Hello, Is That You?

It looks like Google has been recording your voice searches (German). There have been rumors all along and it was assumed this was going on. They have the actual voice recordings and their transcripts and also generate a “finger print” of your voice to be able to verify it.

If you extrapolate from that they can by now

*shudder*

CFSSL FTW

After reading how CloudFlare handles their PKI and that LetsEncrypt will use it I wanted to give CFSSL a shot.

Reading the project’s documentation doesn’t really help in building your own CA, but searching the Internet I found Fernando Barillas’ blog explaining how to create your own root certificate and how to create intermediate certificates from this.

I took it a step further I wrote a script generating new certificates for several services with different intermediates and possibly different configurations (e.g. depending on your distro and services certain cyphers (e.g. using ECC) may not be supported).
I also streamlined generating service specific key, cert and chain files. 😀

Have a look at the full Gist or just the most interesting part:

You’ll still have to deploy them yourself.

Update 2016-10-04:
Fixed some issues with this Gist.

  • Fixed a bug where intermediate CA certificates weren’t marked as CAs any more
  • Updated the example CSRs and the script so it can now be run without errors

Update 2017-10-08:

  • Cleaned up `renew-certs.sh` by extracting functions for generating root CA, intermediate CA and service keys.

A Service Monitor built with Polymer

I tried to build a service monitor having the following features:

  • showing the reachability of HTTP servers
  • plotting the amount of messages in a specific RabbitMQ queue
  • plotting the amount of queues with specific prefixes
  • showing the status of RabbitMQ queues i.e. how many messages are in there? are there any consumers? are they hung?
  • showing the availability of certain Redis clients

Well, you can find the result on GitHub.
It uses two things I published before: polymer-flot and flot-sparklines. 😀

An example dashboard:

polymer-service-monitor screen shot

too long for Unix domain socket

If you’re an Ansible user and encounter the following error:

unix_listener: "..." too long for Unix domain socket

you need to set the control_path option in your ansible.cfg file to tell SSH to use shorter path names for the control socket. You should have a look at the ssh_config(5) man page  (under

ControlPath

) for a list of possible substitutions.

I chose:

control_path = %(directory)s/ssh-%%C

Inner City “Dueling” Over “Micro Aggressions”

From the comments section of a summary of a paper called “Microaggression and Moral Cultures“:

Screen Shot of the comments section 2015-10-04 at 14.35.41
Now we just need to bring back a culture of dueling and the problem will sort itself out.
Re: In the inner city men are dueling over the smallest of, er, micro aggressions.

TMMD ?