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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 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.






  • I actually want to learn enough code to contribute, but there’s this gap between “how to code” and “how to participate in a modern software project”.

    Like, I’ve created plenty of little things. Discord bots, automation scripts, plenty of sysadmin stuff for work, etc. But like, I clone a git repo cause there’s a home assistant bug I’d like to fix for example, and I’m immediately lost on where to start.




  • No apology needed, one thing about security is that paranoia is good. One problem with security is that paranoia leads to assumptions and misinformation, rather than understanding.

    Symmetric key encryption is much faster than asymmetric, and can use much larger keys with less compute penalty. So we use acPU intensive asymmetric TLS handshakes to safely exchange the keys, and then switch to the faster method for the data.

    So when ZigBee use AES 128, you can be reasonably sure the data packets are safe. The next question to ask is “do they exchange their keys safely?”

    Which in this case would be “no” if you just leave the ZigBee controller in pairing mode all the time. However, you only allow pairing when you want it, and only pair with devices you explicitly allow. Unauthorized devices never get your network key.


  • That’s fair, since it’s possible these chips have some backdoored bootloader or something, I’ve never personally analyzed them with an electron microscope, but the architecture and wire traces are published, so you could start a chip fabrication plant and roll your own silicon.

    The actual running code on them is usually GitHub hosted though, or you can write it yourself and just import the libraries you need, again usually from GitHub or the platform specific repositories.

    If you’re worried about Chinese chips in your open source though, I have some real bad news for you.

    If you’re using FOSS specifically as a control against Chinese spying, and not analyzing the commit logs of every package you download, I have more bad news for you.