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Let's Encrypt: a real open certificate authority

I ran into Let's Encrypt project few months ago, after reading on the website of an independent radio that they finally solved their own issues with SSL by creating a Valid Certificate using Let's Encrypt . At the beginning I imagined that they would have created something like self-signed certificates or something that, at the end, wouldn't be valid completely or at least not useful without user's validation. Surprisingly this was not the case, they either have a valid certificate and the browser used to like it too. I was curious and I wanted to go in deep with this. The opportunity fell from the sky , when after revoking a certificate and rekeying the same for another domain, I had to leave a domain with an invalid and revoked certificate. This shouldn't represent a problem, since the domain was hosting a website quite outdated. However I forgot that someone was still embedding iframes from that domain, moreover they neither can modify easily tons
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Cloud Conf 2017

Last week I have been at the great yearly appointment here in Turin: Cloud Conf '17 . This event, now at its 5 th edition, always gives an overview of on-going projects and state-of-the-art technologies. But never like this year, the organizers Gabriele Mittica ( @GabrieleMittica ) and Walter Dal Mut ( @walterdalmut ), with their company Corley Cloud ( @CorleyCloud ) succeeded in mixing such a variety of topics for talks, that really allowed us to touch where technology is and where it is going. From Microservices to Serverless   For me it was very interesting to comprehend that few years ago we started massively splitting architecture of backend applications from legacy servers into small pieces of microservices communicating via API. Nowadays the same it's happening with the applications themselves; the serverless paradigm is changing the overview of application development in the cloud environment. You now will split an application into a large numbe
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Scaling Host on Amazon AWS EC2 using Ansible

It's already a long time since I started playing around with Ansible. Actually I was curious about other CM (Configuration Management) software tools like SaltStack , Chef or Puppet but as long as I started looking for them I jumped into a book which compares and explains them, giving a real taste of all of them. It turns out that Ansible was both powerful and simple to learn and without particular requested backgrounds. What captured early my attention was the possibility to deploy quickly host machines on Amazon AWS using EC2 and the corresponding Ec2 Ansible module , since I haven't a “real” set of machines to play with. Using EC2 hosts I can easily test my configuration without worrying about which machine I am using, moreover using micro-instances these tests are almost priceless (as long as you remember to stop them from time to time!). What I wanted to create is a system to deploy on Amazon AWS a scalable set of instances of Apache Tomcat container proxied vi
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Connect To a PPTP VPN from an Ubuntu Server using command line

I ended up in handling tens of linux servers remotely and as a developer running into sysadmin tasks is quite common. That's one of the reasons which make me become a command-line lover. Anyway, in this situation the major issue for me is to make Google understand what am I really looking for, since this kind of problem is usually faced in a Desktop or GUI-based Ubuntu environment. As I said it was really hard to let Google find something useful for my purpose, but after some heavy digging I could figure out how I should proceed The Ubuntu version on which I perform this setup is a 12.04 LTS, so I can not guarantee for other versions. And in addiction to that often the information retrieved belongs to old Ubuntu releases. In any case this is how I proceeded. Note 1 : you would use your favourite text editor (nano, pico, vim) where I may refer to VIM Note 2 : All the following commands are intended to be executed as superuser (using sudo or being root) Note 3 : the followi
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