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When it became known that Microsoft was going to port MSSQL to Linux, many sysadmins surely thought that it would end in catastrophe. Enterprise providers have not been brilliantly successful with Linux ports so far – trying to install (and configure) Oracle DB on a Linux server is one of the worst experiences known to…

Where web servers are concerned, there are many options to improve the security of connections, but also to prevent cross-site attacks. SSL Simple SSL/TLS configurations are shown here first, followed by expanded SSL/TLS features, such as HSTS and OCSP. In principle, it is always recommended that the current protocols and cipher suites are copied, for…

Matrix is primarily characterised as a chat protocol. This protocol is designed to link up existing chat solutions such as XMPP (Jabber), IRC or Mattermost. Comparison to XMPP XMPP has the same idea, a difference is in the protocol structure. XMPP has a base RFC, and can thus be extended using various XEPs. This makes…

If you work a lot with Linux systems and still set them up manually, you’re familiar with the problem of never having the right installation medium available. It also wouldn’t hurt to have a rescue system. Many people use live systems like grml, Kali or Damn Small Linux. But each of these systems has limitations,…

We’ve decided to use GitLab CI to build Debian packages automatically. GitLab CI allows users to execute tasks based on definable events, such as Git tags. We’ve created a generic Docker container which contains the base package-building tools and is used by GitLab to build the package. Updates can be easily installed in the build…

I recently had a customer on the line who was complaining about a script that was running too slowly. It was an import that generally takes several hours. The source code doesn’t come from me and the script accesses multiple databases on different servers. The usual performance analysis tools were of no use in this…

Security continues to be a hot topic in IT. We’ve seen the trend reflected, for example, in the development of a variety of security-related tools, such as Square’s Keywhiz or HashiCorp Vault. We’ve taken a closer look at Vault and thought about how we might implement Vault at Adfinis SyGroup. What is Vault? In its…

The configuration of SSL protocols and ciphers on web servers has been the done thing for some time now. It is often overlooked that other services can also be configured in this way, even though a large number services offer this option. A good example of this is the SSH server OpenSSH. SSH is a…

We visited Washington D.C. with the chameleon and saw a lot of exciting things at the annual SUSECon and above all, experienced the Open Source spirit. The infectious mood, the proximity to SUSE management, the large number of techies, but also the way in which SUSE presents itself are just some of the reasons why…

Forms on websites are so ubiquitous and so much taken for granted that they are rarely given much thought. Even so, every Internet user would probably find it easy to recall a form that does not work as well as it should. Variations seem to be endless and in particular regarding form validations there are…