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What is browser fingerprint?

You may think you are on the internet anonymously. Yet every click you make from your gadgets gives impact on your person.

Whenever you go online, your device provides specific data to the pages you visit. For example, it can be used to have information about your operating system and settings. Even your hardware can draw conclusions.

If someone uses this data to identify your identity, they are talking about browser fingerprinting. Websites do this for example to recognize your browser, plugins, language, screen resolution, time zone and other settings.
So that they can identify unique visitors and follow their online activities.

Fingerprinting

The name doesn’t come from anywhere: If a digital fingerprint has been created first, your identity can be precisely identified. According to Mozilla, “the procedure is able to correctly identify users in 99% of the cases.” ”
Even if you block cookies, surf with VPN, or adhere to other security measures that are so often recommended online, your digital fingerprint can betray you.

Finding browser fingerprint

On websites such as AmIUnique, you can find out how unique your digital fingerprint is. Test your browser and find out if you’re easily identified – and need to act. we also has a tool on offer – with our browser Privacy Check, see what traces you’ve left while surfing.

Protect my browser fingerprint

Where personal data is collected, there is always a risk of abuse. Unlike other factors of identification like your IP address, your digital fingerprint is invisible and therefore harder to protect. So a lot of users don’t even know that they are passing their data on.

Maybe companies are selling this data to third parties to make profit from it. Malware attacks can also become more effective with personalized data.
How can I effectively protect myself from browser fingerprint?

The bad news first: It’s almost impossible to fully protect yourself from fingerprinting. Still, you can weaken your fingerprint with a number of methods.

Use your browser in incognito mode

The easiest way to reduce your fingerprint is by surfing in incognito mode. Almost every browser offers this feature.

If you visit websites in private mode, they will not be saved in the browser history. Your browser profile is set to a certain standard that is the same for all users in incognito mode. That’s why this user’s digital fingerprints look similar – and their uniqueness is diminishing.

However, this method is not particularly effective because in browser fingerprinting there are still many other data that the Incognito mode has no effect on.

Surf with the goal browser

If you are serious, you should not just change the mode, but the whole browser right away. The gate browser is so pre-confirmed that the digital fingerprint of all users is identical. In addition, the browser blocks JavaScript very effectively.

Depending on which features in the gate browser are individually activated, however, you can draw conclusions on your digital identity. In addition, the goal browser is less service-friendly for Layen right now.

Disable JavaScript

Through JavaScript, web pages can gather plugins and other information that will sharpen the profile of your digital fingerprint. You can either manually disable JavaScript via your browser, or use tools like NoScript or AdBlock Plus.

Because many websites are dependent on JavaScript, however, the deactivation could greatly affect your surf taste.

Hide your ip address with a VPN

With a VPN (Virtual Private Network) you can access a closed, secure network through a secured tunnel, thus concealing your IP. We explain here how exactly this works, and which providers there are.
As an intermediary of your data, VPN makes sure web servers don’t come in contact with your IP address.

However, the IP address is just a factor in your identity, and browser settings on the other hand are not blurred by a VPN. That is why a VPN alone is not an effective protection, and only in connection with other methods – for example, deactivating JavaScript – is an advantage.

Data protection software and extensions

Data protection is also a constant topic for software developers, and numerous providers and expands promise effective help. Privacy Badger, for example, blocks certain domains that use fingerprinting technologies. Disconnect works in a similar way. Together with a strong adblocker, these extensions help protect your network identity from harmful domains.
Browser fingerprinting: There is no perfect protection

As you can see, there is no absolute waterproof protection against browser fingerprinting. Each of the proposed measures has pros and cons.
For better protection, you can combine the different options, but for normal internet users, the effort could be too big.

Nevertheless, you should try to keep your digital fingerprint as small as possible. Software that everyone should use anyway – adblocker or anti-malware – can have a lot of impact.

Take the actions that seem most reasonable to you – and see how much your browser fingerprint has shrunk in a before-after comparison on Cover Your Tracks or Am I Unique.

