• 2 Posts
  • 80 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • What in the world is “a proprietary OS I cannot trust”. What’s your actual threat model? Have you actually run any risk analyses or code audits against these OSes vs. (i assume) Linux to know for sure that you can trust any give FOSS OS? You do realize there’s still an OS on your dumb switch, right?

    This is a silly reason to not learn to manage your networking hardware.


  • A VLAN is (theoretically) equivalent to a physically separated layer 2 domain. The only way for machines to communicate between vlans is via a gateway interface.

    If you don’t trust the operating system, then you don’t trust that it won’t change it’s IP/subnet to just hop onto the other network. Or even send packets with the other network’s header and spoof packets onto the other subnets.

    It’s trivially easy to malform broadcast traffic and hop subnets, or to use various arp table attacks to trick the switching device. If you need to segregate traffic, you need a VLAN.

    Edit: Should probably note that simply VLAN tagging from the endpoints on a trunk port isn’t any better than subnetting, since an untrusted machine can just tag packets however it wants. You need to use an 802.1q aware switch and gateway to use VLANs effectively.















  • Free tier is super limited and super easy to accidentally break out of. I had a single file in S3, but because my logging settings were wrong, I broke the free tier with junk logs.

    The t2 micro ec2 instances are fine, but you need to be very careful about their storage and network egress.

    Best use I’ve had for AWS that has managed to stay within the free limits has been Lambda. Managed to convert a couple self hosted discord bots to a few Lambda functions, works great. Plugging it into CloudFormation and tying up CI/CD with CodePipeline and the like were overkill but good learning exp.

    I don’t think there’s any ECS free tier, but you can fit a private container repository in the free S3 limits as well.



  • You’re going to want to look up things like symlinks, hard links, fuse filesystems, and bind mounts among other concepts. Your “whole directory” and other duplicates are artifacts of how the filesystem and process management works, and simply running fsearch or find over them is going to be confusing if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

    One Unix concept that carries over to Linux is that everything is a file. Your shared memory space, process data, device driver interfaces, etc, all of it is accessible somewhere in the same virtual filesystem tree as the actual files.

    Because of this, there’s very little reason to have the whole filesystem indexed from root. If you’re worried about space usage, you want to work with packages through the package manager. If you’re worried about system integrity, you’ll want package validators.