Walkthrough a PEM file in Go

 December 21, 2017

A few months ago, I posted how to create a PKI in Go. Today I’d like to add share a useful function (at least from my point of view) that I found myself to write.

The problem arose when I had a function that required as input a *pem.Block of the public key, but all I had was the PEM file containing, as you can imagine:

• the Private Key
• the Public Key
• the CA Public Key

I think this is a typical situation, and for this, I’d like to share a function I wrote to extract it. I know that it’s probably not perfect, but it could be a good starting point for many of you, and if you have suggestions, please leave a comment down below or send me an email, and I’ll update the post!

SSH with Yubikey

 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:

Ansible Tower in Vagrant

 July 26, 2017

A lot of times during my job I found myself with the need of Ansible Tower testing environments.

In the last few weeks I created a Vagrant script to actually automate it.

As this is a single host installation, which is usually more than enough for the majority of tests I do, the Vagrant file is very easy:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|

    # Set machine size
    config.vm.provider :libvirt do |domain|
        domain.memory = 2048
        domain.cpus = 1
    end

    # Tower/PgSQL machine
    config.vm.define "tower" do |tower|
        tower.vm.box = "centos/7"
    end

    # Ansible Tower configuration
    config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
        ansible.playbook = "playbook.yaml"
    end

end

I basically create a 2Gb of RAM machine leveraging libvirt and run an Ansible Playbook on it. The reason I created a 2Gb of RAM machine and I’ve not tried to shrink it further is because the Ansible Tower installation checks for 2Gb of RAM, and I wanted to create something easy. I’m sure I could patch the installer to accept a 1Gb machine, but it’s not worth the effort to me. Also, in my usual usage of the computer I rarely go below 11Gb free memory, so I’m not too concerned in giving 2Gb to my VM.

Create a PKI in GoLang

 June 5, 2017

Lately I have been programming quite a bit and - for the first time - I have used Golang doing so. Go is a very nice language and really helped me with the development. One of the reasons why I have enjoyed this much Go is the standard library, which is amazing. I would like to share today the easiness of creating a basic Certificate Authority and signed certificates in Go.

libVirt on Hetzner

 April 26, 2017

After many years of using Hetzner as a server provider, and having rented from them multiple servers for many reasons, I decided to rent a server with 128Gb of RAM to do some tests with many (virtualized) machines on top of CentOS.

As it often happens, hosting providers put in place a lot of security measurements that sometimes make doing simple stuff more complex. The first approach I tried was using the (only) Ethernet interface as a bridged interface, but that did not brought me very far. Speaking with the support they pointed out that it was impossible in my setup, so I moved to the second option: the broute.

Vagrant etcd cluster

 March 21, 2017

Sometimes I need to do some tests which are destructive and I need to perform them over and over until I figure out a process that reliably brings me to a desired state. I usually create some kind of easy to provision environments and work on it.

In the last few weeks I found myself working on an etcd cluster, so I created an environment with Vagrant, and since I had to write the majority of this by myself, since I have not found anything on Google that suited my needs, I’m going to share this with you.

FOSDEM 2017

 February 5, 2017 -  Bruxelles, BE

FOSDEM is a must for all open source enthusiast in Europe and close by. I think that the reasons to go to FOSDEM are different from the reasons of many other conferences, but equally valid. The comparison with DevConf is obvious, due to the temporal closeness of the two events.

I think that DevConf is more about enterprise grade software (or close to be), while FOSDEM is more about experimentations and community. The causes for this are probably obvious if you consider that DevConf is mainly sponsored by Red Hat, while FOSDEM is completely community driven.

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. This year at DevConf (like in many others conferences) containers are a very big topic. The other big topic (related, but different) was Modularization, an approach Fedora is trying to

LinuxDay 2016 in Bernareggio

 November 1, 2016 -  Villanova di Bernareggio, IT

In Italy every year, during the last weekend of October, there is the Linux Day, an “open day” for the LUGs where they create events to publicize GNU/Linux and the Free Software. As usual (for the last 7 years now), the ViGLug organized this event and this time has been in Bernareggio (MB), a city less than half hour drive north-east from Milan. This year, for the first time in the ViGLug life, we have partnered up with other two organizations BrigX (the Bernareggio LUG) and the Coderdojo Brianza. This allowed us to have more diverse contents and to reach more people.

FLOCK 2016

 August 7, 2016 -  Kraków, PL

This year, I have been able to go to Flock :). Flock location this year was Krakov (Poland). Since my flight arrival time was very close to Mailga’s one, I waited him at the airport and then we went together to the Flock location. This has proven to be a good idea, since we had the time to speak about some important topics around the Italian Community. We then arrived to the Flock location, were we discovered a problem with the rooms booking, but that got resolved in a quick way by Bexelbie.