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Infrastructure & DevOps

The most popular blog posts about infrastructure & devops on Hacker News. 1,840 posts.

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1741

Why Certificate Lifecycle Automation Matters

If you’ve perused the ActivityPub feed of certificates whose keys are known to be compromised , and clicked on the “Show More” button to see the name of the certificate issuer, you may have noticed that some issuers seem to come up again and again. This might make sense – after all, if a CA is issuing a large volume…

1751

Nginx with dynamic upstreams

I recently made a setup at work where I had a Nginx server facing the user, which would forward requests to a service running behind an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (aka. ELB). That in itself doesn’t sound like a difficult task, you just find the hostname for the ELB and point Nginx at it with a proxy_pass statement like…

1752

BliKVM PCIe puts a computer in your computer

This is the BliKVM PCIe, a full computer on a PCI Express card. This is an IP KVM (Internet Protocol Keyboard-Video-Mouse) that can be put inside another computer or server. Most server motherboards already have remote 'lights-out' management functionality built in. Most frequently this is referred to as IPMI…

1755

APIs for Manufacturing

Perhaps you too remember that crayon-factory segment from Sesame Street. The one where they show dramatic shots of hot orange wax getting poured into vats and molds and eventually labeled and boxed up into neat packages of the rainbow, while Skrillex-junior music played in the background. This was my favorite segment…

1757

Containers from first principles

You’ve likely heard everyone at the office or online proclaim that “K8s has eaten everyone’s lunch!” or that “everything should be in a docker container!”. While there are advantages to the above methodologies; it’s very easy to have cargo-culted their adoption; especially for Kubernetes (K8s). I find the biggest…

1758

Wolf Incident Postmortem

Incident #210 Status Complete, one action item outstanding. Summary Sentinel consumed by wolf after repeated false alarms. Impact Loss of sentinel. No flock impact. Root causes Sentinel generated noisy alerts due to premature deployment, incomplete training, and overly monotonous task. Oncalls failed to respond to…

1761

The anatomy of a smart bulb

I’ve been having some troubles with Zigbee. Yes, at our airbnb we have a rather big dining room where I’ve put 7 Zigbee RGBWW Smart bulbs. The problem is that each time I try to turn all 7 on or off there’s either a lag or some of them just won’t switch on or off. The controller is a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB dongle, yes…

1770

Patching Is Hard

There are many news reports of a ransomware worm . Much of the National Health Service in the UK has been hit; so has FedEx . The patch for the flaw exploited by this malware has been out for a while, but many companies haven’t installed it. Naturally, this has prompted a lot of victim-blaming: they should have…