MY SSH TRICK
10 hours of jetlag and rainy afternoon naps don’t mix. It’s 2 minutes to 2AM here in Provo, UT and I can’t sleep so I’m blogging.
DEPLOYING WORDPRESS WITH SUSE CAAS PLATFORM
Introduction
While you may never have a reason to deploy Wordpress on CaaSP, the following exercise will give you a way to see how persistent storage, deployments, and NodePort networking work in Kubernetes work. It is my belief that a decent understanding of the theory around Kubernetes is useful, but an actual hands-on understanding will help fill in gaps where theory alone misses. It is assumed that you have already built your own cluster and have kubectl working. Example files are on Github and are free to download.
STUPID SCRIPT
I just cobbled this script together to make starting up VirtualBox VM’s a little easier when remote.
WHAT ARE THESE VERY OLD POSTS?
Recently I imported posts from my old Ham Radio/Tech blog: ki4gmx.wordpress.com. They are ancient, but they are important to me to keep. I am slowly going through some of the posts and updating links. If you see two links in a row with one of them struckthrough, the that one is the old link. The new one, which probably points to the original on archive.org, is next to it.
WHAT IS A CVE AND HOW CAN IT BENEFIT ME?
Like a lot of the things that I write here, this is a question that came up in a ticket that I worked on recently. A customer recently received a message like this:
ABOUT PATCHING: WHAT IS A PATCH IN SLE AND OPENSUSE?
A while back I wrote a post on why you should patch your servers. I think it surprised some people. I got at least one comment from twitter saying, “I’m surprised you get so many tickets on this topic since security is so important in enterprise server environments.” And yet, we do. At any current time, we have multiple tickets asking for RCA (Root Cause Analysis) for a server crash or hang when the server has not been patched in month, years, or even ever. Sometimes they never register the server to receive patched and so never patch their server beyond what is in the base version that we ship in the beginning. 
ON WRITING DOCKERFILES
I came across an email yesterday before I went home in our internal Docker mailing list. The author was looking for a Tomcat container written using SLES as a base-image. I didn’t remember coming across anything like that so I checked dockerhub. There were several there, but most of them, including the official one from Apache, were build on Debian or Ubuntu. I found one that uses a binary package in a tarball created by Apache. I created a plain container shell:
HOW CAN I GET MALWARE?
I received an email this morning. I’m actually expecting a package that has been held for some time and when I saw it, it seems potentially legit at first. But then I realized that I don’t use my work email for personal things like that. When I saw that it came from someone who didn’t have a UPS email address, and there is a .zip attachment. I don’t know for sure that this attachment has a virus or any kind of malware, but I won’t take the chance on company hardware.
WHY SHOULD I PATCH MY SERVER?
Wait, what?
Why should I patch my server?
Because you won’t get bug fixes.
SUSE DOCUMENTATION
Did you know that SUSE provides free documentation for all of our products to the general public in multiple languages and in multiple formats? Not only that, it is released under the GNU Free Documentation or under a Creative Commons license. As a big fan of the work that the Creative Commons folks do, this makes me proud to work for a company that actually cares about giving back to the community. Not only is our documentation freely available, so are our knowledgebase articles. Unlike other companies, we don’t give just a few lines of the article and then prompt the user to buy our products in order to fix a problem. Also, now that SLE* and OpenSUSE share the same direct codebase, a problem solved in one product can easily be used to fix the other.