MACCHIATObin Single Shot first impressions

 July 31, 2022

I’ve played with a MACCHIATObin Single Shot board for the last month. I decided to pick this up instead of a different board because of its sheer connectivity. This board has 1x1GbE, 1x2.5GbE, and 2x10GbE, which is very rare for those kinds of boards. I was most interested in the two 10GbE due to some projects I have in mind.

I was interested in installing Fedora, which proved very easy. The first time I created a bootable micro-SD card with Fedora, it worked perfectly out of the box. After a few tests, I decided to install Fedora on a SATA drive. The SATA installation proved a bit more complex because I assumed it could boot from USB, but I did not manage to do so. I then moved the Fedora ISO to a micro-SD card and installed it from there, which proved to work flawlessly.

Nebula on Fedora

 June 30, 2022

In the last year, I moved more and more data and services to hardware that I can directly control. A direct consequence of this is that I started to run more hardware at my house. This change has been very positive, but it is suboptimal when not at home. All services I run are secure and could be shared directly on the web, but I prefer a more cautious approach. For this reason, I decided to create a VPN.

Can you trust a cloud provider for HA?

 May 23, 2022

We have seen a massive increase in the “real world” dependency on digital services in the last few years. This process will probably continue in the future, and we are not ready for it. In the same few years, we have seen a lot of cases where digital services went offline or got hacked. In a society that relies more and more on digital services, we can not afford such services not to be available or secure. Although security is essential, I want to focus on availability for now.

Obtain an Ansible Job output from Ansible Tower API

 April 27, 2022

A couple of years back, I wrote a blogpost on obtaining the previous Job ID in Ansible Tower workflow. Now, let’s go further and create another module to obtain the output of such a job.

Before moving further, I want to specify that I talk about Ansible Tower since this is the most known name for this software, but I could also be talking about AWX or Ansible Controller since those are the same codebase. AWX is the open-source upstream project. Ansible Tower is the former name of the Red Hat product based on AWX. Ansible Controller is the name of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 component based on AWX.

gopass in Fedora

 April 25, 2022

I started to use ZX2C4’s pass back in 2016 to manage my passwords. I liked the idea behind pass, but I found it too hackish. For this reason, I moved to gopass at the end of 2017 because it was a far more complete implementation of pass from my point of view.

gopass is now part of my system, and I’m so used to it that it is hard for me to think about my workflows without gopass into them.

PSM I and PSPO I

 March 31, 2022

On Friday, I had the opportunity to take scrum.org’s Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I) and Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I) exams.

I’ve started to prepare myself with a training course mainly focused on PSM I. Even though the training title was around PSM I, the course has been on the ideas and reasons behind scrum more than specifically on the certification.

I’ve then proceeded with a full read of the scrum guide.

Inject DB connections in Golang gRPC API

 March 21, 2022

One of the first issues that I had to solve when I started to use gRPC was how to inject a DB connection pool to the function handling the request. The DB connection injection is needed because creating a new SQL connection every time there is a new gRPC request (and tearing it down at the end) is a massive waste of resources. Also, this approach could limit the scalability of the API since the database probably has a limited number of connections it will accept.

gRPC-Gateway 2 in Fedora

 February 22, 2022

gRPC is a very nice technology that allows the implementation of efficient APIs in a very efficient way. Thanks to gRPC and protobuf, you do not have to write much boilerplate code since the boilerplate code is generated automatically from the proto file. This works perfectly until both your client and server can perform gRPC calls. Luckily most of the languages have no issue with this. Still, the big exception is JavaScript (and other languages that will compile to JS, such as TypeScript) running in a browser.

pdfcpu in Fedora

 February 19, 2022

pdfcpu is a command-line tool to perform actions on PDF files. It allows to perform all the standard operations, such as merge, split, and rotate pages. It also allows less common operations such as changing the user and owner passwords, encrypting/decrypting, optimizing, etc.

The project started back in 2017, but I discovered it only last year. I like pdfcpu due to the high focus on allowing and making it easy to perform those kinds of operations in batch.

US services, EU privacy rules

 January 25, 2022

In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of talking about Google Analytics and the GDPR. I think most of the comments around it have missed the whole picture.

A little bit of history

Our brief history begins at the end of the ’90s when the EU and the US agreed on the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles. On the 26th July 2000, the European Commission (EC) formalized it with the Commission Decision 2000/520/EC, where it was defined that data could be freely moved from the EU to the US. The assumption was that the data on US soil would have comparable (or better) protection than the same data on EU soil, and therefore the privacy of European citizens was not at risk. On 6th October 2015, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) invalidated this decision on the basis that in the US laws were authorizing public authorities to have access on a generalized basis to the content of electronic communications, and this was deemed to be “compromising the essence of the fundamental right to respect for private life” (the quote is from the ECJ decision).