• 2 posts
  • 21 comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: May 24th, 2024
  • The annoyance grows with the number of hosts ;-) I still want to feel in control, which is why I’m hesitant to implement unattended decryption like with tang/clevis.

    But I’m interested in the idea of not messing with the initrd-image, boot into a running system and then wait for decryption of a data-partition. Isn’t it a hassle to manually override all the relevant service declarations etc. to wait for the mount? Or how do you do that?

  • It wasn’t clear to me at first glance how the mandos server gets the approval to supply the client with its desired key, but I figured it out in the meantime: that’s done through the mandos-monitor tui. However, that doesn’t quite fit my ux-expectations. Thanks for mentioning it, though. It’s an interesting project I will keep in mind.

Hey everyone, here’s an idea, what do you think? (Please stop me…)

I have a few remote servers where disk encryption is only a moderately important measure; I definitely want to keep it but I’m also annoyed by having to ssh into it during the initrd-phase to provide a passkey on every reboot. What I would like is to get a notification with a link to my idp for some device flow, allowing me to authorize the server to obtain the secrets necessary for decryption.

As far as I can tell, this hasn’t been done before, or have I missed something? A naive idea would be to have custom oidc-claims for the different servers where the value is the luks-passphrase. Feels like a bad idea, though. Any ideas on the details as to how? I obviously don’t want to bloat my initrd-image, so a bash script using curl would be ideal.

  • The selling point of unraid is that you can mix and match different disk sizes and it figures out a (good, efficient?) way to handle them even as you grow a pool. You’re not going to have a good time with a 1TB drive, a 2 TB drive and a 15 TB drive using zfs, unraid doesn’t care… (Using and preferring zfs myself, by the way; this is heresay.)

  • Deployment of NC on kubernetes/docker (and maintenance thereof) is super scary. They copy config files around in dockerfile, e.g., it’s a hell of a mess. (And not just docker: I have one instance running on an old-fashioned webhosting with only ftp access and I have to manually edit .ini and apache config after each update since they’re being overwritten.) As the documentation of OCIS is growing and it gets more features, I might actually change even the larger instances, but for now I must consider it as not feature complete (since people have expectations from nextcloud that aren’t met by ocis and its extensions). Moreover, I have more trust in the long term openness of nextcloud as opposed to owncloud, for historical reasons.

  • I am considering switching as well, for similar reasons. What has been holding me back (besides missing time to plan and do the migration) is thst I don’t quite trust ownCloud any more, and due to a lack of documentation, I would want to run it in parallel for some time to get the hang of it before migrating the other users (which adds to the time constraint).

    I’ll most likely deploy using their helm chart – does anyone have any real-world experience with it?

  • Awesome, so, essentially, you create a name.pod file like so:

    [Unit]
    Description=Pod Description
    
    [Pod]
    # stuff like PublishPort or networking
    

    and join every container into the pod through the following line in the .container files: Pod=name.pod

    and I presume this all gets started via systemctl --user start name.service and systemd/podman figures out somehow which containers will have to be created and joined into the pod, or do they all have to be started individually?

    (Either way, I find the documentation of this feature lacking. When I tested this stuff myself, I’ll look into improving it.)