Category: How to
-
Adding WiFi Card to Alix apu Running pfSense
I always thought it would be neat to manage my home WiFi from the same interface as the rest of my network. After eyeing the hardware for a long time and doing some research every couple months or so, I finally made the leap and purchased the necessary hardware. As I’m using an Alix apu2c2,…
-
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…
-
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…