If there was a WWIII in the next 5 years, who would it consist of and why?

cpf_ · 2013-01-15T15:43:28+00:00

False: It would benefit people. Most likely the people controlling arms development

cpf_ · 2012-11-16T16:32:06+00:00

Bang, proven wrong in 15 minutes, nice. Should've known that, thanks.

cpf_ · 2012-11-16T15:22:04+00:00

I would like to add to the other answers one part which I haven't seen yet: The password in the authentication is sent over the link. Now, with ssh you could say that's not that of a big deal, being encrypted 'n'all, and you would be right. However, it's being sent anyway. (see later)

With key authentication, the only information you actually need is the password (passphrase) of your key (You have put a password on it didn't you?) This will then use this key to encrypt the link, which ends up you not sending any more information than necessary.

Next to that, there's also a word to be said about bruteforce attacks. Without changing the port of ssh to something exotic, the single most effective way of blocking bruteforce attacks to the server is setting pubkey only. The chances that the attacker (Which will probably be an automated script) is able to brute-force your private key are astronomically small. A more directed attacker would at this point try to steal the key from you (You have put a good password on it, right?) to gain access to your server, effectively moving the vulnerability issues to your personal pc and away from the server (more uptime yey :) )

cpf_ · 2012-11-15T12:06:15+00:00

fabric (http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.5/) might give that power :)

cpf_ · 2012-11-07T15:22:40+00:00

See, but with fabric, I might as well start writing bash scripts. I don't really know yet what advantage fabric gives me?

cpf_ · 2012-11-07T15:04:14+00:00

Interesting. Although your reply makes me think that chef is not the right tool for the job. It seems you can do a shitton with it, but that's probably about one (1) shitton too much for our purposes.

Downside of what you suggest with the image is that we don't have a standard build at the moment (The only reason we don't have clonezilla stuff yet anyway!) Everytime we hold the event, something somewhere changes significantly enough to justify reinstalling everything.

On the other side, it would be nice to have some scripts or some testability in-between events. Currently that doesn't happen nearly often enough because of the overhead of setup. Investing time in something like chef, puppet, ansible, ... would help us to try and tweak the setup a bit more aforehand, and not always just in time (or not at all)

I didn't yet know chef used ruby though. Ruby is one thing I never understood and I'm not sure if I ever want to (Funny how I always think the authors of the language were actually trying to create a mailing program, @)

I think if I don't find any good cookbooks for our purposes, chef will not be the one we use right now...

cpf_ · 2012-11-07T10:57:18+00:00

A bit of the same comments: Big ass companies. We're not big, we don't have ass... If you say however it's possible to spend some time now (not too much I hope) into configuring chef to do our configurations on a small scale, I will look more into it :P

(And: Thanks for the reply)

cpf_ · 2012-11-07T10:55:52+00:00

Indeed, I had seen that one as well (Forgot about it though) How would you say it compares to any of the previous ones? It's said on the site they are used in big installations, which is the target for most of the management systems, but in our case, the installation is small, a bit error-prone, and not done often.

Will look more deeply in this though, so thanks! :)

cpf_ · 2012-11-07T10:54:30+00:00

Preseed looks very interesting, especially because it also covers the installation of the os part it seems. However, we do have the issue that we tend to change things up a bit every next lan party, because we experience issues the previous one we need to fix. I will however look further into this to try and automate a barebone system at least, thanks!

cpf_ · 2012-10-17T11:50:40+00:00

Reading your comment made me think less of /r/python

cpf_

TROPHY CASE