(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog
April 30, 2025
If you’ve followed my posts over the years, you know I prefer clean solutions to less clean ones for my home lab (more to come on this!). Over the past year, I settled on a pattern that gives me the isolation of Kubernetes Namespaces without any of its weight: one private Podman network per application, plus Traefik in a shared “DMZ” network that terminates TLS and forwards traffic where it needs to go.
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March 31, 2025
For a while now, I’ve been looking into optimizing and reorganizing some of the infrastructure that powers my self-hosting services. After evaluating a few alternatives, Scaleway’s Dedibox lineup caught my attention: it is a European company with good hardware and decent pricing.
However, as with every good solution, it is not perfect. Scaleway does not provide Fedora as an OS option for their Dedibox machines. They offer a decent selection, including Rocky Linux, Debian, and Ubuntu — but no Fedora. Now, if you know me, you know that Fedora is not just my distro of choice — it’s the one I trust for both personal and professional projects.
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January 31, 2025
The next few days are shaping up to be packed with open-source goodness! I’ll be heading to CentOS Connect, FOSDEM, and CfgMgmtCamp, three of the best events in the ecosystem. These conferences always include a great mix of technical talks, hallway conversations, and spontaneous meetups with friends—both old and new.
If you’re around, let’s catch up!
CentOS Connect (Brussels, January 31)
Although the event run yesterday and today, I’ll only be able to attend today.
CentOS Connect is a small but incredibly valuable event where the wider CentOS community (Fedora, CentOS, and all the Enterprise Linux distros) meets to discuss the space’s present and future.
It’s a great opportunity to meet contributors, learn about upcoming changes, and exchange ideas with people who shape the CentOS ecosystem.
I really like this event because its atmosphere is similar to Flock: very casual and more like a friends’ gathering than a conference.
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.
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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:
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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.
September 30, 2024
Recently, I heard a pitch from a public cloud company. Among other characteristics, a key aspect they stressed is that they are the cheapest cloud. This aspect struck me. Not because I believe it is or is not, but because I’ve heard many companies pitch themselves as the cheapest cloud over the years. I asked the CTO if they were foreseeing consistent and planned cuts in the pricing every year or so. The CTO’s answer was very sensible but negative on the specific point. Later the same day, I was thinking more about my interaction with that CTO, and it became clear to me why pitching to be the cheapest cloud is not a good idea.
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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.
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.
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July 31, 2024
Last month, the Ansible Forum had a discussion about potential changes that might be implemented in AWX. One aspect that immediately hit me was the decision to move from SemVer to CalVer. More specifically, what struck me was the focus on this change in the initial post and in the comments. Since it took me a while to formulate a whole reasoning behind my perspective, I created this blog post to explain my thought process better.
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June 17, 2024
I took the EX358 exam a few years back and therefore it recently expired. Since the exam is still available, I decided to take it again to renew my Red Hat Certified Specialist in Services Management and Automation certification and, therefore, extend my Red Hat Certified Architect certification.
This time around, I had the impression that the exam had changed quite a bit from the last time I took it. While the previous time the exam reminded me mostly of an Ansible certification, this time it reminded me way more of the old RHCE exam (the EX300). The bulk of the exam was about configuring the various services, while in the previous version, there was a lot more focus on the Ansible part, which is more like the EX294. It is also true that EX300 was phasing out at the time, but it was still an exam many people had, while EX294 was fairly new. However, as I suggested the previous time, it is still crucial to be able to perform all configurations manually and with Ansible because you can not know what you will be tasked to perform manually and what you will be tasked to perform using Ansible.
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