Week in review, at home anyway

Posted on May 17, 2014 by mark
  • Got the Snort IDS running on this webserver. Also wrote a quick nagios plugin script to monitor it for me
  • Also later installed snort onto my main VM host; theoretically alerts reported by my webserver guest instance should not reach the webserver guest now. Seems to be working, nagios tells me I have alerts on the host machine, none on the webserver. Haven’t reviewed the alerts yet due to other issues later in the week
  • Created a new VM dedicated to being a VPN server, using the opensource community version of openvpn; setup so clients must have valid certs issued by the server ca plus also go though userid/password authentication on top of that. Tested it, works fine, certainly a more secure access method that relying on opening an ssh port. Only issue was the documentation on the openvpn site for using easyrsa is out of date, but it was easy enought to figure out was was needed. Also configured nagios and bacula to look after it. Still to install snort on there and see if the VPN keeps working.
  • Got sidetracked by… knocked my desktops external disk cable (I think, may have been a timeout issue as the desktop had not been rebooted in months and had started using a lot of swap). A LUKS encrypted external disk (as all my external disks and usb keys are), external disks configured with passwords that cannot be entered on a keyboard. Bit of a mission to fix as had to manually kill everything using it, umount it, luksClose it… and could not get it luksOpen’ed again to fsck it… blkid reported it had a luks UUID that was definately not the correct luks UUID for the disk; but after a reboot it was recognised correctly and could be fsck’ed. It lives again.
  • And mirrored the pictures I have of T from the recovered disk to other disks, I can never replace those. I guess they are the only important files really.
  • And made slight progress in making the general section of my website more mobile friendly, almost everything is wrapping for different screen sizes now, although its not too pretty on smaller screens yet

About mark

At work, been working on Tandems for around 30yrs (programming + sysadmin), plus AIX and Solaris sysadmin also thrown in during the last 20yrs; also about 5yrs on MVS (mainly operations and automation but also smp/e work). At home I have been using linux for decades. Programming background is commercially in TAL/COBOL/SCOBOL/C(Tandem); 370 assembler(MVS); C, perl and shell scripting in *nix; and Microsoft Macro Assembler(windows).
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