Customize a Linux virtual machine on Azure

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is an adaptable and easy-to-manage platform that allows developers and administrators to deploy business-critical workloads on-premises, in the cloud and at the edge. It is optimized for performance, security, and reliability. Since 2009, SUSE and Microsoft have been working together to provide unique, codeveloped, Azure-optimized solutions for SUSE SLES.

Example scenario

Imagine you work for a startup retailer that wants to create a website, and you have been asked to set up a LAMP stack (Linux OS, Apache webserver, MySQL database, PHP programming) using SUSE SLES on Azure.

What will we be doing?

Through the course of this post, we’ll discuss two tools that are unique to SUSE and how you can use them to add packages to your SUSE SLES VM on Azure.

What is the main goal?

By the end of this post, you will be able to deploy a SUSE Linux VM on Azure, install packages with YaST, and reconcile dependencies with zypper.

A virtual machine (VM) on Azure provides the infrastructure for running your workloads. Recall that your employer needs you to create a new VM for the LAMP stack. Here we will use the Azure portal to create the new VM. The portal walks you through the required information and provides hints and helpful messages during the creation.

Sign in to the Azure portal
On the Azure portal menu or from the Home page, under Azure services, select Virtual machines. Alternatively, you can enter Virtual machines in the top search box, and press Enter to get the virtual pane.
In the top menu bar, select Add > Virtual machine. The Create a virtual machine pane appears.
In the Basics tab:
- Choose the subscription you will be using for this exercise and Resource group and name it rg-lamp-demo
- Name your virtual machine vm-lamp-test-1 and select the default Availability option
- Choose the SUSE Enterprise Linux 15 SP2 + Patching option for your image
- Leave the Azure Spot instance box unchecked
- Choose the smallest size VM (Standard_B1s)
- Select the SSH public key for your authentication type
- Generate a new key pair and store it on your local machine along with the username
- Press next to customize your VM, or press Review + create to deploy your SLES VM
Select the default options for the Disks and Networking settings
Finish configuring the VM and creating the image by selecting Review + create.
After the system validates your options, and gives you details about the VM being created, select Create to create and deploy the VM. The Azure dashboard will show the VM that’s being deployed. This may take several minutes.
From the Azure portal, select Go to resource and the Overview pane to see the VM you just created
Open the connect menu and choose ssh
Follow the steps to connect your machine with ssh. If you are using a local Windows machine, you will need putty, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), or another software that provides ssh under Windows. If you are using a local Linux machine, open a terminal.

YaST is an admin tool developed by SUSE that allows you to add packages to your machine (in addition to other things).

Once you’ve launched a pay-as-you-go SLES virtual machine image on Azure, you need to add packages for the Apache, MySQL, and PHP portion of the LAMP stack to build your website.

In this unit we’ll talk about what packages are, and how you can use YaST to manage them on your SLES virtual machine.

Packages add functionality to your machine

Your Linux engine is a blank slate that you need to fill to create the functionality and feature set you desire. This requires installing software. Many times, software packages are developed by individual contributors from the open-source community, which means that they don’t always work well together.

Distributors like SUSE provide bug fixes, maintenance and support of such packages and provide them as a “Linux Distribution” to give you ready-to-run options. The main SUSE distribution targeted to enterprise customers is the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). There is also an open-source version called openSUSE.

SUSE uses the RPM package format to deliver such software to the system.

By choosing to run SLES, you automatically get access to over 3,500 RPM packages that have been pre-configured by SUSE engineers to work great together.

YaST is a specialized tool that helps you to administrate your system

YaST is a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server tool that provides a graphical interface for all essential installation and system configuration tasks. Whether you need to update packages, configure a printer, modify firewall settings, set up an FTP server, or partition a hard disk—you can do it using YaST. In this post, we’ll be using YaST to add packages to your VM. Following similar steps you can use YaST to update and delete packages as well.

