Shoot yourself in the foot: Docker, Nextcloud & git [en]

I did something stupid again. I noticed it, when I received notifications from my Prometheus monitoring. The probe that sends HTTP requests to my Nextcloud server was failing. Strangely, no other probes were failing. No high load, no memory exhaustion, no filesystem running full. Manual testing confirmed that all my other web-apps worked as expected, …

Shoot yourself in the foot: crypttab edition [en]

I’m running Ubuntu on my laptop, using the standard disk-encryption that the Ubuntu installer provides. (Well, the one it provided a couple of years back, when I last installed from scratch.) This setup uses cryptsetup with LUKS on the main partition. This in turn contains an LVM physical volume, which contains a volume group with …

The B in BYOK stands for Bullshit [en]

I’ve recently encountered someone, who insisted on a Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK) setup for compliance reason. I’ve always been skeptical about that and I didn’t have to search long for confirmation. This is what the Wikipedia article on BYOK has to say: […] a cloud computing security marketing model […] […] gives the enterprise the perceived control …

Let’s Encrypt! [en]

… is where I’m getting the TLS certificates for this blog nowadays (after moving away from CAcert). I’ve been using Let’s Encrypt at work now and then. Many colleagues in my department are heavy users and my employer is a sponsor. So I knew what to expect and how to get started. Nevertheless, here’s a …

OpenSSL CLI-Cheat-Sheet [en]

The OpenSSL library is utilized by a wide range of other open-source projects, like web-servers, mail-servers, VPN-servers, etc. When dealing with such software and SSL, it often proves useful to be familiar with the openssl command-line tools. Of course, OpenSSL does have great man-pages, and a quick web-search reveals plenty of usage examples. However, OpenSSL …