Pim Widdershoven

DevOps Engineer, Cloud Specialist, with many interest in tech related subjects

Deploy a secure instance of Elasticsearch on Kubernetes

It's easy to deploy Elasticsearch on Kubernetes. You get yourself a copy of the Elastic Helm Charts and you run helm install. Job well done... or not? The default Elasticsearch configuration doesn't enable any encryption or security mechanism, that doesn't sound really safe! In this blog post, I'll explain how you secure your Elasticsearch instance by enabling encryption (SSL transport and HTTP over SSL) and native authentication.

Written by Pim on Sunday December 22, 2019 - Comment - Permalink
Categories: devops, technology, howto - Tags: elasticsearch, security, kubernetes, helm, tls, pki, authentication, encryption

Automate your home with a Shelly 1 Wi-Fi module

I'm a bit conservative about automating my home because of the vendor lock-in or the requirement to have a central hub. Last Black Friday I came across the Shelly products. Shelly doesn't require a central hub and only needs a Wi-Fi connection and there isn't a vendor lock-in because the modules do have their own web interface and API. Interesting and I bought a couple of Shelly 1's! In this article more about the Shelly 1 and how I use them to automate my front door and back door lights.

Written by Pim on Sunday December 15, 2019 - Comment - Permalink
Categories: technology, howto - Tags: Shelly, home-automation

Deploy Kubernetes Cluster with Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE)

In this blog post, I'll explain how you deploy a brand new Kubernetes Cluster with Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE). Rancher Kubernetes Engine doesn't include the Rancher management application itself and will deploy a vanilla Kubernetes Cluster for you, the exact same thing as kubeadm can do for you but much more simple!

Written by Pim on Thursday November 28, 2019 - Comment - Permalink
Categories: docker, rancher - Tags: kubernetes, rke, rancher

Install Keycloak on CentOS 7 with MySQL backend

Keycloak is an open source Identity and Access Management solution aimed at modern applications and services. It makes it easy to secure applications and services with little to no code. I'm using Keycloak as an Identity Broker and have multiple Active Directories added to Keycloak.

Written by Pim on Tuesday October 23, 2018 - Comment - Permalink
Categories: devops, technology, howto - Tags: centos7, authentication, keycloak, mysql, nginx, jboss, identity-provider, active-directory, security

Use Kubernetes Certificate Manager to automatically add SSL/TLS certificates to ingresses

Kubernetes Certificate Manager (cert-manager) is a native Kubernetes controller helping you to issue certificates from a variety of sources, such as Let's Encrypt, HashiCorp Valut, a signing keypair and self-signed. The Certificate Manager ensures certificates are valid and up-to-date, and attempt to renew certificates at a configured time before expiry.

Written by Pim on Tuesday October 16, 2018 - Comment - Permalink
Categories: devops, technology, howto - Tags: kubernetes, lets-encrypt, certificates, helm, tiller, kubernetes-ingress, SSL, TLS, security

Docker on CentOS 7 machine with XFS filesystem can cause trouble when d_type is not supported

At my work, we try to automate almost everything. We're using Docker to containerize our in-house developed software and are running these containers on CentOS 7 machines. When you're using a modern CentOS 7 version, the XFS filesystems are configured correctly with d_type support activated. But when you want to run Docker containers on an older version of CentOS 7, d_type support could be disabled causing a lot of trouble when you're chowning and chmoding files in a container: files are not found or skipped, etc.

Written by Pim on Monday August 27, 2018 - Comment - Permalink
Categories: docker, devops, technology - Tags: docker, centos7, centos, xfs, storage