Blog

Striving for high-availability of some software systems requires ensuring their individual components are reliable and usually redundant. A typical example of such component is a SQL database - MariaDB being the case we had to handle this time.

We decided to go for MariaDB Galera cluster on CentOS and I would like to write about our experience here. We have chosen active-active (master-master) design with two nodes called nodeA and nodeB having IP addresses 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2 respectively.

Picture yourself in an Abelian group on a two-dimensional finite field with identity point at the infinity and group generator...

Sometimes technology resembles psychedelic pictures of the 60's - in a good way. Elliptic curve cryptography primitives are an example of such technology. When - as a programmer - you dive into them, you find yourself in a spectacularly simple yet effective machine. I am still talking about the ECC! While working on a project which uses ECC primitives I started wondering: why only a handful of protocols use these? Why is such beautiful tool as ECDSA left alone in the corner and everyone dances with bigger and bigger hammers like RSA?

I have had a tremendous opportunity to be a speaker at the SecPublica 2016 security conference held in Prague on 31st March. All the speakers - including myself - gave the talks in Czech and therefore the presentation slides and videos are useful only for you guys from the Czech (and Slovak) Republic.

Feel free to check them out for yourself at http://www.secpublica.cz/2016/. There are however a few things worth noting from my preparations for this talk I would like to write here about.

I would like - if I may - to take you on a strange journey.

As a part of developing a simple UDP-based networking application for Linux where the client may communicate with the server over multiple physical network connections, we needed to programatically setup source-based routing. It seemed like a really simple task. A simple task which turned into a roller coaster ride from the heights of pure amusement to the very depths of hell itself.