getting code signing certificate on own Yubikey and then using it to sign windows binaries in unattended way, on KVM VM

starting from June 2023 code signing certificates for MS Windows cannot be delivered as a file anymore. files are easy to steal. now certs must reside on security modules which don’t allow private key extraction, at least not for mere mortals. we’re using such a cert to sign exe and msi files on a build ... Read More

mysqldump headaches

over the years i’ve set up multiple backup workflows. one of them is described here. part of the cycles involves taking database backups. for MySQL i’m mostly using mysqldump. it comes with some headaches: it’s single-threaded by nature – both for backup, and restore [ unless you chop the dump file into pieces and try ... Read More

fighting a false-positive flagging by multiple antivirus vendors

recently i woke up to this: “Hi, some of our employees are using your application. This morning they have received an upgrade notification (in yellow banner) to get the latest version of your app. Our anti-virus/malware has triggered on your module called “somefile.exe” detected at risk being a “Trojan.Gen.MBT “. below few resources that i’ve ... Read More

multi-master mysql replication with servers on 3 different continents

at work i’m using mysql replication quite extensively. first it was a straightforward one-way replication that has been rock-solid for us since 2009. in 2012, for another type of data, we’ve started using master-master setup. initially the servers were in different European countries, eventually the secondary site was moved to North America while primary one ... Read More

MySQL on BTRFS?

i’ve been running a set of production MySQL databases on BTRFS since April 2016. BTRFS is not exactly known for its stellar performance when hosting databases or images of virtual machines due to its COW nature. why would i do it then? to have data snapshots and be able to ‘go back in time’ quickly ... Read More

bridging two physical interfaces of esxi server

my colleagues got into an unpleasant situation where one of two dedicated servers, running vmware esxi 6.0, rented from a datacenter lost its network connectivity. the datacenter/internet-facing interface is down, hours later, during regular working day, the hosting provider did not react and resolve the problem. maybe the network card died, maybe switch port misbehaves ... Read More