Technology Short Take 125

Welcome to Technology Short Take #125, where I have a collection of articles about various data center and cloud technologies collected from around the Internet. I hope I have managed to find a few useful things for you! (If not, contact me on Twitter and tell me how I can make this more helpful for you.)

Networking

• Dinesh Dutt of Cumulus Networks writes about the effect of switch port count in Clos topologies.
• Tim Smith shares how to set up additional blocklists for Pi-Hole for your home lab.
• Matt Oswalt has a super-cool post on building your own JunOS router with cRPD and LinuxKit. Good stuff here! This blending of “traditional” network engineering with containers, Linux, and DevOps tooling is how Matt is setting new trends and directions for the networking industry.

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around. I’ll try hard to find something useful for the next Technology Short Take.

Security

• Chris Wahl touches on the topic of using GitHub personal tokens to authenticate to HashiCorp Vault.
• Guido Appenzeller—once my manager at VMware, now at Yubico—shared this article about the Cerberus banking trojan, which is apparently now able to steal two-factor authentication (2FA) tokens from the Google Authenticator application. Yikes.
• And while we are on the topic of Yubico: the company recently released this security advisory related to running a self-hosted one-time password (OTP) validation server. Note that the vulnerability discussed does not affect their most well-known product, the Yubikeys.
• Alexander Bakker discusses a mysterious bug in the firmware of Google’s Titan M chip.
• Mark Ermolov discusses a vulnerability in the ROM (read-only memory) of the Intel Converged Security and Management Engine (CSME).
• Aaron Parecki discusses the first draft of OAuth 2.1.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

• Paul Czarkowski has a post on creating self-signed certificates on Kubernetes.
• Pulumi recently introduced the ability to generate YAML from a supported programming language (like JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or .NET—Go support is coming soon). It feels like this implementation—and others like it, like jk, which I wrote about here—are just syntactic differences, meaning you’re still writing the manifest. You’re just writing it in a different language/format than YAML. Maybe it’s just me. Convince me I’m wrong.
• Eric Hammond has a great article on running AWS CLI commands across multiple accounts in an AWS organization. Lots of bash here, you’ve been forewarned.
• Nigel Poulton has a list of kubectl tips here.
• Keith Lee has a list of Cluster API resources you might want to check out. (I’ve been known to write a few Cluster API things as well.)
• Javier Aguilar takes readers through using CloudFormation to create a VPC with a NAT gateway.
• William Lam provides a sneak peek at deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS. I hope to publish something similar for “native” AWS soon.
• And here’s Joe Mann talking about deploying Kubernetes clusters to vSphere using Cluster API Provider for vSphere (CAPV) version 0.6.0 (which brings support for v1alpha3).
• Anne Currie has an update on the “climate friendliness” of various cloud providers.

Operating Systems/Applications

• Kornelis Sietsma looks at the options for working with multiple git identities on a single system.
• Michael Dales shares his experience trying out Windows 10 and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as a Linux development environment.
• Robert Guske has a three-part series on running Linux development desktops with VMware Horizon (part 1, part 2, and part 3).
• Jeff Johnson talks about notarization and customer privacy in newer releases of macOS.

Storage

• Chin-Fah Heoh has a write-up from Storage Field Day 19 about a range of open source projects and initiatives related to storage.
• You can also go get your fill of storage-related links from J Metz.

Virtualization

• Hannel Hazeley of Microsoft shows how to set up nested virtualization for Azure VM/VHD. Hannel’s post also lays out a couple of use cases/scenarios for such a configuration.
• This is interesting, albeit more from a “science experiment” perspective than anything useful.
• Frank Denneman walks readers through the initial placement of a vSphere Pod (a vSphere Pod is a new construct available with “Project Pacific”).

Career/Soft Skills

• Jessica Dean shares her home office setup, which is applicable since so many folks are/will be working from home for a while. Her setup is a bit pricey for my budget, but still provides some useful ideas.

That’s all for now! I hope that you’ve found something useful. I welcome all feedback from readers, so I invite you to contact me on Twitter if you have corrections, feedback, suggestions for improvement, or just want to say hello.