knowledge base solutions in different companies. Interest in this topic is probably cause because I often faced a frustrating situation. IT employees at company X were not incentivized to write documentations at all. Company X had not institutionalized a proper knowledge management. In result with employees leaving the company, knowledge got lost. Mistakes were repeated. Frustration increased. A vicious cycle.
Performance is critical when deploying an environment with Ansible. By default Ansible does not tell how much time elapsed for specific role or task. However, this information would be critical to identify inefficient tasks. Luckily Ansible offers an interface for callback plugins. With the help of a callback plugin one can hook into the role or task execution call. In this post I’ll show you how to configure the callback plugins for profiling roles and tasks. It is quite easy.
My current project is heavily based on Ansible. We use Ansible to deploy into different environments and domains. The configuration has become quite complex. That is why we need to cleanup a server from time to time. Especially when one has to upgrade services on a server and requires to get rid of the old services first. In this post I would like to show you, how we define and run Ansible cleanup tasks in our project.
Today I learned that certain Ubuntu package versions are bound to the release version of Ubuntu. For example the only available version of the password store tool pass for Ubuntu LTS 14.04 (trusty) is 1.4.2-3. If you need a newer version you have to update Ubuntu first. Usually this no big deal, however, if you work with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) it is a big deal. The WSL release is bound to the Windows version. In result to update a package you have to update your Windows first.
I have started a new job and as usual had to set up a new computer. Using Windows in a Unix environment seems like a bad choice at first. However, Microsoft has changed strategy and embraced the Unix world with projects such as Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) or Windows SQL Server support for Linux. In result you can install bash with WSL and use the native ssh client. But there is also another way. If you install Git for Windows a ssh binary is shipped as well. This binary and other tools such as ssh-keygen are not available from the command line by default. I want show you how to fix this, setup a keypair and start using ssh in a Windows environment.
Intrigued by the title you might ask your self: What is the reason to store ether in a software wallet? Well, If you have cryptocoins on an exchange platform there is always the risk of the account getting hacked or the platform goes offline (see MtGox). Exchange platforms for cryptocoins are not as regulated and institutionalized as banks and trading centers are. The risk is in favor of the provider. To assert full control of your coins aka your money it is recommended to store them in a wallet.
I visited China from the beginning of last december until christmas. My backpack was filled with prejudice and the expectation of having a hard time travelling there. The reality looked quite different. China was a blast! Vibrant, lively, fascinating, contradictory and quite the opposite from the european life style. Swallowed in Beijing and spit out in Hong Kong I enjoyed China all over. Definitely not the last I have been there. Again my favorite pictures:
My local sports club STV Kerns organized and performed a cinema themed gymnastic show Turnerabend. Together with other sports clubs we’ve put together a program and presented during two evenings and one after noon. During the event I was in charge of technical aspects and making photos of the show. Here are some of my favorites.