Free SSL certificates for everyone! the https://letsencrypt.org/ initiative backed by Akamai, Cisco, Mozilla and EFF, is going to offer free certificates. On this post I am going to explain how I have automated the process of creation and renewal of certificates, on a Debian server with a lot of virtualhosts with the minimal modification of the apache conf files.

Wifatch’s code does not ship any payloads used for malicious activities, such as carrying out DDoS attacks, in fact all the hardcoded routines seem to have been implemented in order to harden compromised devices. We’ve been monitoring Wifatch’s peer-to-peer network for a number of months and have yet to observe any malicious actions being carried out through it.

This document describes security in the Debian project and in the Debian operating system. Starting with the process of securing and hardening the default Debian GNU/Linux distribution installation, it also covers some of the common tasks to set up a secure network environment using Debian GNU/Linux, gives additional information on the security tools available and talks about how security is enforced in Debian by the security and audit team.

Packages under development aren't always ready to be in the main Debian archive. But that doesn't mean it should be hard for people to install them. When asking people to test programs, it is most convenient to present it in the way they are expecting: as a package. For this, a personal repository is useful. The tools for doing this are available in Debian, but the method is not well documented. This article attempts to do that.

Rigs of Rods is an open source vehicle simulator licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3. What makes Rigs of Rods different to most simulators is its unique soft-body physics: vehicles, machines, objects, etc. are simulated in real-time as flexible soft-body objects, giving the simulation an extremely accurate behavior which entirely depends on the physical construction of the vehicles or objects you create. The community contributes greatly to the game, giving it a vast selection of vehicles and terrains from which you can choose.

Sysdig is open source, system-level exploration: capture system state and activity from a running Linux instance, then save, filter and analyze. Think of it as strace + tcpdump + lsof + awesome sauce.

With a little Lua cherry on top.

mpv is a fork of mplayer2 and MPlayer. It shares some features with the former projects while introducing many more.

Having gone through all the pain of polishing an OpenStack installation, I can see why it might seem like a better idea to grab a couple of beers in a local bar than spend additional hours fighting Nagios or Cacti. In the world of bare metal these tools seem to do the job—they warn about abnormal activities and provide insight into trend graphs.

With the advent of the cloud, however, proper monitoring has started getting out of hand for many IT teams. On top of the relatively predictable hardware, a complicated pile of software called “cloud middleware” has been dropped in our laps. Huge numbers of virtual resources (VMs, networks, storage) are coming and going at a rapid pace, causing unpredictable workload peaks.

Proper methods of dealing with this mess are in their infancy – and could even be worth launching a startup company around. This post is an attempt to shed some light on the various aspects of cloud monitoring, from the hardware to the user’s cloud ecosystem.

Get all the benefits of the latest Raspbian release without wiping your Raspberry Pi and starting from scratch by manually update it…

All you’ve got to do is follow these terminal commands and you’ll be up and running in, well, quite a while actually (it can takes ages, but you can leave it to it). The only caveat is that any new software that comes bundled with the new release wont be installed.