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Servers, SUSE, Red Hat and Fedora

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  • My Favorite Infrastructure

    PCI policy pays a lot of attention to systems that manage sensitive cardholder data. These systems are labeled as "in scope", which means they must comply with PCI-DSS standards. This scope extends to systems that interact with these sensitive systems, and there is a strong emphasis on compartmentation—separating and isolating the systems that are in scope from the rest of the systems, so you can put tight controls on their network access, including which administrators can access them and how.

    Our architecture started with a strict separation between development and production environments. In a traditional data center, you might accomplish this by using separate physical network and server equipment (or using abstractions to virtualize the separation). In the case of cloud providers, one of the easiest, safest and most portable ways to do it is by using completely separate accounts for each environment. In this way, there's no risk that a misconfiguration would expose production to development, and it has a side benefit of making it easy to calculate how much each environment is costing you per month.

    When it came to the actual server architecture, we divided servers into individual roles and gave them generic role-based names. We then took advantage of the Virtual Private Cloud feature in Amazon Web Services to isolate each of these roles into its own subnet, so we could isolate each type of server from others and tightly control access between them.

    By default, Virtual Private Cloud servers are either in the DMZ and have public IP addresses, or they have only internal addresses. We opted to put as few servers as possible in the DMZ, so most servers in the environment only had a private IP address. We intentionally did not set up a gateway server that routed all of these servers' traffic to the internet—their isolation from the internet was a feature!

    Of course, some internal servers did need some internet access. For those servers, it was only to talk to a small number of external web services. We set up a series of HTTP proxies in the DMZ that handled different use cases and had strict whitelists in place. That way we could restrict internet access from outside the host itself to just the sites it needed, while also not having to worry about collecting lists of IP blocks for a particular service (particularly challenging these days since everyone uses cloud servers).

    [...]

    Although I covered a lot of ground in this infrastructure write-up, I still covered only a lot of the higher-level details. For instance, deploying a fault-tolerant, scalable Postgres database could be an article all by itself. I also didn't talk much about the extensive documentation I wrote that, much like my articles in Linux Journal, walks the reader through how to use all of these tools we built.

    As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, this is only an example of an infrastructure design that I found worked well for me with my constraints. Your constraints might be different and might lead to a different design. The goal here is to provide you with one successful approach, so you might be inspired to adapt it to your own needs.

  • A Blunt Reminder About Security for Embedded Computing

    The ICS Advisory (ICSA-19-211-01) released on July 30th by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is chilling to read. According to the documentation, VxWorks is “exploitable remotely” and requires “low skill level to exploit.” Elaborating further, CISA risk assessment concludes, “Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution.”
    The potential consequences of this security breech are astounding to measure, particularly when I look back on my own personal experiences in this space, and now as an Account Executive for Embedded Systems here at SUSE.

    [...]

    At the time, VxWorks was the standard go-to OS in the majority of the embedded production platforms I worked with. It was an ideal way to replace the legacy stove-piped platforms with an Open Architecture (OA) COTS solution. In light of the recent CISA warning, however, it is concerning to know that many of those affected systems processed highly-classified intelligence data at home and abroad.

  • Red Hat Recognized as a Leader by Independent Research Firm in Infrastructure Automation Platforms Evaluation [Ed: Forrester is not “Independent Research Firm”; It’s taking bribes to lie.]
  • Why Red Hat can take over the cloud sooner than you think
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7: Final Full Support Update
  • Transport Layer Security version 1.3 in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

    TLS 1.3 is the sixth iteration of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol. Originally designed by Netscape in the mid-1990’s to serve the purposes of online shopping, it quickly became the primary security protocol of the Internet. Now not limited just to web browsing, among other things, it secures email transfers, database accesses or business to business communication.

    Because it had its roots in the early days of public cryptography, when public knowledge about securely designing cryptographic protocols was limited, the first two iterations: SSLv2 and SSLv3 are now quite thoroughly broken. The next two iterations, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 depend on the security of Message Digest 5 (MD5) and Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA1).

  • Cute Qt applications in Fedora Workstation

    Fedora Workstation is all about Gnome and it has been since the beginning, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care about Qt applications, the opposite is true. Many users use Qt applications, even on Gnome, mainly because many KDE/Qt applications don’t have adequate replacement written in Gtk or they are just used to them and don’t really have reason to switch to another one.

    For Qt integration, there is some sort of Gnome support in Qt itself, which includes a platform theme reading Gnome configuration, like fonts and icons. This platform theme also provides native file dialogs, but don’t expect native look of Qt applications. There used to be a gtk2 style, which used gtk calls directly to render natively looking Qt widgets, but it was moved from qtbase to qt5-styleplugins, because it cannot be used today in combination with gtk3.

    For reasons mentioned above, we have been working on a Qt style to make Qt applications look natively in Gnome. This style is named adwaita-qt and from the name you can guess that it makes Qt applications look like Gtk applications with Adwaita style. Adwaita-qt is actually not a new project, it’s been there for years and it was developed by Martin Bříza. Unfortunately, Martin left Red Hat long time ago and since then a new version of Gnome’s Adwaita was released, completely changing colors and made the Adwaita theme look more modern. Being the one who takes care of these things nowadays, I started slowly updating adwaita-qt to make it look like the current Gnome Adwaita theme and voilà, a new version was released after 3 months of intermittent work.

  • Fedora Community Blog: Friday with Infra

    Friday with Infra is a new event done by CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team, that will help potential contributors to start working on some of the applications we maintain. During this event members of the CPE team will help you to start working on those applications and help you with any issue you may encounter. At the end of this event you should be able to maintain the application by yourself.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.