Author Archives: Urs
Quick tip: VMware vSphere and USB, use xHCI
For a project i had to move quite a lot of data, which is used as an initial seed for replication, to a second location. The best device i could find quickly was a 1TB USB disk. OK, fine… Copied all the data to the disk on my client and shipped the disk to the second location. There it was … Continue reading
Quick tip: Download all pdf files on a website
After RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 was released this week, which has a bunch of very cool features by the way, I wanted to download all the new documentations as PDF to put them on my iPad. But right-click each of the 30 links and click “save as” definitely wasn’t the way to go. Administrators are lazy guys… URL of the … Continue reading
Quick tip: Flush OS X Mavericks plist file cache
My finding of the day while I did a clean install on my MacBook Pro: In OS X Mavericks, Apple started to cache plist files, which results in replacing a plist file manually has no effect until the cache is reloaded automatically. If you open the application which uses this plist file to early, it overwrites your copied file with … Continue reading
Increase SSL and TLS security on nginx and Apache by enabling PFS and HSTS
The default configuration of SSL is fine on most Linux distributions (you will get an A-Rating at SSL Labs), but still could be done a lot better and more secure. Goals we want to achieve: Enable Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) Enable HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) Disable SSLv2 and SSLv3 PCI compliant FIPS-ready (optional) Don’t break IE… NOTE: the configuration below will … Continue reading
Change host name of Puppet client
Here are the steps i use to change the host name of a puppet client: On the client side stop Puppet, remove old certificates and change host name: Change the host name in /etc/sysconfig/network and /etc/hosts, then reboot the client. Remove the old certificate on the server: If you’re using Foreman, change the host name there too. Finally, initialize a … Continue reading