Where does your Ansible code come from?

 April 30, 2025 -  ,

A bad year for open source databases

 December 31, 2024

Although the definitions of Open Source are related to specific software characteristics (i.e., the license), the reality is much more complex. Open-source is way more related to a social contract that the software’s creator and its users morally sign than the definition might lead you to believe. This social contract’s key aspect concerns the software’s current license and the licenses of future versions. This is because although users of open-source software usually do not pay to use it, they incur high costs to do so. Examples of those costs are training costs and potential costs to replace a certain technology should it become unavailable in the future.

Where does your Ansible code come from?

 December 4, 2024 -  Paris, FR

Hyperscalers are not serious about Service Level Agreements (SLA)

 November 30, 2024

I often talk with people about Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in public cloud contexts, and I discover that their idea of what those SLAs are is often distorted.

I believe SLAs need to be approached with a healthy dose of skepticism. In reality, they often provide little meaningful recourse when things go awry. There are two big issues, in my opinion, with the SLA provided by many companies, including the hyperscalers:

Nebula VPN split configuration

 October 31, 2024

We have had Nebula VPN within the Fedora repositories for a couple of years. A couple of months ago, I changed the default systemd service unit. More specifically, this is the change:

-ExecStart=/usr/bin/nebula -config /etc/nebula/config.yml
+ExecStart=/usr/bin/nebula -config /etc/nebula

Although the change is only a few characters, this change allows for a much more flexible use of Nebula. Before this change, the configuration could only be placed in the config.yaml file. After this change, all YAML files in the folders will be read, merged, and used as configuration.

On Out of Office emails

 August 26, 2024

This summer, I found myself multiple times reading out-of-office emails. Actually, this is not a new phenomenon: it has happened every summer since I started working. Obviously, it also happens outside the summer, but it is far easier to notice it during the summer.

I think the majority of people should not configure an out-of-office replyer.

By recipient

Many people might write to you and receive an out-of-office email if you have set up an out-of-office replayer. Let’s analyze the various personas that might send you emails and whether the out-of-office message makes sense for them.

Where does your Ansible code come from?

 June 21, 2024 -  Málaga, ES

Forward all your traffic with RedSocks

 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.

Where does your Ansible code come from?

 April 24, 2024 -  ,

Use Dante to proxy web traffic

 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.