Avatar (Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog

Manage Podman containers with Systemd and Quadlet

May 17, 2023

Until a few months ago, the only option to start containers from Systemd was to create a Systemd unit which called podman (or docker) with the run sub-command. Podman was also providing podman generate systemd to easily create such Systemd file. This has now changed. From version 4.4 of Podman, in addition to the mentioned method, it is possible to use Quadlet to simplify the execution of containers from Systemd.

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GitHub Actions and containers

April 17, 2023

GitHub Actions allows the use of containers with different Operating Systems. Although, it does not mean that everything is seamless when you are using them. I’ve discovered this the hard way! Below are my findings and the process I followed to make the GitHub Action pipeline work properly with containers. It all started with the addition of a new tool in the pipeline, which was not installable on Ubuntu (the GitHub Actions default operating system), due to a packaging issue.

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Red Hat Certified Specialist in Containers

February 27, 2023

Last week, I completed the Red Hat EX188 exam, which allowed me to become Red Hat Certified Specialist in Containers. I think that Red Hat has been able to improve the quality of its exams over time. Newer exams tend to have better explanations of the required tasks. It could also be that this feeling is partially due to my increasing familiarity with those kinds of exercises. This exam is very new; in fact, I believe it was released at the beginning of the year, and this is by far the more user-friendly Red Hat exam I’ve ever done.

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Podman ports and firewalld

February 24, 2023

A few weeks ago, I was doing a security check on one of my machines to ensure that everything was secure when I noticed that there were some ports open that I was surprised to find out. The way I discovered those ports was by checking some ports with netcat (nc -zv IP_ADDRESS PORT). I was expecting those ports to be closed, and I got surprised when netcat claimed to be able to connect to them.

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DevConf 2020

January 27, 2020 - Brno, CZ

As it happened at other times in my life, I managed to be present at DevConf. DevConf is one of the best conferences that I attend. The reasons are many and varied, starting from the location that I find relatively stress-free. Another reason is the fact that there are many different kinds of sessions, and many sessions are not overcrowded, so it is relatively simple to participate in any session you would like to.

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Why you should bundle the root CAs in your image

July 13, 2018

If you have ever used Docker or any other Linux OCI container system, you inevitably have incurred in the following error: x509: failed to load system roots and no roots provided This message is remembering you that you forgot to provide Root Certificate Authorities to your application. There are two different ways to solve this: mount the /etc/ssl/certs folder from the machine where the container is running bundling the root CAs in your image As you may imagine from the title, I believe that the second option is by far better than the first one.

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Why everything will end up in a container

May 9, 2018

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about why containerization is not always the answer and I’ve received quite a few comments about it. This article has the goal to analyze an aspect in favor of containerization which I believe to be true but was not mentioned in the previous post: the time aspect of the phenomenon. In the ICT sector, we are used to new technologies, or at least we should be.

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Why containerization is not always the answer

March 27, 2018

UPDATE: I’ve then written another post to clarify better my point of view on the future of containers. When I hear people (and usually those people are salespeople) saying that as soon as you put a Container Platform in your company, all your problems go away, I feel bad for the company they are trying to sell it to. I’ve seen far too many container platforms (as well as many other technologies) fail at customers because they have been sold as this magical problem that makes all your problems go away.

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DevConf 2017

January 29, 2017 - Brno, CZ

I think this is a special moment of the year, where in less than two weeks is possible to meet a huge amount of Open Source contributors in person. Obviously you will need to take few flights, but it’s definitely worth. DevConf this year was great. I’ve been able to assist to a huge amount of talks (more than 20) and the majority of which were very interesting. As always in conferences, there are themes heavily discussed and other completely absent.

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