• 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.

There have been three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released since last week.

The snapshots brought a single major version update and new versions of KDE’s Plasma and Frameworks.

ImageMagick’s 7.0.8.56 version arrived in snapshot 20190730 and added support for the TIM2 image format, which is commonly used in PlayStation 2 and sometimes in PlayStation Portable games. The snapshot also delivered an update for Mesa 3D Graphics Library with version 19.1.3 that mostly provided fixes for ANV and RADV drivers, as well as NIR backend fixes. File searching tool catfish 1.4.8 provided some fixes with directories and a fix running on Wayland. The GNU Compiler Collection 7 added a patch and fixed for a Link Time Optimization (LTO) linker plugin. The 9.0.1 glu, which is the OpenGL Utility library for Mesa, fixed a possible memory leak. The Linux Kernel was updated to 5.2.3; the new version made a few fixes for PowerPC and added Bluetooth for some new devices. Serval Python packages were updated in the snapshot. LLVM tools and libraries were updated in Tumbleweed with llvm8 8.0.1 but the changelog states not to run LLVM tests on PowerPC because of sporadic hangs. The 2.4.7 version of openvpn in the snapshot added support for tls-ciphersuites for TLS 1.3 and updated openvpn.keyring with public key downloaded from https://swupdate.openvpn.net/community/keys/security-key-2019.asc. A lengthy list of fixes were made to the VIM text editor in version 8.1.1741. Other packages updated in the snapshot were ucode-intel 20190618, xapps 1.4.8, ypbind 2.6.1 and zstd 1.4.1. The snapshot is trending as moderately stable with a rating of 79, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Two openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots have been released since our last Tumbleweed update on Saturday.

The most recent snapshot, 20190723, updated Mozilla Firefox to version 68.0.1. The browser fixed the missing Full-Screen button when watching videos in full screen mode on HBO GO. The new 68 version enhanced the Dark Mode reader view to include darkening the controls, sidebars and toolbars. It also addressed several Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE). The snapshot provided an update to GNOME 3.32.4, which fixed an issue that led to some packages with multiple appdata files not correctly showing up on the updates page. The Guile programming language package update to 2.2.6 fixed regression introduced in the previous version that broke HTTP servers locale encoding. Hardware library hwinfo 21.67 fixed Direct Access Storage Devices (DASD) detection. A major 7.0 version of hylafax+ arrived in the snapshot. The Linux Kernel brought several new features with the 5.2.1 kernel and enhanced security for a hardware vulnerability affecting Intel processors. The open-source painting program Krita 4.2.3 version offered a variety of fixes including a copy and paste fix of the animation frames. A few libraries like libgphoto2, libuv and libva received update. There were also several Perl and Rubygem packages that were updated in the snapshot. The file manager for the Xfce Desktop Environment, thunar 1.8.8, fixed XML declaration in uca.xml and the 2.15 transactional-update package enable network during updates and allow updates of the bootloader on EFI systems. The snapshot is currently trending at a 93 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots in the middle of this week brought new minor version updates to ImageMagick, Squid, SQLite, VIM and more. The new KDE Applications 19.04.3 version arrived in the first two snapshots.

The more recent snapshot, 20190718, brought a half-dozen new packages, which include fix for the UrbanCode Deploy (UCD) script data for Unicode 10+ scripts for the OpenType text shaping engine package harfbuzz 2.5.3. A two-year old Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) was fixed with the update of libpng12 1.2.59. The tool that cleans RPM spec files, spec-cleaner 1.1.4, added a temporary patch to fix a test that fails if there is no internet connection. Caching proxy squid 4.8 fixed GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 9 build issues and added a fix to prevent parameter parsing used for a potential Denial of Service (DoS). RISC-V support was added with the virt-manager 2.2.1 update and xclock 1.0.9 was also updated in the snapshot, which is trending at a 97 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.