- Home
- /
- Blog
- /
- Page 3
On Cloud Repatriation
If you’ve stumbled across this post using a search engine, you might be wondering what this cloud repatriation is all about. Well, to us it’s about trying to build a locally hosted alternative to placing all of our data in the datacenters of a few very large corporations. Why are we spending our time doing this? you might also wonder. Well, there are obvious economical aspects, but I, for one, have always just liked the thought of running my own basic information infrastructure, controlling my own data, etc. It probably boils down basic desires of self-sustainability and to know exactly what is happening with my data. And I’m certainly not the only one feeling this way. Others are sceptical of leaving all their data, and the control of what is done with it, in the hands of corporations that in reality answer to no one. Or they also just like to tinker and run stuff themselves.
The Curious Case of Enterprise Infrastructure
Summary
After devolving into a reservoir of inefficient software and expensive hardware, the enterprise IT industry was unable to mount a defence to the onslaught of AWS. As a consequence developers and new enterprises are now going directly to the cloud. The former industry leader, VMware, has folded and repositioned itself as a gateway to AWS and steward of legacy workloads. The hosting industry is to a large extent following this example. While this is unfortunate for the enterprise industry, we claim that this also presents a market opportunity.
Installing Elementary OS on a discarded MacBook Air
So, for various reasons I wanted to install the wonderfull Elementary OS on an old MacBook Air (13″ ultimo 2010, 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2Duo) I had lying around. Mostly because, why not? but also because I really like Elementary OS. Quickly I ran into what must be a very common problem, namely that after succesful installation, one is rewarded with a completely black screen. No signs of life, not even during booting. However, my MacBook Air did in fact boot and did even sign onto my wifi – my router’s web interface revealed the IP address the MacBook had been assigned, and I could ping that address. So the issue was clearly related to the video driver, but also hard to fix, since, well – no screen. This is probably keeping some from repurposing old Macs, which I think is a great thing to do.
On the trail of the SuperMicro BMC hack
By now most people in the infrastructure business will know about Bloomberg’s story about the alleged hacking of Super Micro hardware by the Chinese.
But what’s really going on here? As this story unfolds, what do we know so far?
First of all let’s assume we know that the Chinese / PLA is involved in hardware hacking for purposes of espionage. China produces a very large part of the computer hardware that is currently running in the data centers of the world. A large chunk is still manufactured in Taiwan (another good reason for China to invade, I guess) and elsewhere, but still. Hardware hacking has always been a part and parcel of the spook agencies’ toolbox, there is no reason to assume the Chinese would not try to leverage the incredible advantage they have here. Assuming the opposite, that PLA is not involved in hardware hacking for intelligence purposes, would not be credible IMHO.
Running your own non-bouncing Zimbra server
Despite having configured SPF, DKIM and DMARC for my email domain, I recently noticed that the mail queue of my Zimbra server was going through the roof with thousands of undelivered and postponed email messages, mostly with sender “mailer-daemon” and some recipient I did not know. If you run a Zimbra server and have this problem or perhaps even better; if you don’t have it yet and don’t want to have it, read on.