Since all VMs in Azure are remote, you will not have a graphical environment to start and will only be able to log into the system over ssh. You will need load YaST using the sudo command, which allows you to perform administer-level functions from your unique log-in without using the administrator log-in ID. This distinction is important because it allows for better activity tracking and auditing.

YaST has two graphical interfaces: one for use with graphical desktop environments like KDE and GNOME and one that is an ncurses-based, pseudo-graphical interface for use on systems without an X server. image-yast-control-center-graphical-interface-inline

yast-control-center-text-interface-inline

The ncurses-based, pseudo-graphical YaST interface is designed primarily to help system administrators to manage systems without an X server. The interface offers several advantages compared to the conventional GUI:

You can navigate the ncurses interface using the keyboard, and there are keyboard shortcuts for practically all interface elements.
The ncurses interface is light on resources, and runs fast even on modest hardware.
You can run the ncurses-based version of YaST via an SSH connection, so you can administer remote systems.

Keep in mind that the minimum supported size of the terminal emulator in which to run YaST is 80×25 characters.

Note that when you first start YaST, not all of the functionality may automatically install. If you appear to be missing something, you can try searching for available packages with “YaST” in the name.

Packages are cumulative and most frequently used as collections

By nature, packages are cumulative and have defined dependencies that lead to specific outcomes. For example, if you want to run a relational database like MariaDB, you need to install the collection of packages, called a module, that enables MariaDB.

SUSE makes it easier to find the right packages for the tasks you want to complete by offering several different groupings of related packages in YaST.

Modules group packages in like bundles i.e. Programming languages, Public Cloud adoption
Patterns group packages by popular scenarios i.e. Run Oracle workloads, Enable a graphical interface
The repository is like a directory that show packages across the entire server

You can view these different options through the TUI or GUI interface for YaST.

Zypper is a command-line package manager that automatically reconciles package dependencies.

With Apache webserver installed, it’s time to add MySQL database to your PAYG instance of SLES on Azure.

In this unit, we’ll talk about how SUSE handles package dependencies and explain what zypper package manager is and how to use it for installation.

Packages alert you of dependencies…One. At. A. Time.

While individual packages can alert you to dependencies on other packages for defined activities or modules, these alerts are raised at the package level, meaning dependencies are triggered one at a time. You must manually select the next package before another dependency is surfaced, which triggers another package that you must select, and so on. For modules with many packages, adding a complete set of packages using this method can take a long time.

SUSE’s package manager, zypper, reconciles package dependencies

SUSE created zypper, a command-line package manager, which makes use of libzpp (SAT solver) to reconcile package dependencies for you. With zypper, all related packages are flagged at once when you select an activity or grouping, so you can install, update, or delete them with a single command. The YaST GUI and TUI includes zypper built into it. YaST runs zypper automatically in the background every time you start. Compared to manually finding and selecting package dependencies through RPM, zypper saves time.

Packages and corresponding modules configuration are updated

As soon as SUSE becomes aware of an error within a package, an update package is shipped. If you run PAYG, the updated packages are pushed out to a SUSE update infrastructure at your Azure datacenter location and on to your machine when you connect. If you run BYOS, you can download the updates through SUSE directly.

You can manually pull updates using zypper

The difference between a patch and an update is that a patch contains one or more packages and an update is always a single package. You can add additional parameters for the update or patch. , you can only install security fixes by selecting–category security.

Let’s have a look at some basic zypper examples:

List available repositories where packages come with sudo zypper lr or sudo zypper repos.
List available patches with sudo zypper lp or sudo zypper list-patches.
List available updates with sudo zypper lu or sudo zypper list-updates.
Install updates/patches with sudo zypper up, sudo zypper update, or sudo zypper patch.

Command line vs. GUI (zypper vs. YaST)

You might be wondering why did we use YaST to load apache and now we’re using zypper to add mariadb? Does it matter which one I use? The short answer is no. Zypper and YaST do the same things, they just go about it a little differently.

From command line, you can launch YaST and get a graphical menu that shows you all the different options you can use to administrate your system. Most of the time, graphical systems are preferred because they provide a visual overview of commands, so you don’t need to remember everything.

