I’ll be at HOPE 11 this year - if anyone else will be around, feel free to send me an email! I won’t have a phone on me (so texting only works if you use Signal!)

Looking forward for a chance to see everyone soon!

A while back, I found myself in need of two webservers that would terminate TLS (with different rules). I wanted to run some custom code I’d written (which uses TLS peer authentication), and also nginx on port 443.

The best way I figured out how to do this was to write a tool to sit on port 443, and parse TLS Client Hello packets, and dispatch to the correct backend depending on the SNI name.

SNI, or Server Name Indication allows the client to announce (yes over cleartext!) what server it’s looking for, similar to the HTTP Host header. Sometimes, like in the case above, the Host header won’t work, since you’ve already done a TLS handshake by the time you figure out who they’re looking for.

I also spun the Client Hello parser out into its own importable package, just in case someone else finds themselves in this same boat.

The code’s up on github.com/paultag/sniff!

Back in 2014, Mako ran a Boston Iron Blogger chapter, where you had to blog once a week, or you owed $5 into the pot. A while later, I ran it (along with Molly and Johns), and things were great.

When I moved to DC, I had already talked with Tom Lee and Eric Mill about running a DC Iron Blogger chapter, but it hasn’t happened in the year and a half I’ve been in DC.

This week, I make good on that, with a fantastic group set up at dc.iron-blogger.com; with more to come (I’m sure!).

Looking forward to many parties and though provoking blog posts in my future. I’m also quite pleased I’ll be resuming my blogging. Hi, again, planet Debian!

paultagskitchen:

Ingredients

• 1 tsp soylent
• 1 tsp simple syrup
• 1 oz Palo Cortado sherry
• ½ oz Rosso Vermouth
• ½ oz Campari

Assembly

Combine Soylent and Simple Syrup. Create what I’m going to start to call “Soylent Syrup”. Enjoy that one, folks.

Add ice to a rocks glass, pour Soylent Syrup over ice. Add Sherry, Vermouth and Campari. Stir. Garnish with an orange twist.

Big thanks to Matthew Garrett for sparking this one.

Hello, World

Been a while since my last blog post - things have been a bit hectic lately, and I’ve not really had the time.

Now that things have settled down a bit – I’m in DC! I’ve moved down south to join the rest of my colleagues at Sunlight to head up our State & Local team.

Leaving behind the brilliant Free Software community in Boston won’t be easy, but I’m hoping to find a similar community here in DC.

Slowly, but I’ll be in by Tonight, PST (early morning EST!)

Hope to see everyone soon!

I’ll be there this year!

Talks look amazing, I can’t wait to hit up all the talks. Looks really well organized! Talk schedule has a bunch that I want to hit, I hope they’re recorded to watch later!

If anyone’s heading to PyGotham, let me know, I’ll be there both days, likely floating around the talks.

I’ll be giving a short talk on Debian and Docker!

I’ll prepare some slides to give a brief talk about Debian and Docker, then open it up to have a normal session to talk over what Docker is and isn’t, and how we can use it in Debian better.

Hope to see y'all in Portland!

Why oh why are they so hard to write?

Even using the built in modules it is insanely hard to debug. Playing a bootsplash in X sucks and my machine boots too fast to test it on reboot.

Basically, euch. All I wanted was a hackers zebra on boot :(