With everything going on in the world with COVID-19 and the social distancing that is happening, people are looking to connect with friends, family and co-workers via Video conferencing more than ever. Recent vulnerabilities in Zoom have made people more cognizant than ever that security needs to be considered when using these platforms no matter what you are using them for.
Jitsi is an open source video conferencing platform that I’ve been hearing about a lot lately, and finally had a chance to look into. In this post I’ll explain how to use Terraform to provision a Jitsi instance when you need a conference and tear it down when you are done. We’ll be using Vultr and their Jitsi “application” and AWS Route 53 for DNS.
It’s time to ditch cloud based password managers. There.. I said it. What we are doing when we use them is giving ownership and management of our trusted secrets to someone else, and hoping that they will be able to protect them from bad guys, and make sure they are available when we need them.
That’s a heck of an ask, isn’t it? I’ve been a LastPass customer for a very, very long time.. I use it to share secrets with my family, I use it on my mobile device to log into apps. It’s a safe bet to say it’s a critical piece of how I operate, and they have never once let me down. That said, if they asked for money to continue using their service, I’d have to pay. If they had a security event where secrets were compromised or if they lost my data, I’d be in very, very bad shape.
In this article, I will talk about how to set up a WebDAV share that’s protected by HTTPS using Traefik, Let’s Encrypt, and a WebDAV container on your own server, and use it to sync your secrets with devices.
Practice what you preach, right? I try to keep my root partition on my personal machine pretty anemic.. usually between 40G and 60G. However, lately I’ve been running out of space and I wasn’t sure why. Here are a few tips and tricks for finding the culprit, and freeing up some space.
My company standardized on Cisco Webex Teams for persistent chat. Unfortunately, webex teams does not have a linux client, and recommends that people simply use the web client. Unfortunately, I’m more used to this answer than I’d like, but fortunately I don’t have to any more.
As it turns out, Docker doesn’t officially support any version of Ubuntu past Artful. This is a bit of a challenge if you want to use a state configuration manager such as Ansible to deploy Docker, or even if you want to install it manually. I was able to get this working by using the test branch of the docker release for Ubuntu Cosmic.
Continuing my series on provisioning VMs on workstation pro outside of the GUI, I’ve got a functional script that will create a linked clone using the vmrun command.
It allows you to specify the following options on the command line:
I’ve been brushing up on a few technologies in my home lab, and have found myself using VMware workstation for some simple tasks that don’t require a whole virtualized environment. Workstation didn’t set the hostname of my Ubuntu 18.xx VMs properly after they booted. Maybe I’m a little spoiled by guest OS customization or missing something, but either way, I needed a way to quickly spin up a whole VM and have it’s hostname set correctly. It’s definitely not the cleanest, and I realize I would be better off using the Workstation Pro REST API, but I’m not there yet.
I find myself setting up Raspberry Pi’s more frequently than I’d like. I never ever have a monitor connected. Below is the method I use to get wireless network connectivity without connecting an Ethernet cable or a monitor and keyboard. This is here because I’m tired of sifting through incorrect articles to find this information.
I decided to get a new case for my main computer today, and chose a micro atx case due to the fact that I’ve always had a big case and am sick of it…
I realized that the small PSU’s that come with micro atx cases might not support my 3 HDDs and1 DVD+RW drive, so I found a great PSU need calculator that I wanted to share.
I’ve been using this for a while now, and have found it a great little trick for accessing services that are blocked due to a firewall.
It’s pretty simple, you just have a few parts to the command string. The first command argument tells ssh to forward a local port (LP) to a remote machine Remote) on a remote port (RP). The second part is something you’re probably familiar with, the destination that you’re connecting to (Destination).
