I wanted to authenticate against OpenStack recently, and had a lot of trouble finding documentation about how to authenticate just by passing arguments (as opposed to by using clouds.yaml or environment variables). Now that I have a working incantation, I figure I should write it down so I can find it again. Its also disappointing…
Author: mikal
Fetching the most recent GitHub actions runner version
One of the struggles I have with running self-hosted GitHub actions runners is that GitHub releases new versions of the runner quite often and I don’t notice. That’s fine as long as you ignore the scary warnings on action output, until they drop support for whatever random old runner you’re using. They did just that…
Turnover of Companies in OpenStack: Prevalence and Rationale
This paper examines the withdrawal behaviour of corporate contributors to OpenStack, which seems particularly relevant given most contributions in OpenStack are corporately supported, and corporate engagement is declining over time. Its also directly relevant to my own experiences contributing to the project, so seemed like a thing I should read. One interesting aspect of the…
On-demand Container Loading in AWS Lambda
My team at work now has a daily personal learning time called “egg time” — its a slightly silly story involving a manager who was good at taking some time to learn things each day, and an egg shaped chair. Today I decided that I should read this paper about container image loading in AWS…
Holman CLXRGB60 RGB WiFi garden light controllers and tasmota
Today I went forth to Bunnings in the rain to purchase a Holman CLXRGB60 RGB garden light controller so that I too could have fancy lighting in my garden and impress all those guests I never have over. I had been given hope by the Blakadder site that I would be able to flash tasmota…
Minor questions in Linux file semantics
I’ve known for a long time that if you delete a file on Unix / Linux but that file is open somewhere, the blocks used by the file aren’t freed until that user closes the file (or is terminated), but I was left wondering about some other edge cases. Shaken Fist has a distributed blob…
Malware Analyst’s Cookbook and DVD
Another technical book, this time because my employer lets me buy random technical books as long as I pinky swear to read them and this one sounded interesting and got good reviews. First off, the book is a bit dated given its from 2011 — there are lots of references to Ubuntu 10.10 for example…
The BeyondCorp papers
Google’s BeyondCorp effort would probably be what we would now call Zero Trust, although I am surprised by how little name recognition BeyondCorp has when I talk to security people about Zero Trust. Perhaps there are subtle differences between the two, but if there are they aren’t obvious to me. I find myself reading the…
Cisco CyberOps Associate: Official Cert Guide
I don’t think I’ve really reviewed a technical book here before, but I read the thing so I guess I should. This book is the certification guide for a “Cisco CyberOps Associate” certification, which is what they now call the CCNA Security qualification. Its a relatively junior certification, qualifying you to be a level one…
Exploring more efficient remote large file storage
My primary personal project is a thing called Shaken Fist these days — it is an infrastructure as a service cloud akin to OpenStack Compute, but smaller and simpler. Shaken Fist doesn’t have an equivalent to the OpenStack Image service, instead letting your describe your instance images by a standard URL. One of the things…