Erianna

One of the common problems developers run into when creating their own Docker images is the sheer size of the final output image. Even after compressing and squashing, images based off of Ubuntu or CentOS can still be hundreds of megabytes in size.

As part of my personal dockerization efforts I’ve spent the past several weeks working on repackaging my PHP and Nginx packages so that they work on Alpine Linux with the aspiration of significantly reducing the size of the Docker images I provide.

To reduce the complexity of my Docker images, I pre-build packages for a given operating system, then install them using the operating system’s built in package manager. After creating packages for Alpine Linux (which was troublesome in it’s own right), I discovered there was little to no accurate documentation on how to create a web repository for Alpine Linux.

In this article I’ll cover the steps I needed to take to create a maintainable ALpine Linux web repository.

It’s hard to believe that it has almost been an entire year since my last blog post. In that time a lot has happened and changed both with my personal life and in the web development world. With those changes comes the need to re-think the way I both host and manage my personal blog – including the platform. Starting today, I’m moving my personal blog (and several other pages scattered across the internet) from being hosted on CiiMS to being hosted on Google Storage with Hugo.

A lot has been said recently about ECSDA certificates and elliptical curve cryptography (ECC), and about how they are the future of the humble SSL Certificate. Cloudflare has written serveral articles describing what excatly ECSDA certs are and how they function with ECC.

If you’re not familiar with ECC yet though, Cloudflare provided a pretty basic TL;DR; of what exactly ECC is and why it is important:

[…] ECC is the next generation of public key cryptography and, based on currently understood mathematics, provides a significantly more secure foundation than first generation public key cryptography systems like RSA. If you’re worried about ensuring the highest level of security while maintaining performance, ECC makes sense to adopt. https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-relatively-easy-to-understand-primer-on-elliptic-curve-cryptography/

Based upon our current understanding of mathamatics, ECC provides significantly better security and performance than a typica 2048 RSA certificate. In this article, we’ll cover how to make a ECDSA Certificate Authority, a ECDSA compatible CSR, and how to sign ECDSA certs.

One of the things that really bugs me about online tutorials is that find one that’s accurate is a major pain. Recently I have to figure out (again) how to get secure dynamic DNS updates working with nsupdate and Bind9. Since I haven’t done this in nearly 3 years now, I had forgotten several important steps. In the hopes of saving someone else time (and mine in the future should I forget in the future). In truth getting this setup is relatively simple - you just have to know the right set of steps in order to get it done right.

For this tutorial I’ll be using the Ubuntu 12.04 and Bind9 from upstream.