Category: Blog

Three Lives in IT and Beyond

Anton Dyakin, Director of Academic Programs at Parallels, shared his thoughts on how the increase in retirement age is related to continuing education and what skills are essential to learn in the coming years. Here’s the story in the first person. By the will of fate, I am living my third, perhaps fourth, full professional life. The first was military service, which concluded with my commissioning as a reserve officer […]

Server platform based on coreboot

As part of the System Transparency project and in partnership with Mullvad, the Supermicro X11SSH-TF server platform has been migrated to the coreboot system. This platform is the first modern server platform featuring the Intel Xeon E3-1200 v6 processor, also known as Kabylake-DT. The following functions have been implemented: ASPEED 2400 SuperI/O and BMC drivers have been added. A BMC IPMI interface driver has been introduced. The boot functionality has been verified and measured. […]

Challenging migration of MongoDB to Kubernetes

This article continues our recent piece about the migration of RabbitMQ and is dedicated to MongoDB. Given that we service numerous Kubernetes and MongoDB clusters, we have encountered the natural necessity to migrate data from one installation to another without downtime. The main scenarios remain the same: transferring MongoDB from a virtual or physical server to Kubernetes or migrating MongoDB within a single Kubernetes cluster […]

Sysadmin vs Boss: The Battle of Good vs Evil?

There is plenty of epic literature about system administrators: quotes and comics on Bashorg, megabytes of stories on IThappens and Dolban-IT, endless online dramas on forums. This is no coincidence. First of all, these guys are the backbone of the crucial infrastructure of any company. Secondly, there are strange debates about whether system administration is dying out. Thirdly, system administrators are quite unique individuals; interacting with them is a separate […]

The final beta version of Android 10 Q is available for download

Google has begun rolling out the final sixth beta version of the Android 10 Q operating system. It is currently available only for Google Pixel devices. For smartphones where the previous version is already installed, the new build installs quite quickly. There are not many changes in this version, as the codebase has already been frozen, and OS developers have focused on bug fixes. […]

Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS release with updated graphics stack and Linux kernel

An update for the Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS distribution has been released, which includes changes aimed at improving hardware support, updating the Linux kernel and graphical stack, fixing installer and bootloader bugs. It also includes the latest updates for several hundred packages addressing vulnerabilities and stability issues. Similar updates for Kubuntu 18.04.3 LTS and Ubuntu Budgie […]

Published the security firmware analyzer code FwAnalyzer.

Cruise, a company specializing in autonomous vehicle technology, has released the source code for its FwAnalyzer project, which provides tools for analyzing Linux-based firmware images and identifying potential vulnerabilities and data leaks. The code is written in Go and distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It supports the analysis of images using ext2/3/4, FAT/VFat, SquashFS, and UBIFS file systems. For disclosure […]

Slurm DevOps: From Git to SRE with All the Stops

From September 4 to 6, a three-day Slyerm DevOps event will take place in St. Petersburg at the Selectel conference hall. We designed the program based on the idea that theoretical writings on DevOps, like manuals for tools, can be read independently. What’s interesting is experience and practice: explanations of how to do things right and wrong, and stories about how we do it. In every company, every administrator or […]

Fault-tolerant IPeE network made from available resources

Hello. There is a network of 5,000 clients. Recently, a rather unpleasant moment occurred — in the center of the network, we have a Brocade RX8 and it started sending a lot of unknown-unicast packets. Since the network is divided into VLANs, this is partially not a problem, BUT there are special VLANs for white addresses, etc., and they are stretched over […]

Understanding Latin Abbreviations and Phrases in English

A year and a half ago, while reading about the vulnerabilities Meltdown and Spectre, I caught myself not fully understanding the difference between the abbreviations i.e. and e.g. Contextually, they seem clear, but later it feels like not entirely right. As a result, I created a small cheat sheet specifically for these abbreviations to avoid confusion. […]

Attack on front-end back-end systems, allowing intrusion into external requests

Details have emerged about a new attack on websites using a frontend-backend model, such as those operating via content delivery networks, load balancers, or proxies. The attack allows for the injection of content into other requests processed in the same thread between the frontend and backend by sending specific requests. The proposed method has successfully been applied to execute an attack that intercepts user authentication parameters for the PayPal service, which has rewarded researchers […]

Release of the LibreOffice 6.3 office suite

The Document Foundation has released version 6.3 of the LibreOffice office suite. Installation packages have been prepared for various distributions of Linux, Windows, and macOS, as well as a version for deploying the online version in Docker. Key improvements include a significant increase in the performance of Writer and Calc. Compared to the previous release, loading and saving certain types of documents is up to 10 times faster. In particular, […]

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