Erianna | Charles R. Portwood II

Alaydriem

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Docker

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing Lexa 2.0

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 17:00:00 -0500

Lexa is a instance and service discovery tool for LXD containers that exposes DNS, DoT and a JSON REST endpoint to make discovery of containers and services within containers on LXD instances easier, except now it’s written entirely in Rust. Lexa can be used as a stand-alone service to identify what LXD containers are running on a given host, or can be used in conjunction with tools such as HaProxy, Traefik, or even your own DNS server to automate load balancing between hosts, blue/green or red/black deployments, CNAME to hosts, and other scenariors.

Bedrock Materials List

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

Making material lists for Minecraft Bedrock edition is hard, so I made a tool written in rust that’ll take an exported .mcstructure file and conver it into a very simple materials list for you to use for your videos. Checkout this Youtube Short that showcases how to use it. You can get more information about the tool from Github: https://github.com/Alaydriem/bedrock-material-list

Announcing PBrick

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 10:00:00 -0500

Today I am making source-available one of my pandemic projects - pbrick – a USB-C PD powered, Bluetooh controlled motor driver and IO software and hardware.

A secure bluetooth DFU bootloader for nRF52

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0500

Today I am publicly announcing the availability of a new nRF52 bootloader for nRF52840 circuits, which source code and binaries available at: https://github.com/kaidyth/nrf52_bootloader.

Introducing Lexa

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 17:00:00 -0500

Lexa is a instance and service discovery tool for LXD containers that exposes DNS, DoT and a JSON REST endpoint to make discovery of containers and services within containers on LXD instances easier. Lexa can be used as a stand-alone service to identify what LXD containers are running on a given host, or can be used in conjunction with tools such as HaProxy, Traefik, or even your own DNS server to automate load balancing between hosts, blue/green or red/black deployments, CNAME to hosts, and other scenariors.

Charles R. Portwood II

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Encrypt Home DNS Traffic

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Your DNS server knows a lot about you - in fact it knows every single website your visit. Between ISP’s intercepting both valid and invalid domains, and potentially selling your browsing history to advertisers, it’s both prudent and remarkably simple to encrypt all of your DNS to prevent this and to more importantly, encrypt this traditionally plain-text data to prevent prying eyes.

Partially Authoritative DNS Zones with CoreDNS

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:00:00 -0500

A semi-authoritative zone enables you to provide authoritative records for a given zone for records the DNS server is aware of, and forwarding all unknown requests to an upstream server.

Available as a CoreDNS plugin, Partial is a drop-in replacement for the CoreDNS file plugin that allows for partially or semi-authoritative DNS zones, and is available on Github at https://github.com/charlesportwoodii/coredns-partial.

Encrypted BTRFS backups with Minio, Systemd, and Restic

Sat, 18 Apr 2020 17:30:00 -0500

If you’ve ever lost an important document or file you know how essential timely and reliable backups are. Getting backups done effeciently can prove to be challenge however, especially on Linux where a dozen different tools exist and do a variation on the same theme.

Until recently I’ve been using Duplicati which is an excellent tool, but struggles to start reliably on newer Linux kernel version, resulting in inconsistent backup states and data loss when you need to recover something.

In this article I’ll cover how I automate backups of all my Linux desktops, servers, and laptops to a locally encrypted BTRFS store, and off-site to a cloud provider.

AMD Ryzen 2 PCI Passthrough with OVMF+VFIO and libvirt on Ubuntu 18.04 to Windows 10

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 09:00:00 -0500

Unable to tolerate the significant performance losses I was seeing on my aging i5-2500 desktop, I recently elected to upgrade my desktop to something a bit more powerful that would enable me to work faster and get more done.

While planning out this process, I stumbled up this article from mid 2017 detailing the process of getting GPU passthrough working on Fedora 26 with Ryzen.

Exhausted by the constant performance losses incurred by Spectre and Meltdown I was experiencing on my old i5-2500, and wanting to capitalize on the cost-per-core benefit Ryzen 2 offered, I decided to take the plunge into GPU passthrough and to see if it would be a viable long term solution for me, and my have I been pleased.

This write up details my experiences getting PCI passthrough working through Ubuntu 18.04 to Windows 10 using OVMF+VFIO and libvirt. While this document shouldn’t be considered a comprehensive guide, it will cover what I needed to do to get this working (mainly so I can set it back up again if I ever need to), while also covering a few tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way.

