December 31, 2021
In December 2020, the CentOS Project announced a series of changes.
The three most important are:
- the creation of CentOS Stream and the consequent rename of CentOS (the classic Linux distribution the project is known for) in CentOS Linux
- the anticipation to today (31/12/2021) of the End Of Life for CentOS Linux 8
- the fact that CentOS Linux 8 is going to be the last and that from now on, only CentOS Stream will have new releases
That announcement created a lot of different sentiments in the community and even more among the CentOS Linux users.
As many predicted, multiple solutions are now available for the users that used to be on CentOS Linux.
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December 28, 2020
At the beginning of this month, I took the EX294 exam, which allowed me to obtain the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification.
It was the first time I attempted the RHCE exam, but I prepared myself in the past for the EX300 exam, the exam that allowed you to obtain the RHCE certification in the RHEL7 time, but never got around to do the exam.
Compared to what I had to study for the EX300, I found the EX294 program way more sensible.
An aspect I’ve never liked about the EX300 was that you needed to learn many implementation details, such as the in-scope applications’ configuration format.
EX294 changed this aspect since it is based on Ansible, and Ansible abstracts the majority of implementation details of the various applications.
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October 1, 2020
A few years ago, I did pass this exam, but since then, the certification expired, so I had to re-take the exam.
While the first time I did the exam in a testing center, this time I had to do it at home since all test centers are closed.
The experience of doing the exam at home has been a very positive one since you can arrange the environment as it better fits you.
You can have as much light as you like (within sensible limits), you can use the chair you prefer and the desk orientation you prefer.
You will not be allowed to bring cheating sheets or similar things since the proctor will ask you to show the whole room using the webcam, as you might imagine.
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November 3, 2017
Authentication factors
One of the common way to create more secure authentication in systems is adding more “factors”, creating in this way a Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).
The idea behind MFA is that there are many different ways to authenticate a user, and those can be split in different “categories” based on the kind of challenge we require.
Generally speaking, it’s common to divide the authentication methods in mainly three categories:
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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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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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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog