This week I am talking to Timothy Pearson of Raptor Engineering. He is behind the Talos II and Blackbird boards for IBM POWER9 CPUs. His major claim is creating the first fully owner controlled general purpose computer in a long while. My view of the Talos II and Blackbird systems is that these boards helped to revitalize the open source ecosystem around POWER more than any other efforts (See also: https://peter.

I’m not superstitious, so I never really cared about black cats, Friday the 13th, and other signs of (imagined) trouble. Last Friday (which was the 13th) I had an article printed in a leading computer magazine in Hungary, and I gave my first IRL talk at a conference in well over two years. Best of all, I also met many people, some for the first time in real life. Free Software Conference: sudo talk Last Friday, I gave a talk at the Free Software Conference in Szeged.

Recently, I started my own blog, and as Google Analytics seems to miss a good part of visitors, I wanted to analyze my web server logs myself. I use syslog-ng to read Apache logs, process them, and store them to Elasticsearch. Along the way, I resolve the IP address using a Python parser, analyze the Agent field of the logs, and also use GeoIP to locate the user on the map.

Sudo had many features to help blue teams in their daily job even before 1.9 was released. Session recordings, plugins and others made sure that most administrative access could be controlled and problems easily detected. Version 1.9 introduced Python support, new APIs, centralized session recordings, however some blind spots still remained. Learn how some of the latest sudo features can help you to better control and log administrative access to your hosts.

What hardware to use for a syslog-ng server? It is a frequent question with no definite answer. It depends on many factors: the number and type of sources, the number of logs, the way logs are processed, and so on. My experience is that for the majority users even a Raspberry Pi would be enough. But of course, not for everyone. You can read the rest of my blog at https://www.

The first time I heard about 21unity was when I read the announcement: 21unity Joins OpenPOWER Foundation. I immediately became interested in the company, as it combines two things I am interested in: POWER and open source. Among others 21unity has its own cloud based on the POWER platform and provides Nextcloud as a service. I tried to refresh my German knowledge and read their website, but the more I read the more interesting it got and the more questions I had.

How can you make Windows easy? Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL in short. Well, probably this is not true for everyone. However, as a Linux user, I definitely love WSL. When not using a browser or text editor, I spend my time on the command line. With WSL, you can have the familiar Linux command line environment from openSUSE also under Windows. Why Windows? Die hard Linux users might ask: why do I use Windows?

After 30 years of using the Internet and trying many communication formats, e-mail is still my favorite. However, e-mail has many problems. Spam is just annoying, but phishing and especially, spear phishing attacks can also be dangerous. A recent security training, and a Twitter thread I started about it, changed my mind completely about how I treat these harmful e-mails. phishing (fishing :-) ) The old way While most spam and some phishing can easily be filtered, spear phishing messages are unique by their nature.

This year the syslog-ng project will participate in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentor organization again. If you are a university student or otherwise eligible to participate in the GSoC program, you can choose to develop a new feature for syslog-ng. Read my blog to learn why to choose syslog-ng and how to get started: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-in-gsoc-2022 syslog-ng logo

For many years, you could use the match() filter of syslog-ng to parse log messages with regular expressions. However, the primary function of match() is filtering. Recent syslog-ng versions now have a dedicated regular expression parser, the regexp-parser(). So, you should use match() only if your primary use case is filtering. Otherwise, use the regexp-parser for parsing, as it is a lot more flexible. You can read the rest of my blog at https://www.