Yesterday, Logstash 1.4.0 was released containing many improvements, one of which was contributed by us. We’ve implemented signature verification and packet decryption in the collectd input plugin. This blogpost will give an overview of how encryption and signing is used in the collectd binary protocol. If you want to implement your own collectd receiver, this is pretty interesting.

Our upstream-provider needed to change the VLAN-ID of our uplink to be in line with their policies. We wanted to do this with minimal downtime. Check out the script we ran on the gateway machines, the VLAN-IDs were changed almost instantly, total unavailability was less than a second.

Recently we’ve been busy implementing a new DNS infrastructure for our resolvers as well as our authoritative servers. We wanted to be ready for future developments like DNSSEC and we wanted to re-new this important part of our infrastructure for a while. This blog-post gives an overview of our new setup.

Yesterday evening we returned from LOADays 2013 in Antwerp, This blogpost describes some things we learned and want to implement in the (near) future.

We had problems with our Crypto Stick ‘hanging’ randomly. An experimental patch from libusb fixes this. We have released packages with this fix.

In our quest to automate even more, we have further automated our installations. We use Debian and don’t want to answer any (except for IP and hostname) question in the debian installer by hand. We’ve already pre-seeded the installer with a lot of answers, but the partitioning was always hard. Before, we formatted the first […]

As you probably know by now: We have our SSH and PGP-keys on a CryptoStick. But getting it to work used to be somewhat harder than it is now. So without further ado: The (almost) foolproof way to get SSH and PGP working with the CryptoStick in Ubuntu.

We are in the process of building the configuration for our monitoring system from exported resources (more on that in the future). To accomplish one of the checks we needed a way to identify the brand of RAID controller in our physical servers. The best way to do this is facter. We’ve written some custom […]