cover

Today I was confronted with a quite annoying problem. I have a server with a 1Gbps network card connected to a 1Gbps switch. I was trying to backup my data as usual but the transfer was slower than usual. Using ethtool I saw that the link speed was only 100Mbps !

SSH Authentication with a CA

cover

This article describes how to use a SSH CA to authenticate to SSH servers. This is particularly useful when you have a lot of servers to manage and you want to avoid the hassle of managing a lot of SSH keys.

The basic idea is to have a CA (Certificate Authority) that will sign the public keys of the users. Then, the users will be able to authenticate to the servers using their signed public key. This way, you don't have to manage the public keys of the users on the servers, you only have to manage the public keys of the CA. You can also limit the validity of the signed public keys to a certain amount of time or to a certain set of servers and users.

Automated media center

cover

I have a lot of media to watch and I don't want to spend time searching for it, downloading it, renaming it, moving it, etc. I want to be able to request a movie or a TV show and watch it in less than 5 minutes. I also want to be able to watch it on any device, anywhere, anytime.

How to decrypt Terraform states stored in GitLab backend

cover

Assuming you are using the GitLab Terraform state feature in your self managed instance and you are using the embded backup utility provided by GitLab.

The Terraform state files are encrypted before they are stored. This means that you cannot retreiv the content at rest. For this purpose, GitLab use application secrets (and derive new secrets from thoses keys when needed) to encrypt sensitive content.

You want to retreiv the content of a state file from a GitLab backup. Like explained in this issue, it's not possible to easily retreiv a decrypted content is the instance is offline.