Running Isso on NixOS in a Docker container

This short article documents how I run Isso, the commenting system used by this blog, inside a Docker container on NixOS, a Linux distribution built on top of Nix. Nix is a declarative package manager for Linux and other Unix systems.

While NixOS 20.09 includes a derivation for Isso, it is unfortunately broken and relies on Python 2. As I am also using a fork of Isso, I have built my own derivation, heavily inspired by the one in master:¹

issoPackage = with pkgs.python3Packages; buildPythonPackage rec {
  pname = "isso";
  version = "custom";

  src = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
    # Use my fork
    owner = "vincentbernat";
    repo = pname;
    rev = "vbe/master";
    sha256 = "0vkkvjcvcjcdzdj73qig32hqgjly8n3ln2djzmhshc04i6g9z07j";
  };

  propagatedBuildInputs = [
    itsdangerous
    jinja2
    misaka
    html5lib
    werkzeug
    bleach
    flask-caching
  ];

  buildInputs = [
    cffi
  ];

  checkInputs = [ nose ];

  checkPhase = ''
    ${python.interpreter} setup.py nosetests
  '';
};

I want to run Isso through Gunicorn. To this effect, I build an environment combining Isso and Gunicorn. Then, I can invoke the latter with "${issoEnv}/bin/gunicorn".

issoEnv = pkgs.python3.buildEnv.override {
    extraLibs = [
      issoPackage
      pkgs.python3Packages. Continue reading

Zero Trust Access Policies for IoT Must be Granular

Python Pieces: Decorators

As some of you know – Im a big believer that we all learn differently. You may read something the first time and immediately grasp the topic whereas I may read it and miss the point entirely. For me, decorators have been one of those things that I felt like I was always close to understanding but still not quite getting it. Sure – some of the examples I read made sense but then I’d find another one that didn’t. In my quest to understand them, I spent a lot of time reviewing a lot of examples and asking a lot of very patient friends for help. At this point, I feel like I know enough to try and explain the topic in a manner that might hopefully help someone else who was having a hard time with the concept. With my learning philosophy out of the way, let’s jump right in….

I want to jump right into a real (albeit not super useful) example of decorators using the full decorator (or shorthand) syntax. Let’s start with this…

def a_decorator(a_function):
    print("You've been decorated!")
    return a_function

@a_decorator
def print_name_string(your_name):
    name_string = "Your name is: " + your_name
    return name_string

print(print_your_name("Jon"))

Continue reading

Vint Cerf’s Mission to Bring the Internet to Outer Space

77-year-old Vint Cerf is credited as the father of the internet — but he’s now tackling an even bigger challenge. He’s joined with the scientists who envision a network that can scale across hundreds of millions of miles, in an airless vacuum, where data transmissions can be blocked by, for example, the planet Jupiter. Cerf’s working with a team whose lofty new dream is an internet which can connect our spacecraft in outer space — to the other spacecraft, and to listeners waiting here on earth. It’s instructive to see how engineers approach a task that stretches endless on an interplanetary scale — and what it took to lead scientists to this galaxy-sized dream. Guide to the Galaxy Back in the 1970s, Cerf co-developed the TCP/IP protocol with Bob Kahn, which became the foundation for all internet communication today. (Though in a recent article in Quanta, Cerf stresses that “A lot of people contributed to the creation of the internet.”) But what’s less known is that Cerf has also held a lifelong interest in outer space. One

DNS XL

Weekend Reads 103020

But amid all this disruption, we have also experienced an incredible digital transformation. In just a few months, we have jumped forward years in our use of advanced digital tools for interacting with one another, running our businesses, sending our kids to school and understanding what is going on in the world.

In 2015, the Internet Society Kolkata Chapter decided to create an Internet Exchange Point (IXP). It had just completed the installation of L-Root Instance, a critical Internet infrastructure to improve security and resiliency of the Web.

We can move towards a future of online education which replicates the artificial scarcity of traditional publishing, or take a path which fosters an abundance of free materials by embracing the principles of open access and open education.

