Welcome to Technology Short Take #189, Halloween Edition! OK, you caught me—this Tech Short Take is not scary. I’ll try harder next year. In the meantime, enjoy this collection of links about data center-related technologies. Although this installation is lighter on content than I would prefer, I am publishing anyway in the hopes of trying to get back to a somewhat-regular cadence. Here’s hoping you find something useful and informative!

Networking

• Kevin Myers dissects EVPN/VXLAN interoperability with MicroTik and IP Infusion.
• Ivan Pepelnjak has a new project: open source EVPN/VXLAN labs. I plan to tackle these myself in the near future!

Servers/Hardware

• Kevin Houston takes a look at the availability of Xeon 6 CPUs across blade server vendors.

Security

• Security researchers recently published some research on a new microarchitectural exploit called “VMScape.” The TL;DR on VMScape is that it allows hypervisor information to leak from a malicious VM. Oops! Olivier Lambert has a write-up that explains why the Xen hypervisor is not affected by this exploit. (Side note: be sure to read the comments—Olivier shares some useful information there.)
• The leaking of source code for F5 appliances by a “nation-state affiliated cyber threat actor” has lead the CISA to call on all federal agencies to mitigate vulnerabilities in F5 appliances due to “an imminent threat to federal networks using F5 devices and software.” That’s not good.
• In early October of this year, Red Hat confirmed the breach of one of its GitLab instances, leading to the theft of nearly 570GB of data across 28,000 repositories. Oof.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

• Iain Smart reviews some common exploit paths when trying to build multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters. As Iain says, multi-tenancy is hard.
• Digital Society discusses their migration off AWS and Digital Ocean to Hetzner.
• Just this past week I learned of Pulumi’s resource hooks, a feature made available back in June of this year.
• Hrittik Roy discusses vCluster Standalone, a multi-tenancy solution for Kubernetes that now no longer requires an underlying host cluster.
• Mattis Fjellström discusses Terraform-related options for managing tags in AWS.

Operating Systems/Applications

• Do you, like Cory Doctorow, believe an AI economic apocalypse is near?
• I recently published a post on Git pre-commit hooks. The next day I wake up to an email from Ivan Pepelnjak, who has—not surprisingly—already explored Git pre-commit hooks and found a framework for making them easier to work with. Ivan uses this framework to perform a variety of checks against his blog posts. Now he has inspired me to go even farther with my pre-commit script!
• Anthropic, along with the UK AI Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, have found that as few as 250 malicious documents can produce a “backdoor” vulnerability in a large language model (LLM). You can get more details, as well as a link to the paper published from their research, by reading the associated Anthropic blog post.
• Here is a handy tool to generate a Mermaid diagram from your Terraform configuration.
• Familiar with pwru? If not, read this guide to getting started with pwru.

That’s it for this time around. As always, I welcome your feedback—I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to reach me on Twitter/X, Mastodon, or Bluesky. Or email me, that is fine too (my address is here on the site, it is not too hard to find). I truly do enjoy hearing from readers. You can also find me in a variety of Slack communities, so feel free to DM me there if you would prefer. Thanks for reading!