Zypper’s command-line interface is faster because you don’t have to navigate several windows or menu bars to execute the command. It also allows you to create your own workflow (or script) which is not possible in a graphical environment. If you use the commands and parameters regularly, zypper can be a faster way to get things done.

In the scenario for this post, the startup retailer you work for wanted to create a new website with a LAMP stack.

Through the units in the post, we discussed how to create a SUSE SLES VM on Azure through the Azure portal, add Apache webserver using YaST, and add MariaDB with zypper.

The purpose of this post was to communicate the role RPM packages play in customizing your virtual machine in the cloud and to introduce you to SUSE tools that make installing packages and managing package updates easier and more automated.

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Once you become familiar with YaST and zypper, you can use them to customize and refine other SUSE deployments on Azure such as:

SLES for SAP Applications, which includes specialized, built-in features to reduce downtime, enhance security, optimize performance, and reduce the maintenance workload of sys admins.
SLES for High Performance Computing (HPC), which includes infrastructure and tools to support parallel computation in the cloud.
Others available on Azure Marketplace: SUMa, SQL on SLES, SAP Solution Templates

How to Create a GitHub Action to deploy to Azure AKS

In this unit, you’ll complete the following tasks: Create a GitHub Action to implement a deployment pipeline Increment the coupon service version in the Helm chart, Verify that the changes were deployed to the AKS cluster, Roll back a deployment

Create the deployment action

Create a GitHub Action for cloud deployment(vps promo) of the coupon service with the following steps:

Select the Actions tab again, select the New workflow button, and select the set up a workflow yourself link.

Replace the YAML in the editor with the following YAML:

name: eShop deploy

on:
  push:
    paths:
    - 'deploy/k8s/helm-simple/coupon/*'
    branches: [ main ]

jobs:
  deploy-to-aks:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Azure Kubernetes set context
      uses: Azure/aks-set-context@v1
      with:
        creds: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}
        resource-group: 'eshop-learn-rg'
        cluster-name: 'eshop-learn-aks'

    - name: Get code from the repository
      uses: actions/checkout@v1
      with:
        ref: main

    - name: Helm tool installer
      uses: Azure/setup-helm@v1

    - name: Azure Login
      uses: Azure/[email protected]
      with:
        creds: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}

    - name: Deploy
      run: >
        helm upgrade 
        --install eshoplearn-coupon
        --namespace=default 
        --set registry=${{ secrets.REGISTRY_LOGIN_SERVER }} 
        --set imagePullPolicy=Always 
        --set host=${{ secrets.IP_ADDRESS }} 
        --set protocol=http './deploy/k8s/helm-simple/coupon'

The preceding YAML defines a GitHub Action that:

Is triggered when a commit is pushed to the coupon service’s Helm chart in the main branch.
Has one job, named deploy-to-aks, that deploys new images. The job runs in an ubuntu-latest runner and has five steps:
1. Azure Kubernetes set context sets the AKS credentials in the runner’s .kube/config file.
2. Get code from the repository checks out the code from the repository.
3. Helm tool installer installs Helm, an open-source package manager for Kubernetes.
4. Azure Login logs in to Azure using the service principal credentials.
5. Deploy executes the helm upgrade command, passing the ACR instance name as the registry parameter. This parameter tells Helm to use your ACR instance rather than the public container registry.

Replace the default workflow file name of main.yml with deploy.yml.
Commit the deploy.yml workflow file directly to the main branch.

These two GitHub Action definitions are stored in the repository’s .github/workflows directory. To make changes, update the appropriate file locally and push to the main branch. Alternatively, create a pull request (PR). If you create a PR, the Action is triggered when merging to main.

Trigger a deployment

To trigger a deployment, you’ll increment the appVersion in the coupon service’s Helm chart. Helm charts are used to define the service specification in a YAML template format.

