Simplicity is a form of art...

Project prioritization

_{This is a long read, skip to “Prioritizing the projects and changes” for the approach details...}

Organizations and companies generally have an IT workload (dare I say, backlog?) which needs to be properly assessed, prioritized and taken up. Sometimes, the IT team(s) get an amount of budget and HR resources to "do their thing", while others need to continuously ask for approval to launch a new project or instantiate a change.

Sizeable organizations even require engineering and development effort on IT projects which are not readily available: specialized teams exist, but they are governance-wise assigned to projects. And as everyone thinks their project is the top-most priority one, many will be disappointed when they hear there are no resources available for their pet project.

So... how should organizations prioritize such projects?

Structuring infrastructural deployments

Many organizations struggle with the all-time increase in IP address allocation and the accompanying need for segmentation. In the past, governing the segments within the organization means keeping close control over the service deployments, firewall rules, etc.

Lately, the idea of micro-segmentation, supported through software-defined networking solutions, seems to defy the need for a segmentation governance. However, I think that that is a very short-sighted sales proposition. Even with micro-segmentation, or even pure point-to-point / peer2peer communication flow control, you'll still be needing a high level overview of the services within your scope.

In this blog post, I'll give some insights in how we are approaching this in the company I work for. In short, it starts with requirements gathering, creating labels to assign to deployments, creating groups based on one or two labels in a layered approach, and finally fixating the resulting schema and start mapping guidance documents (policies) toward the presented architecture.

Matching MD5 SSH fingerprint

Today I was attempting to update a local repository, when SSH complained about a changed fingerprint, something like the following:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@    WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!     @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that a host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the ECDSA key sent by the remote host is
SHA256:p4ZGs+YjsBAw26tn2a+HPkga1dPWWAWX+NEm4Cv4I9s.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /home/user/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending ECDSA key in /home/user/.ssh/known_hosts:9
ECDSA host key for 192.168.56.101 has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.

Switched to Lineage OS

I have been a long time user of Cyanogenmod, which discontinued its services end of 2016. Due to lack of (continuous) time, I was not able to switch over toward a different ROM. Also, I wasn't sure if LineageOS would remain the best choice for me or not. I wanted to review other ROMs for my Samsung Galaxy SIII (the i9300 model) phone.

Today, I made my choice and installed LineageOS.

cvechecker 3.8 released

A new release is now available for the cvechecker application. This is a stupid yet important bugfix release: the 3.7 release saw all newly released CVEs as being already known, so it did not take them up to the database. As a result, systems would never check for the new CVEs.

Handling certificates in Gentoo Linux

I recently created a new article on the Gentoo Wiki titled Certificates which talks about how to handle certificate stores on Gentoo Linux. The write-up of the article (which might still change name later, because it does not handle everything about certificates, mostly how to handle certificate stores) was inspired by the observation that I had to adjust the certificate stores of both Chromium and Firefox separately, even though they both use NSS.

cvechecker 3.7 released

After a long time of getting too little attention from me, I decided to make a new cvechecker release. There are few changes in it, but I am planning on making a new release soon with lots of clean-ups.

I missed FOSDEM

I sadly had to miss out on the FOSDEM event. The entire weekend was filled with me being apathetic, feverish and overall zombie-like. Yes, sickness can be cruel. It wasn't until today that I had the energy back to fire up my laptop.

Sorry for the crew that I promised to meet at FOSDEM. I'll make it up, somehow.

SELinux System Administration, 2nd Edition

While still working on a few other projects, one of the time consumers of the past half year (haven't you noticed? my blog was quite silent) has come to an end: the SELinux System Administration - Second Edition book is now available. With almost double the amount of pages and a serious update of the content, the book can now be bought either through Packt Publishing itself, or the various online bookstores such as Amazon.

With the holidays now approaching, I hope to be able to execute a few tasks within the Gentoo community (and of the Gentoo Foundation) and get back on track. Luckily, my absence was not jeopardizing the state of SELinux in Gentoo thanks to the efforts of Jason Zaman.

GnuPG: private key suddenly missing?

After updating my workstation, I noticed that keychain reported that it could not load one of the GnuPG keys I passed it on.

 * keychain 2.8.1 ~ http://www.funtoo.org
 * Found existing ssh-agent: 2167
 * Found existing gpg-agent: 2194
 * Warning: can't find 0xB7BD4B0DE76AC6A4; skipping
 * Known ssh key: /home/swift/.ssh/id_dsa
 * Known ssh key: /home/swift/.ssh/id_ed25519
 * Known gpg key: 0x22899E947878B0CE

I did not modify my key store at all, so what happened?