How to erase your SSD / HDD using hdparm

I recently had to ship some (used) drives back to the manufacturer. And even though I'm pretty sure the drives will be erased first thing and even though the drives were used in a RAID (actually SHR2) set with an encrypted volume and it would be hard, if not impossible, to recover anything from them without my help I'm still never too keen to keep my bits and bytes on drives that are out of my hands. Selling my laptop? Erase drive. Recycling an old workstation? Erase drive. Then use a hammer to whack a screwdriver through the drive or "drop" (rather: throw) the drive on the ground a few times. You never know where a drive ends up and in who's hands.

WD Red NAS drives use SMR and I'm not happy about it - understatement of the year

If you're into NAS drives then you may have heard that recently word got around that Western Digital's NAS drives, the WD Reds specifically, apparently use SMR - Shingled Magnetic Recording. There's been a lot of fuss about it and I'm not about to repeat it all so that's why I'll provide some links to other sources I came across myself. What this blogpost is about, though, is me documenting what happened after I contacted WD from a customer perspective. Your experience may vary, but what you're about to read is mine.

Handling multiple implementations of an interface with Dependency Injection in .Net Core

When you have an interface with multiple implementations and you don't want to use a 3rd party DI framework, you'll need to work around some limitations of the 'native' DI implementation in .Net Core.

Swashbuckle custom ordering of controllers

By default, Swagger (or rather: Swashbuckle) orders the documentation of controllers by controllername. So if you have a FooController, BarController and BazController they will be ordered as Bar, Baz, Foo in the swagger UI. Let's change that.

Configure your Windows Remote Desktop (RDP) to use TLS with a StartSSL certificate

I wanted to use TLS with non-self-signed certificates for RDP connections to my workstation at home and so I set out to make it happen. Since I don't have a domain with Active Directory (anymore...) the 'usual' methods found on the web don't quite apply. Here's a simple, step-by-step, guide on how to use StartSSL certificates to secure your RDP connection. This should also work fine with certificates from other CA's; step 2 and 3 (obtaining the .crt file)  can/will be different but other than that you should be fine.

Do you really want "bank grade" security in your SSL? Dutch edition

Inspired by Do you really want "bank grade" security in your SSL? Here’s how Aussie banks fare found on /r/programming I present to you the "Dutch edition". The author used Qualys SSL Labs' SSL test to determine how good banks' SSL implementations really are.

MongoVue GridFS bug

I have been a MongoVUE user for some time and have always been quite happy with it. I had a bug or problem a few years ago (can't remember what exactly) and was quite astonished that their site doesn't feature a "support" section. All you can do is click "contact us" and fill in some crappy e-mail form. Back then, if I recall correctly, it must've done the job because the bug has been fixed (I guess).