Automation Via UEFI

In large-scale datacenter environments, traditional BIOS-based automation quickly becomes a bottleneck. This post explores how I automated server provisioning and RAID configuration directly through UEFI, without using a live OS. From building a bootable ISO with xorriso to embedding BOOTX64.EFI from EDK2, we’ll walk through each step — creating startup scripts, managing RAID controllers, and understanding UEFI’s limitations like missing log-transfer tools. This guide demonstrates how firmware-level automation can simplify provisioning across clusters while minimizing wasted storage and deployment overhead.

Brief Introduction to Zimbra Internal Architecture

In some cases, you might want to recover your data from Zimbra, or you may be curious about how Zimbra manages users and emails behind the scenes. I dug into Zimbra’s nuts and bolts because we lost Zimbra’s local LDAP, which took more than 3 days to fix, so I wanted to share what I
SSH Gitlab

SSH Access Without OS Shell in Gitlab

Exposing SSH of your gitlab on the internet could be dangerous as attackers can get shell access into your server. So here we show you a way to enable SSH for Git without opening access to shell of the hosting OS. Step 1: Run another SSH instance just for gitlab Copy sshd config file and

Provisioning DNS Server Using PowerDNS

When you want to setup a DNS server on *nix platform, the first option that may cross your mind is bind9. But there are other options such as PowerDNS. In this post I’m going to show you how to setup a DNS server in single node mode. This DNS server is going to be authoritative

Using Putty to Automate Cisco Devices

Sometimes you want to automate some cumbersome tasks in your Cisco devices, namely I am dealing with an old 3750 core router with OS version 12.x and I don’t want to login to it manually every time I want to change a config or shutdown an interface. Hence I thought I can make use of

Using Maven with Socks Proxy

For bypassing using socks proxy use following command : mvn install -DproxySet=true -Dsocks.proxyHost=YOU_SOCKS_PROXY_ADDRESS -Dsocks.proxyPort=SOCKS_PROXY_PORT This command works in Linux and Windows Happy coding.

How to Create JWT Token Using LDAP and Spring Boot Part 1

If you are working in an enterprise infrastructures, chances are that you are using a centralized authentication system, most likely Active Directory or openLDAP. In this blog I’ll explore how to create a REST API using spring boot to authenticate against openLDAP and create a JWT token in return. Before getting our hand dirty, we

How to use CompletableFuture in SpringBoot 2

In Spring Boot there is an annotation @Async to assist developers for developing concurrent applications. But using this feature is quite tricky. In this blog we will see how to use this feature along with CompletableFuture. I assumed you know the drill about CompletableFuture, so I won’t repeat the concept here. First of all you

Installing openLDAP and Making it Replicable

OpenLDAP installation is fairly straight-forward and doesn’t have any caveats, but making it replicable has ambiguity. We will start with installing openLDAP. I will use following configs : ubuntu 16.04 server openLDAP 2.4.x phpLDAPadmin Installing openLDAP : First thing first, update your ubuntu box : sudo apt-get update Install openLDAP : sudo apt-get install slapd