Wireguard on EdgeOS for a faster home VPN

Sat, 11 Aug 2018 13:00:00 -0500

Wireguard is an extremely simple, fast, and modern VPN. With it’s introduction into the mainline linux kernel, Wireguard promises to provide a simpler, faster, and more secure way for setting up a VPN without needing to deal with traditional solutions like OpenVPN and L2TP/IPSEC, which can be cumbersome and slow.

In this article I’ll cover how to install Wireguard on a Ubiquiti router, and how to connect a remote client to it.

Adding a Secondary Encrypted Hard Drive with LVM & LUKS on Ubuntu

Sat, 21 Jul 2018 13:50:00 -0500

Similar to Bitlocker on Windows, the native Ubuntu installer provides the capabilities during installation to encrypt your primary hard drive. Getting secondary, or even external devices encrypted however is a bit more complicated.

In this article I’ll cover how to encrypt a second hard drive after installing Ubuntu, and set it up with LVM for easy expansion later. Additionally I’ll cover the steps necessary to automatically decrypt external drives on boot when you decrypt your primary hard drive, and how to access this media once logged into the system.

Protecting Passwords with Argon2id in PHP 7.3

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 13:30:00 -0500

Starting with PHP 7.3, Argon2id may be used as part of the password_* functions to provide better password security.

This article I cover the benefits of Argon2id, how to compile Argon2id into PHP, how to use Argon2id within your PHP 7.3 applications, and some useful pieces of information about Argon2id usage within applications in general.

For more information on Argon2id support within PHP 7.3, reference the Argon2 Password Hash Enhancements RFC on the PHP Wiki.

Creating an Alpine Linux Repository

Sat, 04 Nov 2017 13:00:00 -0500

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.

Moving to Hugo

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 10:59:40 -0500

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.

About

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 12:22:26 -0500

My name is Charles R. Portwood II. Currently I am a Master Technology Consultant at Wipfli. I am a multi-diciplinary software developer and systems engineer with an experience in several programming languages, hosting services, embedded software, and development methodologies. I provide consultation with specializations in architecture design and implementation; API, mobile, and web development; security; and cryptography. Behind the name “Erianna” In the fictional universe of Terah Lai Shorehn (TLS) that I am authoring, Erianna is the name of the planet and super-continent that the majority of the stories and events take place on.

Alpine Linux

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Alpine Linux The Alpine Linux repository is primarily used to provide packages for Docker, however the repository can be used independently. Before the repository can be added, you first need to download and install the signing key. Unlike Debian or RedHat systems, packages for Alpine Linux are signed using rather specific RSA 4096 key. apk add curl wget --no-cache curl -qs https://www.erianna.com/charlesportwoodii@erianna.com-59ea3c02.rsa.pub \ -o /etc/apk/keys/charlesportwoodii@erianna.com-59ea3c02.rsa.pub This RSA key is signed using my primary Ed25519 key.

Github

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Ubuntu

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The new apt repository (apt.erianna.com) currently supports Trusty (14.04), Xenial (16.04),, and Bionic (18.04) packages across two distributions: main and test. The test distribution contains software packages that are functional but should not be used in production. Package Signing All software packages for Ubuntu are signed using an Ed25519 GnuPG key, which requires GnuPG 2.1.x. If your upstream provider does not provide support for GnuPG 2.1.x yet, it can be installed from the repository directly.

Mastering Yii

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

About this book Learn to work with the key aspects of Yii Framework 2 Explore how to create RESTful APIs with Yii Incorporate codeception with Yii2 to test your code thoroughly Who this book is for This book is for Yii Framework developers who want to quickly master Yii2. This book assumes some familiarity with Yii2, PHP 5, and HTML5. What you’ll learn Explore Yii2’s conventions and learn how to properly configure Yii2 Create both web and console applications Reduce development time by learning to create classes automatically with Gii, Yii2’s automatic code generation tool Use Yii2’s database migration tool Manage and access databases with Active Record, DAO, and Query Builder Handle user authentication and authorization within Yii2 Create RESTful APIs with Yii Framework 2 Test applications automatically with codeception

ECDSA Certificate Authorities and Certificates With OpenSSL

Thu, 07 May 2015 23:00:00 -0500

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.

Yii Project Blueprints

Thu, 25 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

About this book Develop real-world web applications through easy-to-follow, step-by-step processes Create eight projects from beginning to end to help you explore the full power of Yii Build a fast, user-based, database-driven content management system with a dashboard and RESTful API Who this book is for This book is for intermediate-to-advanced level Yii developers who want to master the Yii framework and develop real-world applications. You should have experience of working with Yii, PHP 5, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Dynamic DNS with Bind9

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:29:00 -0500

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.