Linux is my primary operating system. I used it on the servers, desktops, laptops, netbooks, and even mobile phones since approximately 1997. I’ve tried a number of distributions over the years, and even created a couple myself. I still look around sometimes to see what others are up to. But most of my machines are running some sort of Red Hat – either a quick and easy Fedora Linux, or a stable and secure Red Hat Enterprise Server, or a cheaper CentOS alternative.
And while by now I am very comfortable in the Linux environment (both graphical and command line), I still discover a lot of new and interesting things about it. When I come across something worthy, I usually share it with the rest of the Open Software world, using this category.
Scott Lowe shares an updated setup of Kubernets on the Amazon AWS. This blog post covers some of the bits in Kubeadm, which have been updated and improved, since his previous post on the subject some time last year.
If you are working with Amazon AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, VMWare, or other related technologies, I can’t recommend his blog high enough.
Slashdot is running a story about a researcher who scanned all Australian IP addresses and found a whole bunch of things that shouldn’t be online.
As interesting as it is, this comment to the thread offers a lot more:
Pffft Only one country?
At a defcon talk in 2014 (talk [youtube.com] slides [defcon.org]) they scanned the whole IPv4 space live, looking for VNC instances. At least, anything that responded to a SYN packet.
Then they took a couple months to connect to each VNC instance, if no password was required, grab a screen shot.
Leading to a series of talks of things that shouldn’t be on the internet [youtube.com].
I am still watching the video, but even in the first few minutes, you’ll see some crazy stuff. And let me get you started with a quick quiz question: if you had 7 servers, each connected to the Internet via a 1 Gb/s link, how long would it take you to scan the whole of Internet (all IP addresses), assuming 10 ports per IP?
Well, five years it took 12 minutes only, and it was done on stage at the conference! To me, this is somewhat mind-blowing. We keep hearing how huge and enormous the Internet is. So the idea of being able to scan all of it in just a few minutes sounds insane. Today, you’ll probably need even less time, with more better broadband and hardware.
And if you are curious about the tool that the guys used, it was massscan. It’s a lot faster than nmap for this kind of jobs, even though they are somewhat compatible.
A lot has been said about the wide range of Amazon Web Services (AWS). They are plenty and cover a whole lot of technologies – from low level infrastructure to artificial intelligence. It is difficult to grasp just how big and complex the AWS feature set. But I think the above periodic table of Amazon Web Services helps a lot.
awslabs/aws-cloudformation-templates is an extensive collection of Amazon AWS CloudFormation templates for a wide range of resources and services. Some of these can be used as is for deploying production infrastructure, others are good starting points for those of us who are still learning.
“Build load-balanced servers in AWS EC2 using CloudFormation” is an excellent guide on deploying load balancer servers with EC2 instances to Amazon AWS cloud with CloudFormation infrastructure management tool. The guide covers a variety of topics from the actual deployment to security and monitoring.
There are many different approaches for load balancing traffic in Amazon AWS, and this one is not a holy grail solution, but it provides plenty of insight into available tools and options.