From the Code tab, edit the deploy/k8s/helm-simple/coupon/Chart.yaml file by clicking the edit icon. Update the appVersion property value to 1.1.0:
```
apiVersion: v2
name: coupon

# YAML omitted for brevity

# This is the version number of the application being deployed. This version number should be
# incremented each time you make changes to the application.
appVersion: 1.1.0
```
It’s important that you update the app version in the Helm chart. This change causes the pod to be replaced when the chart is deployed to AKS with helm upgrade.
Commit and push this change to the main branch.The deployment workflow is triggered automatically. The app is deployed after a few minutes.

Monitor the deployment

Select the Actions tab in your repository to monitor the deployment’s progress.
Select the most recent workflow run listed for the eShop deploy workflow. The commit message used in the previous step becomes the run’s name.
Select the deploy-to-aks task:In the preceding image, you can see details of the deploy-to-aks job for this particular workflow run. The Set up job and Complete job steps are listed. In between those two steps are the custom steps defined within the deploy-to-aks job.
Select the Actions tab again. You’ll see a variation of the following screen when the deployment completes:
Back in the command shell, run the following command to monitor the coupon service pods in your AKS cluster:
```
kubectl get pods --selector service=coupon --watch
```
In the preceding command:
- The --selector flag filters the list to only pods for the coupon service. For this reason, pods for other services in the cluster aren’t displayed.
- The --watch flag instructs kubectl to watch for changes. When a change is detected, an additional table row is appended to the command shell output. The status of the existing and newly deployed pods is displayed in real time.
A variation of the following output appears:
```
NAME                              READY   STATUS              RESTARTS   AGE
coupon-5b9597995-7s4hh            1/1     Running             1          31m
coupon-74fd48bbd-rqgfd            0/1     ContainerCreating   0          22s
```
In the preceding output, notice that a new coupon pod was created. While the old pod is still running and when the new pod is ready, the old one is terminated. This process makes the transition to the new version as smooth as possible.
Once the new pod’s Ready status displays 1/1, press Ctrl+C to stop kubectl‘s watch mode.

Run the following command to check the coupon service deployment history:

helm history eshoplearn-coupon

The history shows the new coupon service version has been deployed.

REVISION        UPDATED                         STATUS          CHART           APP VERSION     DESCRIPTION
1               Thu Sep 10 19:19:31 2020        superseded      coupon-0.1.0    1.0.0           Install complete
2               Thu Sep 10 19:51:10 2020        deployed        coupon-0.1.0    1.1.0           Upgrade complete

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Verify the deployment

Complete the following steps to verify your change is deployed:

Run the following command in the command shell:

cat ~/clouddrive/aspnet-learn-temp/deployment-urls.txt

Select the Web SPA application URL to launch the app.
Log in from the LOGIN page.
Add your favorite products to the shopping bag by selecting the images.
Select the shopping bag icon in the upper right, and select CHECKOUT.
Enter the code DISC-5 in the HAVE A DISCOUNT CODE? text box for a five USD discount, and select APPLY.
Select PLACE ORDER to complete the purchase.
Back in the command shell, select the Centralized logging URL.
In the Seq logs search text box, enter Applying coupon DISC-5 and press Enter.The logs are filtered to display the following entry:

Roll back the deployment

During production issues, one common mitigation is to revert a deployment to a known good deployment. Use the following command to roll back from version 1.1.0 to 1.0.0.

helm rollback eshoplearn-coupon

The deployment history confirms that everything is back to normal:

Rollback was a success! Happy Helming!

Note: In a real-life scenario, you’ll have multiple environments to which the build’s artifacts can be deployed. For example, you might have development, testing, and staging environments. The deployment workflows can be triggered by events like merging PRs. Quality or approval gates, such as a stakeholder’s PR approval, can be added to prevent unexpected deployments to production.

In this unit, you created a GitHub Action to deploy the coupon service to AKS. To test the deployment workflow, you incremented the coupon service version in its Helm chart. Upon completion of the deployment workflow run, you searched the Seq logs to confirm the discount code redemption message was present. Finally, you reverted the coupon service in AKS to version 1.0.0.

Happy deploying!