If you’re working with Amazon Web Services, and want the highest level of security around usage of your AWS account, AWS recommends that you use IAM users instead of the account’s root user, set up Multi-Factor authentication (MFA) on the IAM users, and then require MFA for API operations. Typically this requires the person performing operations on AWS to provide a one-time code when they authenticate to AWS, as well as their more permanent password (for the web console) or their Access Key (for the CLI and SDKs). Read More...
I recently wanted to automate building a headless Debian testing (codename “buster”) virtual
machine, hosted on macOS, and it turned out to be somewhat more complicated than I expected, so I
thought I’d document it here for others’ benefit.
Instead of installing VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion or Parallels which are quite heavyweight virtual
machine apps, I wanted to run a headless VM using QEMU, which can be installed easily using
Homebrew. QEMU now supports hardware accelerated x86 virtualisation on Macs using the
Hypervisor.framework built in to macOS.
The script and preseed file to perform the fully automated install is here, and I’ll explain
the details behind what it does in this post.
Wanting to compile a small program I’d written in Rust to run on my home router, I found this guide to cross compilation of Rust code. The router is a Netgear R7000 with an ARM processor, running FreshTomato, a distribution of Linux for ARM and MIPS architecture consumer routers. The top of that guide shows an example of installing the cross-compilation toolchain for ARM on Ubuntu, but it required some work to adapt to Mac OS High Sierra, my desktop environment. Read More...
