This blog post will summarize my experience attending 35th Chaos Communication Congress AKA 35c3, which took place between 27th and 30th December 2018 in Leipzig, Germany. The Congress hosts a variety of talks, assemblies and serves as a meeting point for thousands of people from the security and hackerspace communities. Moreover, the Congress covers many other different topics ranging from arts & culture, technology, hobby projects as well as politics. In this post, I will be mainly focusing on the security and technical talks of the conference.

New location AKA Willkommen in Leipzig My first visit to 29C3 in 2012 was the year when Congress moved from Berlin to Hamburg. Bigger auditoriums, more room for more people. After the last year’s problems with almost 2000 people not getting to 33C3 because of the congress hall capacity limits, CCC organizers decided to look for a new venue. They found one in the city of Leipzig and Congress Hall Leipzig.

On January 9th, the rest of my work on Ansible modules for managing Solaris/illumos networking was accepted into Ansible and this work will be a part of the next release. With this batch of modules almost every aspect of Solaris/illumos networking (apart from link aggregations and bridges) can be configured and managed by Ansible. The following new modules are available in Ansible: dladm_vlan dladm_linkprop dladm_iptun ipadm_addr ipadm_addrprop ipadm_ifprop In the next blog post I will show some real examples how to accomplish useful work with these modules.

I visited 33rd Chaos Communication Congress, which took place between 27th and 30th December 2016 in CCH in Hamburg. The motto of last year’s congress was Works for me. This was my fifth attendance of the Chaos Communication Congress. The overall atmosphere on the Congress and organization was excellent as always. However, I have to admit that the quallity of talks was worse when compared to previous years. During previous Congresses I had problems with choosing which talk to attend as there were too many of them I wanted to visit at the same time.

On August 30th, my work on Ansible modules for managing Solaris/illumos networking was merged into ansible-modules-extras repository. This functionality will be available in the next release of Ansible. Following modules were contributed: dladm_etherstub dladm_vnic ipadm_if ipadm_prop flowadm This also marks a major milestone for automating the deployment of Solaris/illumos zones with Ansible. There already was a module for creating/deleting zones and manipulating their state - solaris_zone. However, there was not a way to manage the networking aspect of zones until now.

Introduction In this blog post, I will show how one can create a mirror of OpenIndiana IPS repositories. IPS repositories hold packages coming from multiple sources, most notably from illumos-gate and oi-userland. Every time user runs pkg update on his OpenIndiana installation, pkg contacts IPS repository to fetch catalog metadata and determines if there are any new updates available. If updates are available, pkg downoalds only changed files over HTTP. IPS application server is written in Python and CherryPy web framework.