Getting HEAD

Posted on September 17, 2018 · 1 min reading time

Crass, I know, but it’s part of my charm. We run load balancers for our proxies and we need to monitor they’re working, so we make requests through them out to the internet. I was doing some checking one day on “top utilization by user” and found that the monitoring account had been… rather hungry. Turns out, we were doing a full GET request to two news sites, for every time a proxy appeared in a load balancing pool, from each of the load balancers. [Read More]

DNS Caching

Posted on September 17, 2018 · 1 min reading time

I really love watching the statistics as one makes a change for the better, and collecting the visualistaions is a bit of a hobby for me. This is the graph of active connections on one of our edge appliances. It carries all client internet traffic and also load balances DNS resolution for clients. It was an incredible drop in traffic - over half the active connections on the appliance - and the response time went from ~150ms to ~1ms for repeat requests. [Read More]

Technical Debt

Posted on September 14, 2018 · 1 min reading time

The human body is a perfect example of unresolved technical debt leading to issues. I have a problem where if I eat too quick, my food gets stuck in a spot in the bottom of my throat near my voicebox. Because I’m a giant, it doesn’t choke me straight up - it just makes it really hard to breathe and I can kinda manage it until I get a drink. [Read More]

Popper's Paradox

Posted on September 14, 2018 · 1 min reading time

Popper’s paradox: The paradox of tolerance was described by Karl Popper in 1945. The paradox states that if a society is tolerant without limit, their ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Popper came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance. I learned this one as part of a post about Alex Jones on Daring Fireball. [Read More]

OpenSSL CA Trust Weirdness

Posted on September 6, 2018 · 3 mins reading time

I’ve been having problems since I installed my own build of OpenSSL - I wanted to be able to use SSL2/3 for testing and some weird ciphers, and the build on Ubuntu wasn’t playing nice. wget and ansible have been giving me grief about SSL trust, and I finally got annoyed enough to sort it out. I knew wget --ca-certificate=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificate.crt https://yaleman.org worked, so it wasn’t the certificate store itself. Searching the internet for “wget ssl trust” or “openssl ca trust” is just a waste of time - you might as well search for “cat pictures”. [Read More]

Splunk search head peering authentication issues

Posted on September 3, 2018 · 2 mins reading time

I was running up a new set of clustered search heads the other day and ran into some issues with one of the nodes talking to the indexer which stored the data. Unable to distribute to peer named INDEXER.example.com at uri=INDEXER.example.com:8089 using the uri-scheme=https because peer has status="Down". I proved that I could telnet from the search head to the index server on 8089 and could connect successfully, also searches at the same time from other nodes work fine, so it wasn’t actually a connectivity issue. [Read More]

This is why

Posted on August 25, 2018 · 1 min reading time

… we should all support funding community broadcast organisations. [Read More]

Ubuntu 18 and Docker DNS

Posted on August 24, 2018 · 1 min reading time

So I’ve reinstalled linux on my laptop and am running Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS - Kali was OK, but there was a lot of cruft and one of the more “desktop” distributions seemed more inviting. No, not Arch. I ran into an issue today however, with DNS resolution failing in my docker containers because of how systemd messes with /etc/resolv.conf. It sets a 127.0.0.53 address, which is systemd-resolved, screwing with docker’s init scripts. [Read More]