Elvith Ma'for

Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!

Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.

Security technicians: takes a deep swig of whiskey I wish I had been born in the neolithic.

Maybe I didn’t search right, but since I found podlet first, while looking for a tutorial, I was lazy and gave it a try. It’s result was enough to get me there. Maybe, had I completely read the podlet docs and checked all optional arguments, o could have gotten a perfect result. But that way, I learned better about quadlets.

I’m currently trying to migrate my stack on my VPS from docker to podman. Bonus points if I get it running rootless.

Somehow, podman compose just wouldn’t work with my existing docker compose file. I quickly found out that podman has many options, but quadlets are preferred. It took me a while to understand what they even are and their concept. I did get the idea and the concept from the docs, but everything else was demonstrating how to set up a very simple one (think a hello world container). Or I found some blog posts with ready made complex examples for some random stacks that were way over my head. But a simple tutorial on how to map the fields/parts of a docker compose to a .container, .network or .volume file for my stack consisting of several containers in a few networks with a reverse proxy in front of it? Nope.

I’m the end I found podlet and used that to convert a docker-compose. While the result wasn’t completely working (e.g. a problem with some environment vars that got passed and switched in a few “layers” that podlet understandably messed up), it was enough to understand all of it with the docs and complete the quadlet. Now I just need to experiment with the rootless part.

Currently, my first and foremost pet peeve is, that different distros use different approaches and utilities, but many blog posts or guides don’t tell you what distro they’re for. If you google the problem and find the fourth guide on how to solve it and realize halfway through, that it’s again e.g. for Debian based systems, while you’re running on SUSE or RedHat or Arch or… can be very frustrating.

German legalese has Verkehr as a reference to in Verkehr bringen which means put something on the market / put something on circulation.

But it’s hard to recognize /learn because

1. Verkehr almost(?) always means traffic outside of legalese and
2. There are also traffic laws, that also use Verkehr but really mean traffic

While technically correct, the word Verkehr here does not translate to traffic, but rather belongs to the compound Verkehrsgenehmigung which is roughly a trade permit for selling a plot of land or using it as a collateral on a loan.

I’m currently experimenting if I can convert my stack to rootless podman.

I found in my notes, that

A user-mode networking tool for unprivileged network namespaces must be installed on the machine in order for Podman to run in a rootless environment.

Podman supports two rootless networking tools: pasta (provided by passt) and slirp4netns.

Could this be your problem?

Taken from https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorials/rootless_tutorial.md

I can see read posts of dead people!

…orm removal pill?

If done correctly, those may only be open from the internet, but not from the local network. While SSH may only be available from your local network - or maybe only by the fixed IP of your PC. Other services may only be reachable, when coming from the correct VLAN (assuming you did segment your home network). Maybe your server can only access the internet, but not to the home network, so that an attacker has a harder time spreading into your home network (note: that’s only really meaningful, if it’s not a software firewall on that same server…)

Instead of thinking with layers, you should use think of Swiss cheese. Each slice of cheese has some holes - think of weaknesses in the defense (or intentional holes as you need a way to connect to the target legitimately). Putting several slices back to back (in random order and orientation) means that the way to penetrate all layers is not a simple straight way, but that you need to work around each layer.

…But will it run DOOM?

On the internet, nobody knows you’re just a brain in a jar car.

2meirl4meirl

That’s exact why I included it here. There are only few happening per year but it’s such a strange topic and somehow fascinating to watch

Depends on what you are looking for. Some from the top of my head - only English sources:

• https://www.xkcd.com/
• https://www.smbc-comics.com/
• https://pluralistic.net/
• https://thedailywtf.com/
• https://buried-treasure.org/
• https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/
• https://parliamentfights.wordpress.com/
• https://research.checkpoint.com/
• https://isc.sans.edu/
• https://this.weekinsecurity.com/

Doesn’t matter, had sex.

I learned it for 6 years in school. I had been to France quite often, but then life changed. Now I haven’t really used/needed it for ages, so I’m a quite rusty. But im getting better again.

Well, one of the Vorteile, in der EU zu leben ist, ce qu’on sait parler plusieurs de langues. Een ik spreek ook en beetje Nederlands.

Currently I’m trying to improve my french again.

Have you seen some of the concept art for Breath Of The Wild? They were thinking about UFOs

https://www.businessinsider.com/zelda-breath-of-the-wild-ufo-concept-art-photos-2017-3

Or when a side quest in Majora’s Mask makes you defend Romani Ranch from aliens?

https://www.zeldadungeon.net/majoras-mask-walkthrough/spring-ranch-graveyard/#c7_2

• Daily incremental (and occasionally full) backup to an external HDD - a full image of my PCs, so that I should be able to restore anything back to what it was in the last ~14 days, assuming no ransomware or fire or…
• All the data I care about gets synced to my Nextcloud (VPS, not home lab) - somewhat ransomware protected as I could restore VPS backups independently from my PC.
• Most precious data (mostly photos) gets backed up regularly to an encrypted zip file and then gets send to a glacier tier S3 bucket. Some manual retention is done on the zip file level, so that I can get a tad older backup restored.
• At least monthly a full backup image of my PCs is created on a separate external HDD which is not stored at home, but in a place I could access 24/7 if I really needed to restore something fast.

Phones, etc? Just sync to the mentioned Nextcloud, PC downloads from there and everything gets then into the aforementioned backups.

Homeserver? See “PC” above. With the caveat that some VMs/containers are not in the backup cycle, as they do not store any valuable data besides temp files, etc. For these, only things like docker compose files, custom config, ansible playbooks,… are in my backup.