SHANER.LIFE

Author: shaner

  • Setup Package Cache Server on Ubuntu 18.04

    If you’re like me and have several Debian/Ubuntu machines on your network there’s going to come a time when you need to upgrade them. Doing so, will use up a lot of bandwidth while every machine will likely be downloading the same packages. This may or may not upset your significant other who’s binge-watching Gilmore…

  • The home lab

    After reading about others home lab environments, I was inspired to write about mine. It’s nothing too fancy but maybe somebody out there will find it interesting. I’ve flipped-flopped several times between various operating systems and hypervisors trying to find the solution that best fits my needs. I’ve tried everything from pure Debian (kvm/libvirt, lxc),…

  • Nginx and Letsencrypt on SmartOS

    acme_tiny is a nice, small utility for creating and renewing your doman SSL/TLS certificates. It’s less than 200 lines of bash and just works. Here’s how to set it up and have your certificate automatically renewed once a month. First, let’s get things installed; nginx and the acme-tiny client and setup the necessary directories. Add…

  • Install elasticsearch 5.x on SmartOS

    Whenever possible, I like running software in containers instead of kvms. Aside from the obvious performance gains, server density increases significantly since you’re not kidnapping huge chunks of DRAM from the OS and holding it hostage. I recently had a need to setup an elasticsearch 5.x cluster on a SmartOS machine. It was mostly straight-forward…

  • Bhyve pfSense 2.4 no console menu

    I ran into an annoying issue today while trying to install pfsense 2.4.2 in a bhyve VM using the ISO installer. Everything went swimmingly until post-install when pfsense finished startup and never provided the expected pfSense console. All it would show is bootup complete. I went through and confirmed /etc/ttys was configured properly and added…

  • A security event pipeline using Bro, Kafka, and FreeBSD Jails

    With the help of the Bro Kafka plug-in, we’ll configure Bro to stream JSON-formatted logs through Kafka and use python to subscribe and print events from the stream. This tutorial uses FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE. But can easily be adapted to Linux installations. How do you monitor events from multiple Bro sensors throughout a network? Do you…