About ATIX-Crew

Der ATIX-Crew besteht aus Leuten, die in unterschiedlichen Bereichen tätig sind: Consulting, Development/Engineering, Support, Vertrieb und Marketing.

Entries by ATIX-Crew

Navigating the XZ Security Vulnerability: A Comprehensive Guide

In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, the recent discovery of a critical vulnerability in XZ Utils, a widely used data compression software, underscores the need for vigilant security practices.

Identified as CVE-2024-3094, this backdoor vulnerability, discovered on March 28, 2024, has sent ripples through the open-source community and beyond, affecting various Linux distributions and necessitating immediate action to safeguard systems against potential exploits​ (Microsoft Community Hub)​​ (Unit 42)​.

Automating Kafka with Ansible

In all areas of life, there are a lot of issues we are not aware of. To measure these problems, we use the so-called fulfillment rate. For example: with a fulfillment rate of 90%, a heart beat would stop every 85 seconds, and an average A4 page of text would contain 30 typos. A fulfillment rate of 99.9% (which seems a lot) still means 22,000 wrong bank bookings per hour, and a total of 32,000 missed heart beats per year. The answer is automation and standardization! These approaches help solve problems we are often not aware of.

Managing Large Debian Repositories with Pulp

Pulp is a free, open-source platform for software repository management. You can fetch, upload, and distribute content from various sources. Repository versioning makes sure that nothing is lost as you can always roll back to previous versions. The pulp_deb plugin adds APT repository support.

Configuration Management across Different Networks with AWX

At the Chemnitz Linux Days 2023, Ottavia Balducci, IT Consultant at ATIX, presented the advantages of AWX. AWX is a tool that can be used to configure hosts with Ansible. It is therefore particularly popular with larger organizations. AWX is open source, fully customisable, has a web UI, REST API, RBAC, CI/CD … There are many reasons for working with AWX.

orcharhino meets new Windows Templates

Starting with version 5.8 orcharhino comes with new provisioning templates for Windows. Diese erweitern die Vielfalt an Funktionen Ihrer Windows-Deployments beispielsweise um eine Installation in Netzen ohne DHCP und parametrisierten Domain Join.

ATIX @ CfgMgmt Camp 2020

Due to our great experiences in the last two years, a delegation of the ATIX crew traveled to the CfgMgmt Camp (Config Management Camp) in Gent this year, too. For ecological reasons, we renounced the plane and drove to Belgium in one car.

The Future of Ansible

The introduction of Collections is not the only recent major innovation in Ansible. Until version 2.8, Ansible was offered as one large package. This included a variety of modules developed and maintained by the Ansible community. The introduction of Collections happened as part of the release of version 2.9: a format for easy packaging and distribution of Ansible content. Collections significantly improved the possibilities for extensions as well as maintenance. The current major version is Ansible 3.0.0. ansible-base is not installed with it, but has become a dependency.

WTF is AIOps?

It is still unclear to many what artificial intelligence actually is in concrete terms. At the same time, it is and has often been discussed whether artificial intelligence poses a threat to humanity, especially after this topic is often associated with a scenario like in the Terminator series. But fundamentally, this technology is neither difficult to grasp nor an inherently dangerous one. As is so often the case, the decisive factor is in which context it is used.

A somewhat different OSAD

For 4 years now, the Open Source Automation Days have been our highlight of the year. We are very pleased to see that Munich’s largest vendor-independent open source conference has established itself as an integral part of the annual calendar of events. When we organized a three-day event for over 150 participants for the first time in 2019, it pushed our motivation for OSAD 2020 enormously. So we started planning immediately afterward, found a location, and already booked it… But suddenly, Corona was there!