Robert Bost

2025 Back to Blogging

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 15:21:02 -0600

It has been a while since I have posted anything publicly and I think its time to bring it back!

My last public post on here was 2018 where I had slowed down on a satellite tracking project. I remember having a ton of fun working on that and learning A LOT about tracking satellites using TLE data and about embedded development.

Since 2018 a lot has happened in life and my career. I won’t get into that here, but I have a lot of technology experiences to share. Hopefully, on a more reasonable cadence.

About

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 14:18:06 -0600

I’m Robert Bost, a software engineer at Red Hat specializing in Linux systems, cloud platforms, and open source infrastructure. My work focuses on building reliable cloud-native environments and writing the software that helps teams understand and operate complex systems.

At Red Hat, I support internal teams through technical enablement, troubleshooting, and scalable solution development. I stay close to both the code and the systems.

This blog is where I share what I’m building, learning, and exploring — from backend code and architecture to automation and tooling.

Quikey Release 0.1.3

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 00:07:35 +0000

Quikey 0.1.3 was released today and includes interactive editing and removal of phrases. This solves the problem with having to know the phrase name/key at time of edit or removal. It also solve a problem where typing the phrase name/key itself performs the text expansion!

Here’s a brief demo showing the new feature: https://asciinema.org/a/FWxBE5bolPRW75eYsD78xvVUC

In addition to the new feature above, the --help output is now more helpful. Also, you can no longer create a phrase name/key that is an empty since that led to zero usability of your keyboard.

Quikey Release 0.1.2

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 02:07:59 +0000

Quikey 0.1.2 was released yesterday and includes the following:

A feature to import from AutoKey. See qk keyimport --help for a quick reference on how to use.
Autostart for the Quikey daemon so there’s no need to run qk start after a reboot or login. This should work on GNOME, Xfce, KDE, and other desktop environments following the XDG Desktop Entry standard.
Added a lot of unit tests.
A few more minor bug fixes.

Auto Key Import

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 03:14:11 +0000

There’s some good work being done here to add import functionality for AutoKey users. This should ease migration for someone with a large AutoKey database. Of course, AutoKey has way more functionality than Quikey so we’ll only be importing key phrases (no mouse or scripting will be migrated).

Hope everyone is staying safe, healthy, and active. <3

Start of Quikey Blog

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 01:17:38 +0000

I’ll be hosting a blog here to track development of an application I develop called Quikey, a keyboard macro tool. Content on this blog will be about new and old features, design, and future plans for Quikey.

Update #3 on Pocket-Sized Satellite Tracker

Thu, 10 May 2018 01:06:58 +0000

I haven’t updated much on the satellite tracker but I figured I would make the repo public since it is just sitting there at the moment. :)

https://github.com/bostrt/sattrack

https://github.com/bostrt/libpredict-arduino-lib

I plan to work on this some more before upcoming DEF CON 26.

Update #2 on Pocket-Sized Satellite Tracker

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 23:11:52 +0000

Things are progressing nicely on the satellite tracker. The following is functional:

libpredict modified to work on Adafruit Feather M0
Real-time clock with battery backup complete
Storage for configs complete
OLED display working and displaying data calculated by libpredict
USB Serial interface for configuring location, callsign, TLE’s, and time (in case RTC loses battery power)

Current tasks

Develop a dev pcb to replace bread-board. Just something that all the breakout boards above solder onto
Finish display graphics
code-cleanup

Screenshot & Photos

Serial interface All components Polar chart that will display relative satellite position Missing photo of the satellite position data due to being in middle of display code rewrite.

Update on Pocket-Sized Satellite Tracker

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:35:06 +0000

After some fighting with libpredict, I found that I am going to need a microcontroller with better floating-point support. The Atmega series of microcontrollers do not have an FPU which means any floating-point support is hard (either inaccurate, slow, or hacked).

I found that some of the ARM Cortex processors do indeed have an FPU and their also come in similar form as Arduinos or other development boards:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2772

Beginning Pocket-Sized Satellite Tracking

Fri, 15 Sep 2017 23:07:30 +0000

A couple months ago, I worked on putting a satellite tracking application on a Raspberry Pi. This worked okay but I have to use a keyboard to select the satellite I want to track before going outside to find it. I also have to lug around an external battery outside which isn’t fun. I could really use something more compact.

Hard Requirements

Screen + Buttons
Tracking multiple satellites (not hundreds, just a few)
Display Azimuth
Display Elevation
Display transponder frequency with Doppler shift
Polar plot (sky plot)
Button to switch between satellites
Ability to set the time and timezone on device (RTC required)

Soft Requirements

Flyby Satellite Tracking on Raspberry Pi

Sat, 22 Jul 2017 03:23:35 +0000

Flyby is a satellite tracking application that runs in a terminal (no GUI required). I wanted to run it on my Raspberry Pi that has a display attached to it so I can carry it outside with me when tracking amateur satellites. This is much easier to move around than a laptop or even my phone where I have to keep the screen from going to sleep or touching something on the screen.Setting up Flyby on a Raspberry Pi was a bit of a challenge but it is now working fine. Here’s my setup steps:

Introducing mod_serverheader

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 03:20:52 +0000

mod_serverheader project site In my work, I have seen people performing security scans, going through audits, and stumbling upon information they wish they could hide about their webservers.

One of the simplest questions that comes up over-and-over is regarding the Server header in Apache HTTPD responses; the thing with the arrows are pointing to below:

# curl -I http://localhost/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2017 20:56:24 EST
Server: Apache/2.4.25 (Fedora) OpenSSL/1.0.2k-fips  ◀◀◀◀◀◀◀◀
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

There are a couple ways to reduce what is disclosed in the Server header.

ModSecurity 2.9.x in 5 minutes

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 04:18:17 +0000

There are just a few fundamental pieces to learn in order to get started with ModSecurity.

Phases
Actions and Rules
Collections

Phases

There are 5 phases of request processing in ModSecurity 1. You can hook into any one these phases using the phase keyword when writing ModSecurity Actions and Rules. The 5 phases occur in this order:

Request Headers Phase
Request Body Phase
Response Headers Phase
Response Body Phase
Logging Phase

As you pass through the phases, you can still access the information from the previous phases. So, if you are not sure where to begin, start with Logging Phase 5.