While pop culture and Hollywood productions depict hackers working tirelessly to compromise security systems and break down firewalls, only a handful of attacks require this level of intense work. In reality, the hackers’ work is much simpler.

The cloud is a computer, no different in theory than the device you’re reading this article on, but very different in construction. For instance, you don’t own the cloud.

The long-held skepticism around wafer-scale architectures is deep Continue reading

The Serverlist: Serverless Wasm AI, Building Automatic Platform Optimizations, and more!

Check out our twenty-first edition of The Serverlist below. Get the latest scoop on the serverless space, get your hands dirty with new developer tutorials, engage in conversations with other serverless developers, and find upcoming meetups and conferences to attend.

Sign up below to have The Serverlist sent directly to your mailbox.

Simplify the Modern Network with VMware NSX-T 3.1

Continuing our commitment to helping organizations around the world deliver a public cloud experience in the data center through VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network, we’re excited to announce the general availability of VMware NSX-TTM 3.1. This latest release of our full stack Layer 2 – 7 networking and security platform delivers capabilities that allow you to build modern networks at cloud scale while simplifying operations and strengthening security for east-west traffic inside the data center.  

As we continue to adapt to new realities, organizations need to build modern networks that can deliver any application, to any user, anywhere at any time, over any infrastructure — all while ensuring performance and connectivity objectives are met. And they need to do this at public cloud scale. NSX-T 3.1 gives organizations a way to simplify modern networks and replace legacy appliances that congest data center traffic. The Virtual Cloud Network powered by NSX-T enables you to achieve a stronger security posture and run virtual and containerized workloads anywhere. 

Continue reading

Networking and Infrastructure News Roundup: October 30 Edition

Heavy Networking 547: Building And Monitoring A User-Centric Digital Experience With Catchpoint (Sponsored)

Heavy Networking 547: Building And Monitoring A User-Centric Digital Experience With Catchpoint (Sponsored)

Today’s Heavy Networking show dives into Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) with sponsor Catchpoint. Catchpoint combines synthetic testing with end user device monitoring to provide greater visibility into the end user experience while helping network engineers and IT admins support and troubleshoot a distributed workforce. Our guests from Catchpoint are Nik Koutsoukos, CMO; and Tony Ferelli, VP Operations.

The post Heavy Networking 547: Building And Monitoring A User-Centric Digital Experience With Catchpoint (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

AMD grabs Xilinx for $35 billion in expansion play

The rumors were true, only the price was off. AMD formally announced this week it intends to acquire FPGA maker Xilinx for $35 billion, not $30 billion as originally rumored.Xilinx is the biggest maker of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips, a class of chips that can be reconfigured for a variety of specialized tasks by the end user. They are especially popular in vertical markets like automotive and cellular base stations, where a chip can be reprogrammed for a new or special task.Analysts see Xilinx as an AI play for AMD, which has lagged behind Nvidia in the race for machine learning (ML) and inference.To read this article in full, please click here

AMD grabs Xilinx for $35 billion in expansion play

The rumors were true, only the price was off. AMD formally announced this week it intends to acquire FPGA maker Xilinx for $35 billion, not $30 billion as originally rumored.Xilinx is the biggest maker of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips, a class of chips that can be reconfigured for a variety of specialized tasks by the end user. They are especially popular in vertical markets like automotive and cellular base stations, where a chip can be reprogrammed for a new or special task.Analysts see Xilinx as an AI play for AMD, which has lagged behind Nvidia in the race for machine learning (ML) and inference.To read this article in full, please click here

Forrester: Get ready for IoT networking chaos

The sheer number of connectivity options available for IoT networks will create chaos in the coming year, according to a newly released set of predictions from Forrester Research.As there’s no single connectivity option that meets every use case for IoT, businesses should expect to navigate a landscape that includes proprietary low-power options like Zigbee, unlicensed standards like Bluetooth, both public and private varieties of 5G, Wi-Fi, and even satellite in order to make deployments work.To read this article in full, please click here

Learning To Listen For Learning

Can you hear me? Are you listening to me? Those two statements are used frequently to see if someone is paying attention to what you’re saying. Their connotation is very different though. One asks a question about whether you can tell if there are words coming out of someone’s mouth. Is the language something you can process? The other question is all about understanding.

