Provisioning a headless Raspberry Pi

The typical way of installing a fresh Raspberry Pi is to attach power, keyboard, mouse, and an HDMI monitor. This is a pain, especially for the diminutive RPi Zero. This blogpost describes a number of options for doing headless setup. There are several options for this, including Ethernet, Ethernet gadget, WiFi, and serial connection. These examples use a Macbook as an example, maybe I'll get around to a blogpost describing this from Windows.

Burning micro SD card

We are going to edit the SD card before booting, so for completeness, I thought I'd describe the process of burning an SD card.

We are going to download the latest "raspbian" operating system. I download the "lite" version because I'm not using the desktop features. It comes as a compressed .zip file which we need to extract into an .img file. Just double-click on the .zip on Windows or Mac.

The next step is to burn the image to an SD card. On Windows I use Win32DiskImager. On Mac I use the following command-line steps:

$ sudo -s
# mount
# diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s1
# dd bs=1m if=~/Downloads/2018-06-27-raspbian-stretch-lite.img of=/dev/disk2 conv=sync

First, I need a root prompt. I then use the Continue reading

Using Workers To Make Static Sites Dynamic

Using Workers To Make Static Sites Dynamic

The following is a guest post by Paddy Sherry, Lead Developer at Gambling.com Group. They build performance marketing websites and tools, using Cloudflare to serve to their global audience. Paddy is a Web Performance enthusiast with an interest in Serverless Computing.

Choosing technology that is used on a large network of sites is a key architectural decision that must be correct. We build static websites but needed to find a way to make them dynamic to do things like geo targeting, restrict access and A/B testing. This post shares our experiences on what we learned when using Workers to tackle these challenges.

Our Background

At Gambling.com Group, we use Cloudflare on all of our sites so our curiosity level in Workers was higher than most. We are big fans of static websites because nothing is faster than flat HTML. We had been searching for a technology like this for some time and applied to be part of the beta program, so were one of the first to gain access to the functionality.

The reason we were so keen to experiment with Workers is that for anyone running static sites, 99% of the time, the product requirements Continue reading

Deploying TLS 1.3

Last week saw the formal publication of the TLS 1.3 specification as RFC 8446. It’s been a long time coming – in fact it’s exactly 10 years since TLS 1.2 was published back in 2008 – but represents a substantial step forward in making the Internet a more secure and trusted place.

What is TLS and why is it needed?

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is widely used to encrypt data transmitted between Internet hosts, with the most popular use being for secure web browser connections (adding the ‘S’ to HTTP). It is also commonly (although less visibly) used to encrypt data sent to and from mail servers (using STARTTLS with SMTP and IMAP/POP etc..), but can be used in conjunction with many other Internet protocols (e.g. DNS-over-TLS, FTPS) where secure connections are required. For more information about how TLS works and why you should use it, please see our TLS Basics guide.

TLS is often used interchangeably with SSL (Secure Socket Layers) which was developed by Netscape and predates it as an IETF Standard, but many Certification Authorities (CAs) still market the X.509 certificates used by TLS as ‘SSL certificates’ due to their familiarity with Continue reading

Dell XPS 15 (9560) Ubuntu 1804 Setup

I recently upgraded my Dell XPS (9560) to Ubuntu 1804 LTS from 1604 and I ran into a few issues along the way. This post may help others so I am documenting it here. Pre-Flight Prior to installing Ubuntu 1604 I upgraded the BIOS from Windows 10. Also in the BIOS settings I disabled secure...

White Box Open Networking: A Cure for Your Regulatory Compliance Ills

Just about every major US regulatory requirement says companies must use software that’s fully supported by the vendor that sells it. Simply put, if you’re using software that is beyond its end of life, you’re not only posing a security risk to your company – you’re also out of regulatory compliance.

It’s an issue for any public company, given that they must all comply with the Sarbanes Oxley Act, as well as any company that must meet the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).  Those three acts alone cover an awful lot of, if not most, US companies.

All software has a lifecycle, including the network operating system (NOS) software controlling all the network switches and routers in enterprise networks. When that NOS is nearing its end of life, meaning you have no choice but to upgrade in order to stay in compliance, it’s a good time to assess your available options. In fact, given the pace of technology change, it’s a safe bet that you’ve got alternatives that quite literally didn’t exist when you installed your current NOS five, six — or more — years ago.

White Continue reading

Network Automation at AnsibleFest: That’s How We Role

AF-Network-Automation-Blog

I am getting super excited about my first ever AnsibleFest! Despite using Ansible for more than five years now, I have never had the opportunity to attend this famed event. I had coworkers from previous employers attend, and they were always excited and invigorated after the conference. October is fast approaching and the energy around the event is growing every day.

I’m especially excited for AnsibleFest 2018 because it will have an entire track dedicated to my favorite subject: Network Automation. Join us for two days (October 2-3) as Ansible network developers, Ansible experts from around the world, partners and community members showcase new functionality, use cases, stories and paths to production. You will hear from the developers who design, create, test and distribute the code. You’ll also hear from industry experts and network operators who create and deploy Ansible Playbooks to manage a variety of network gear and situations.

I’ll highlight two talks I’m especially excited about, to give you an idea of what you’ll learn in the Network Automation track at AnsibleFest 2018.

First up is one of my favorite coworkers, Trishna Guha, talking about the Network-Engine role. Trishna will highlight how Network-Engine extracts data from network devices Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 24th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Images from a far flung galaxy? Nope. It's the mind blowing swirling beauty of ink in motion. 

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

 

  • $10 billion: damages in worlds largest cyberattack; .5%: bitcoins use of all the electricity on earth; 1/200th: Verizon throttling California firefighters for leverage; 4.6%: YC companies reaching $100M+ valuation; 45: ave age of successful startup founder; $250,000: monthly take from browser-based Monero mining; 300+: 3D digitizatized Greek and Roman sculptures; 80: employees are chipped at a company; 100k: bike graveyard from failed startups; 70%: executives think they are block chain experts; $7 billion: Slack valuation; 120: AWS instance types; 27.6 petabytes: Microsoft’s undersea data center webcam of swimming fish; 42%: product is the reason startups fail; $334bn: Continue reading
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