Christoph's last Weblog entries

Entries from August 2016.

DANE and DNSSEC Monitoring
30th August 2016

At this year's FrOSCon I repeted my presentation on DNSSEC. In the audience, there was the suggestion of a lack of proper monitoring plugins for a DANE and DNSSEC infrastructure that was easily available. As I already had some personal tools around and some spare time to burn I've just started a repository with some useful tools. It's available on my website and has mirrors on Gitlab and Github. I intent to keep this repository up-to-date with my personal requirements (which also means adding a xmpp check soon) and am happy to take any contributions (either by mail or as "pull requests" on one of the two mirrors). It currently has smtp (both ssmtp and starttls) and https support as well as support for checking valid DNSSEC configuration of a zone.

While working on it it turned out some things can be complicated. My language of choice was python3 (if only because the ssl library has improved since 2.7 a lot), however ldns and unbound in Debian lack python3 support in their bindings. This seems fixable as the source in Debian is buildable and useable with python3 so it just needs packaging adjustments. Funnily the ldns module, which is only needed for check_dnssec, in debian is currently buggy for python2 and python3 and ldns' python3 support is somewhat lacking so I spent several hours hunting SWIG problems.

Tags: dnssec, foss, linux, monitoring.
Looking for a replacement Homeserver
11th August 2016

Almost exactly six years ago I bought one of these Fuloong 6064 mini PCs. The machine has been working great ever since both collecting my mail and acting as an IMAP server as well as providing public services -- it's also keyserver.siccegge.de. However jessie is supposed to be the last Debian release supporting the hardware and the system's rather slow and lacks memory. This is especially noticeable with IMAP spam filter training and mail indexing. Therefore I'm looking for some nice replacement -- preferably non-x86 again (no technical reasons). My requirements are pretty simple:

Now I'd consider one of these ARM boards and get it a nice case but they seem all to either fail in terms of SATA or not being faster at all (and one needs to go for outdated hardware to stand a chance of mainline kernel support). If anyone knows something nice and non-x86 I'll happily take suggestions.

Tags: debian, linux.

RSS Feed

Created by Chronicle v4.6