A recent episode of Linux Unplugged was talking about using certificates for SSH auth, and got me thinking about enhancing my usage of SSH. I stumbled upon this page with some good recommendations from the infosec folks at Mozilla:

https://infosec.mozilla.org/guidelines/openssh

Background

I’ve recently been deploying a new enterprise setup for my company. Part of this process involves configuring device registration with an Azure Hybrid Active Directory. We also decided to use Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) with Multi Factor Authentication (MFA).

While setting up one of the machines I ran into the above screen while trying to setup Windows Hello for Business, AKA a pin for the user I was logging in as. The proves to be a problem as most businesses will restrict what resources you’re allowed to access when a pin isn’t configured.

Background

When diving into high-performance virtualization, memory is often an area of focus. In this article, I will attempt to explain simply why memory is a concern, and the various ways that are available to you to fix it. This way, you may pick which solution fits your needs.

Memory management is a key responsibility of your operating system (OS). Your OS takes the memory in your system and divides it up into pages. As programs request memory, your OS assigns pages to said programs.

When browsing through other peoples’ setups, you’ll find a huge range of flags people set. Here’s a list of what I find important, along with what they do. The table on contents will be organized by levels to represent where each config option should go. Note that there are many more flags to explore, should you be so inclined¹.

domain

memory

currentMemory

memoryBacking

hugepages

Specifying huge pages

cputune

os

features

acpi

apic

hyperv

relaxed

vapic

spinlocks

vpindex

runtime

synic

stimer

reset

vendor_id

frequencies

reenlightenment

tlbflush

kvm

hidden

vmport

ipapic

cpu

topology

feature

Background

Over the past few months I’ve gotten into experimenting with PCI Passthrough using Linux virtualization. The basic premise is that, instead of dual-booting Linux with Windows for gaming, we can run Windows in a VM and passthrough necessary hardware (storage, graphics card) to achieve near-native performance.

I’ve learned a lot from this experimentation. There are lots of helpful people in this community, but there are also a lot of differing configurations and no one place to look all of the various settings up. With this in mind, I aim to pool all of the information I’ve learned, to help people with their virtualization journeys.

This is less of a rant and more some observations I’ve noticed. In the past year I’ve had the opportunity to talk to people who are hiring and people who are seeking jobs. Often, each group would be frustrated with the other.

A term you’ll hear a lot in modern dating is ghosting. For those who aren’t familiar, ghosting is defined as “the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication”.¹ However, it’s clear that the practice of ghosting isn’t limited to modern dating. It’s becoming more common for employees and employers alike to practice ghosting.

Background

I recently capped off about two weeks of nasty computer trouble with being unable to get KDE Neon to boot on it’s own. GRUB would boot into it’s recovery shell, and I would have to use pesky command line trickery¹ to get my system running.

Now, normally this is a quick fix. A little GRUB housekeeping and update-grub should do the trick. However, the strangest things were happening. No matter my changes, nothing was taking. Always back to the recovery shell for me. I scrapped every inch of my file system, tried all the forum posts, but nothing was working.

Background

Let’s Encrypt is a service known for how easy it is to enable SSL on websites (which you must know if you’re reading this article about renewing!). Earlier this year Let’s Encrypt added support for wildcard certificates, and with the added complexity of supporting multiple subdomains on one certificate came added complexity to renew these certificates.

The other day I encountered what looks like a common error when trying to renew one of my wildcard certificates. On running certbot renew I got this error:

Sometimes (rarely) I run across a problem I’m able to fix myself. When I encounter one of these you better believe I’ll publish it here.

Also, I just need to make sure Jekyll is working with GitLab Pages properly. shakes fist at sky