KEEPING THINGS UPDATED WITH APT-DATER
One challenge of running servers, especially if you have more than a few, is keeping all of the software up to date on them. Patches are released constantly, and keeping software updated is a major security concern. One great tool that can help automate this is apt-dater, a text based utility that lets you interactively update packages on systems. Installing apt-dater is included in the main Debian and Ubuntu repositories, so you just have to run apt-get install apt-dater on the host you’ll use to update systems, and apt-get install apt-dater-host on your servers.
Read moreADDRESSING THE LOG4J VULNERABILITY IN UNIFI VIDEO 3.10.13
If you’ve been on the Internet at all today, you’ve probably heard that there is a pretty nasty RCE issue with log4j, a logging package for Java applications. The CVE is CVE-2021-44228, and is a pretty scary RCE bug that is already being exploited in the wild. Update: I originally had comments in this post stating Ubiquiti should update the NVR software. I’ve since learned it’s officially deprecated and won’t be receiving any updates.
Read moreEMBY + NGINX REVERSE PROXY
After some light Google-ing, I couldn’t find a simple example for Emby running behind an Nginx reverse proxy. I built this config using some boilerplate config I have and some config snippets from other config examples. If you’re brand new or not sure exactly what you need, it can be a bit confusing to see older threads with lots of comments and suggestions, and it may be hard to tell what exactly you need to edit.
Read moreUA-PARSER-JS COMPROMISE
Obvious Disclaimer: I’m not a professional security researcher. I dabble in these things and more pursue these things out of curiosity. Let me know what I got wrong. Today I read that there was another victim of a Supply Chain attack, a NPM module author had a few of their modules compromised, one of which (the one I read about) was ua-parser.js. This module provides detection of various platform data from user agent strings.
Read moreLVM BASICS
This is a quick how-to showing my procedure for setting up new drives with LVM. What is LVM LVM stands for Logical Volume Manager and is a newer way to manage partitions and disks in Linux. If you’ve never used LVM, it makes adding partitions, resizing things, adding disks, and more easy and slick on Linux. Basically, it’s an abstraction layer between your disks and partitions. You can have partitions span multiple disks, change them around on the fly, move them around, etc without any of the fuss of before.
Read moreMY PERSONAL BACKUP STRATEGY
I’m pretty protective of my data. I like to make sure all my important file are backed up, and I employ a 3-2-1 backup strategy for basically everything. What are 3-2-1 Backups This is a term that is floated around frequently when talking about backups. It basically boils down to these rules: You have 3 independent copies of your data. Of those 3 copies, 2 of them are on different systems (Different servers, different SANs, etc).
Read morePROMXOX/RCLONE OFFSITE BACKUP
One of the most important parts of keeping data safe is offsite backups. One excellent tool for this is Rclone, a tool that copies data to local and remote locations with ease. I don’t use Rclone for all my backups, which I’ll get into, but I use it for some cases and it’s a great tool. Why I Use Rclone I operate a dedicated server where the hardware is managed by a third-party.
Read moreCUSTOM DEBIAN ISO
If you’re installing Debian on a regular basis, or want to automate the installation a bit more, building a custom Debian installation ISO can be quite handy. You can automate some of the more tedious parts of the installation, install extra packages and run additional setup, or even completely automate the installation! Why? In my case, I’m working with some automated provisioning using Puppet and Packer. Most of the time, you can start with a pre-installed operating system and work from there.
Read moreFIREWALLD IN DEBIAN 10
In the past, I showed how to add a firewall rule in Debian 9. For Debian 10, these instructions still work but installing the firewalld package is a bit more involved. Why There is a bug in iptables (which is how firewalld applies rules) that causes it to crash on start up. Thanks to this GitHub Issue, I was able to track this down to the specific version of iptables that ships with Debian 10 (1.
Read morePUPPET WITHOUT A PUPPET SERVER
One tool that is pretty neat for anyone who manages more than one machine is Puppet. In it’s simplest form, Puppet is designed to codify actions you may take on your server and run them automatically. The typical deployment for Puppet relies on a central Puppet server (the “Puppetmaster”), and clients distributed around your network. What if, say, we wanted to run Puppet without this central server? Why Puppet is great, and a centralized Puppet server is equally great.
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