Month: February 2019
DoS’ing the cloud with logs
A few years ago an NTP issue came to light that caused a lot of damage. Cloudflare did a good writeup on this if you want to see the details. But in a nutshell, if there is a request which can be sent which causes a larger response, you have amplification. In the NTP case,…
Helm, Kubernetes, and the immutable configMap… a design pattern
Lets say you have got some program that doesn’t reload when its config changes. You introduce it to Kubernetes via helm. You use a configMap. All is good. Later you do a helm upgrade and… nothing happens. You are sad. You roll up your sleeves, write some code using inotify(), and the program restarts as…
Project Block Heater
Here in the great white north block heaters on cars are common. They are a bit less important than they used to be in this day and age of fuel injection and engine controllers, but they still are needed in the colder bits of the country to keep your oil from turning to taffy. (see…
A smarthome platform bytes the dust: Lowes Iris is dead
You might have read about the now death of Lowes Iris. For a while they had been looking for a buyer. Instead they will brick all the devices and call it a day. This highlights one of the challenges of IoT… people expect the devices to live longer than the revenue streams that support them.…