Taking Turns Speaking

“Seek first to understand,then to be understood.” – Stephen Covey

Listening is hard. Like super hard. How often do you find yourself on a conference call with your mind wandering to other things you need to take care of? How many times have we seen someone shopping online for shoes or camping gear instead of taking notes on the call they should be paying attention to? They answer is more often than we should.

Attention spans are hard for everyone, whether you’re affected by attention disorders or have normal brain chemistry. Our minds hate being bored. They’re always looking for a way to escape to something more exciting and stimulating. You know you can feel it when there’s a topic that seriously interests you and pulls you in versus the same old Continue reading

Unwrap the SERVFAIL

We recently released a new version of Cloudflare Resolver which adds a piece of information called “Extended DNS Errors” (EDE) along with the response code under certain circumstances. This will be helpful in tracing DNS resolution errors and figuring out what went wrong behind the scenes.

A tight-lipped agent

The DNS protocol was designed to map domain names to IP addresses. To inform the client about the result of the lookup, the protocol has a 4 bit field, called response code/RCODE. The logic to serve a response might look something like this:

function lookup(domain) {
    ...
    switch result {
    case "No error condition":
        return NOERROR with client expected answer
    case "No record for the request type":
        return NOERROR
    case "The request domain does not exist":
        return NXDOMAIN
    case "Refuse to perform the specified operation for policy reasons":
        return REFUSE
    default("Server failure: unable to process this query due to a problem with the name server"):
        return SERVFAIL
    }
}

try {
    lookup(domain)
} catch {
    return SERVFAIL
}

Although the context hasn't changed much, protocol extensions such as DNSSEC have been added, which makes the RCODE run out of space to express the server's internal Continue reading

Using the Midnight Commander to browse Linux directories

Midnight Commander – the "mc" command – provides an easy way to browse directories and to view, move, delete, compare, change and edit files. Similar in some ways to ranger, mc makes it easy to move around directories and offers side-by-side file/directory listings that work independently of each other. In addition, it provides a very wide range of actions that you can take through simple menu choices.To start Midnight Commander, simply type "mc" in a terminal window. When you open mc, both the left and right sides of the display will look the same and will show the contents of whatever directory you started in. You can switch sides using the tab key or simply by clicking on a directory or file in the side of the display. You can select a file or directory simply by clicking on it. You can also browse directory contents using the up and down arrow keys.To read this article in full, please click here

Who’s selling SASE and what do you get?

Demand for secure access service edge (SASE) has grown tremendously during the pandemic. As adoption picks up, vendors are promising feature-rich and integrated SASE solutions. Customers have different needs when it comes to SASE, however, and it’s not always easy to understand what a SASE provider is offering.As an approach, SASE combines networking and security into a scalable cloud service that fits with the remote and hybrid work models companies use today. Potential benefits include easier network and security management, flexibility to scale up or down as business needs require, and lower costs.To read this article in full, please click here

Who’s selling SASE and what do you get?

Demand for secure access service edge (SASE) has grown tremendously during the pandemic. As adoption picks up, vendors are promising feature-rich and integrated SASE solutions. Customers have different needs when it comes to SASE, however, and it’s not always easy to understand what a SASE provider is offering.As an approach, SASE combines networking and security into a scalable cloud service that fits with the remote and hybrid work models companies use today. Potential benefits include easier network and security management, flexibility to scale up or down as business needs require, and lower costs.To read this article in full, please click here

Video: Cisco SD-WAN Onboarding Process

After describing Cisco SD-WAN architecture and routing capabilities, David Penaloza focused on the onboarding process and tasks performed by the Cisco SD-WAN solution (encryption, tunnel establishment, and device onboarding) in it’s so-called Orchestration Plane.