(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog
April 30, 2024
VPNs can be used in different ways based on the desired objective. If the goal is to reach some specific web pages served only within a network, using a proxy will probably do the trick. Another common use for VPNs is to ensure the confidentiality of data transferred between a remote system and a safe site. In this case, we might want to ensure that all traffic from the remote system reaches the safe site via the VPN.
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March 31, 2024
A while ago, I posted about using SSH to proxy traffic within a Nebula network context. In the last few months, I changed my implementation because SSH required some steps and accesses that I was not fully happy with.
In the previous iteration, I was using SSH as a SOCKS proxy. The problem, though, is that I need to set up the connection every time and use my SSH credentials, so it becomes difficult to have it always on. A different SOCKS proxy software needs to be used to achieve the same result without SSH.
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November 28, 2022
As discusse in a previous post, I use nebula to create a VPN connection between the various machines I use. Usually what I really care about this setup is the ability of consuming services those machine expose on my nebula network.
When I travel, I prefer to proxy my data through my nebula network. This allows me to not have to care about the limitations imposed in those networks, as long as I’m able to open my tunnel. The second advantage I have, is that I can choose the location where my traffic leaves my VPN, since I have multiple machines in multiple nations. Another advantage is that I can be sure that no data is visibile by the network manager, even if this is becoming less and less relevant, since the majority of the traffic is encrypted nowadays.
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February 19, 2022
pdfcpu is a command-line tool to perform actions on PDF files. It allows to perform all the standard operations, such as merge, split, and rotate pages. It also allows less common operations such as changing the user and owner passwords, encrypting/decrypting, optimizing, etc.
The project started back in 2017, but I discovered it only last year. I like pdfcpu due to the high focus on allowing and making it easy to perform those kinds of operations in batch.
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February 29, 2016
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the biggest public cloud provider and has released a set of tools to help out sysadmins and developers for integrating with their infrastructure.
The three tools we are going to discuss in this article are three of AWS’s most-used and well-known tools:
All those tools are currently available in Fedora (22+) and EPEL (7).
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January 27, 2016
A couple of weeks ago, I’ve announced the availability of AWS tools for Fedora. I’m very happy to announce that today they are available in the EPEL7 repository as well.
The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository is an RPM repository managed by the Fedora community that creates, maintains, and manages a high quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Scientific Linux (SL), and Oracle Linux (OL). As you can imagine, the 7 stays for the version, so only the version 7.x of the named distributions will allow you to install those packages.
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January 16, 2016
In the last few weeks I’ve worked toward bringing the Amazon Web Services tools in Fedora. The three AWS tools that are coming in the next few days in Fedora are:
Botocore just landed in Fedora updates repositories while boto3 and awscli will be pushed to the updates repository tomorrow or Monday morning. If you want to see them in the repo even sooner test them and give feedbacks, in this way Bodhi will allow those packages to be pushed to the stable repository if feedbacks are positive.
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December 22, 2015
Innotop is a tool that allows you to control the status of a MySQL/MariaDB database. It is widely used since it shows the data with an interface very similar to the top one.
Lately it’s development has slowed down, but small changes do come regularly.
The biggest change this time (compared to the 1.10.0-0.2 version) is the addition of a patch that allows innotop to work properly with MariaDB 10.1 and 10.2 that has recently hit the Fedora 24 repositories.
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August 24, 2014
One of my clients asked me to upgrade their MySQL 5.1 installation to MariaDB 10. This caused some problems mainly due to the fact that many MySQL clients are not MariaDB 10 ready. An example of a MySQL client not yet ready for MariaDB 10 is Innotop.
Innotop is a widely used client for MySQL/MariaDB that shows you an interface similar to the “top” Unix command. To solve this, I found a patch online and, after some testing, I’ve added it to the Fedora package.
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January 3, 2013
Have you ever had to develop a script in UNIX that has to send an email?
If you have, probably you have used the “mail” function since this program is the standard program to send e-mails in UNIX environments if you are using the CLI (Command Line Interface).
The manual for mail reports this as mail usage prototype:
mail -r [sender] -s [subject] receiver-1[,receiver-2,...,receiver-n] > [File with the body]
I think all the parameters are pretty straightforward except the “File with the body” one. This has to be an ASCII file (ie: .txt) with the e-mail body content in the text-only mode.
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