Wandering Thoughts archives

2025-07-06:	The easiest way to interact with programs is to run them in terminals
2025-07-02:	On sysadmins (not) changing (OpenSSL) cipher suite strings
2025-06-28:	A new little shell script to improve my desktop environment
2025-06-21:	My pragmatic view on virtual screens versus window groups
2025-06-09:	Potential issues in running your own identity provider
2025-06-08:	Thinking about facets of (cloud) identity providers
2025-06-03:	I have divided (and partly uninformed) views on OpenTelemetry
2025-06-02:	Things are different between system and application monitoring
2025-05-28:	Our Grafana and Loki installs have quietly become 'legacy software' here
2025-05-20:	The five platforms we have to cover when planning systems
2025-05-14:	Two broad approaches to having Multi-Factor Authentication everywhere
2025-05-12:	Our need for re-provisioning support in mesh networks (and elsewhere)
2025-05-10:	Using WireGuard seriously as a mesh network needs a provisioning system
2025-05-07:	Chosing between "it works for now" and "it works in the long term"
2025-05-01:	The complexity of mixing mesh networking and routes to subnets
2025-04-19:	Tailscale's surprising interaction of DNS settings and 'exit nodes'
2025-04-11:	How I install personal versions of programs (on Unix)
2025-04-06:	Sorting out the ordering of OpenSSH configuration directives
2025-04-02:	The order of files in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/ matters (and may surprise you)
2025-03-30:	Our simple view of 'identity' for our (Unix) accounts
2025-03-29:	Using SimpleSAMLphp to set up an identity provider with Duo support
2025-03-27:	US sanctions and your VPN (and certain big US-based cloud providers)
2025-03-26:	Three ways I know of to authenticate SSH connections with OIDC tokens
2025-03-14:	Some notes on configuring Dovecot to authenticate via OIDC/OAuth2
2025-03-09:	How I got my nose rubbed in my screens having 'bad' areas for me
2025-03-05:	A Prometheus gotcha with alerts based on counting things
2025-03-04:	What SimpleSAMLphp's core:AttributeAlter does with creating new attributes
2025-03-03:	If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling
2025-02-25:	MFA's "push notification" authentication method can be easier to integrate
2025-02-23:	JSON has become today's machine-readable output format (on Unix)
2025-02-20:	It's good to have offline contact information for your upstream networking
2025-02-19:	Shared (Unix) hosting and the problem of managing resource limits
2025-02-18:	One problem with "shared Unix hosting" was the lack of resource limits
2025-02-12:	How you should respond to authentication failures isn't universal
2025-02-10:	Everything should be able to ratelimit sources of authentication failures
2025-02-04:	The practical (Unix) problems with .cache and its friends
2025-01-31:	Modern languages and bad packaging outcomes at scale
2025-01-30:	The tradeoffs of having an internal unauthenticated SMTP server
2025-01-23:	Sometimes you need to (or have to) run old binaries of programs
2025-01-18:	Some ways to restrict who can log in via OpenSSH and how they authenticate
2025-01-17:	Thoughts on having SSH allow password authentication from the Internet
2025-01-14:	My bug reports are mostly done for work these days
2025-01-11:	IMAP clients can vary in their reactions to IMAP errors
2025-01-08:	Using tcpdump to see only incoming or outgoing traffic

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By month for 2025: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul; before 2025.