A look at ActivityPub's foundation

I’m renaming the series to “Replacing Avahi” because after a bit of reflection “getting rid of” sounds a lot harsher than I ever intended. In part 1 we took a quick look at what DNS-SD is and why we use Avahi for it on Linux. We then came up with a plan on how to replace it by re-implementing its D-Bus API ourselves by in turn leveraging...

Avahi is a daemon you can run on your system for the purpose of discovering or announcing services using DNS-SD. DNS-SD defines how to perform service discovery using DNS SRV and TXT records. Though it can use unicast DNS, its most typical usage is using multicast DNS over zeroconf, i.e link local IPv4/6. If you’ve heard of Apple Bonjour, this is...

When running servers I want to encrypt the data stored on them. The problem you then pretty quickly run into is that it’s hard to actually boot with an encrypted root. I’ve solved this problem in the past by having a tinysshd in my initramfs which prompts me for a password to unlock the volumes. Though this works, it’s annoying in that the server...

A lot has been written about working remotely. In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to write down my own thoughts on this topic and the processes and tools I’ve developed to help me be effective at working remotely. I moved to being full-time remote in February of 2019. Before that every job I’ve had was office bound. Though I...

In a previous post I showed you how to setup Keycloak to provide you with OpenID Connect and SAML capabilities. The problem with Keycloak is is that’s it’s a pretty big beast, whereas most of the time we don’t need all the functionality. It’s also tricky to run in a highly available fashion and is annoyingly slow to start up. In this post we’ll...