Of Pi’s and Play

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Hello Once again,

Lately I have been in a sort of Tecno slump, I havent really worked on anything Technological in a while, other than a few side projects with the Raspberry Pis, Of which I now run three, Five if you include my Fathers and Father in-laws, which I don’t as they do the same as number one.

Pi number 1 Is my Main media center PC with RaspBMC, It has been attached to my TV for over three months and only gets worked on when I blow it up, I.E. Over clocking and corrupting the SD card, Trying out and failing to get it to boot over NFS, Trying it randomly on USB.

Pi number 2 Protoboard PI, Havent worked on this one much, Runs one of the Debian Distros available, and has a protoboard attached, nothing built and no components bought besides the board and PI

Pi number 3, Kali Linux, Pentesting from a Pi, albeit slow this is actually pretty cool, Reaver runs decently, not fast by any means but I am looking for improvements, but as a dropbox this is awesome.

Both Fathers Pis are Currently Media Centers as well though My Pops may be re-purposed into a small web server as after the death and rebirth of the server I have not been able to get the three nics to coöperate nicely since..

-Jace

Love Virtual Machines and Hypervisors

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Ello,

As anyone who checked recently knows I had a HDD failure where My servers Operating system Hard Drive Failed, The Bios would not even recognize the drive being plugged in, So I figured i would be down for a while and set up a small web server in one of my Raspberry Pi’s.

What I did not know was how cheap mechanical Hard drives had become over the last year or so, The boot drive was a 500GB and well within warranty, so I had already planned to send it back to get it repaired/replaced, on a off trip to a local computer store I checked the price for another drive($64 and change) in the mean time and bought it on sight.

Seeing as with most of my recent servers I have switched to running different services in separate VMs I.E.: This Webserver in one, The IRC server in another, etc…

So Once I had the server back up bringing the services up was cake, just load each VM from the most current backup and were back where we were.

Feels good to have a decent back up stratagy.

Jace

Virus Scare leads to new Beginnings

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Ello,

Much as the title reads My computer(win 7 boot) started acting strange though no matter how much I scanned it and with(MS Defender Offline, Kaspersky Rescue and Clam AV which ran from my Dualboot of Ubuntu) everything came up clean.

By strange I mean things like device manager erroring out, other random errors that just made it seem like the system was compromised, so I pulled out a Ubuntu boot stick and wiped the drive with ‘shred -z’ which overwrote the drive three times before overwriting it with straight zeros.

After that I decided it was time to learn Windows 8 as I am the go to IT person for my and my wifes family, and staying behind the curve wont do me any good. So I Grabbed my copy of Win 8 and stuck it in, installed it, placed my antivirus, and could not get the system to update for the life of me.

Research, Madness and multiple computer threats later, I happened apon a page from my google search that stated if you have something, In my case my router, filtering active x to turn it off, Windows 8 will not update if you filter Active X, which has always been enabled in my Router and never caused an Issue in Win 7, never the less after disabling it Windows 8 updated and allowed me to install Media center.

That was Just Windows, I plan to install Kali Linux as well and see how it pans out as a daily driver as apposed to my old setup of Win/Ubuntu/BackTrack, If Kali will function as I need it to Ubuntu will go to the way side, With Kali I also plan to look into using an encrypted LVM to store it.

This is all for now,
Jace

Google Readers Demise Gives Birth to Self Hosted RSS Reader

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Ello All,

Most seem to say lately that RSS feeds are a dying technology, I would disagree as I use them at least bi-daily if not more, I use them to keep track of My News on Technology, Different Linux and Android Trends, Threats and Vulnerabilities in the Infosec world, Random Web Comics and other Funnies (Memes and such).

So with Googles announcement to Kill off Reader was sudden and very disturbing as like I said I used it to check everything, and nothing else seemed to have what I wanted, nothing until I found out I could Host it my self, Enter Tiny Tiny RSS.

Tiny Tiny RSS, Looks alot like Google Reader but is hosted on my own server so there’s no chance of it getting taken down, less I get attacked that is.

Installation took all of around thirty minutes and I used the tar from the site to do so, I wont go into the installation instructructions as they are available on the website.

Overall I like it so far, Though I have only had it up since six thirty am, I have checked it periodically throughout the day and it updates the count in the tab I have it in.

Jace

Branching(Bridging?) the Server

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Well another sort or accomplishment under my belt, I have successfully added a third nice to Server. Set it up for bridging, after trial and error, a lot of aggravations, and finally bucking and asking for help.

I now have a working topology as such:

Nic 1 — LAN 1 — Host only < for the underlying host, media server and storage system.
Nic 2 — LAN 1 — br0 KVM set one, original servers including this web server.
Nic 3 — LAN 2 — br1 KVM set two, new servers on separate wan connection.

All working so far after a few hiccups. Love this stuff!

EOL

True Transformer, Computer in Disguise

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After Reading up on the latest up comings in the Transformer Infinity (TF700) world I found something new, something beautiful..

Seeing as I have been at work and not keeping up on this I feel so dumb for missing it.

A True Dual boot option for my Tablet, That will not wipe the Internal memory.. Will not Destroy anything, and since I have an unlocked and Androidroot bootloader all else was childs play.

After following this guide and taking about an hour to get the ubuntu partition downloaded, I copied it over, another ten minutes for it to install, gave it fifteen gigabyte for its virtual disk.

I have both Ubuntu and my EXISTING Android installation available on my Tablet either one being selectable at boot time

Ubuntu has full working wifi and touchscreen with onscreen keyboard which is nice when I don’t want to have it docked.

Pictures may follow.

First #MiSec Meeting

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I Attended my first #MiSec Meeting last Night, not quite what I expected.. In some ways better I.E. Not a hole in the wall with only three or four geeks as when I got the the Secured Facility last night there was already over fifteen people there, And more streamed in.

I’m starting to feel a bit out of my league.. I watch the presentations and only could keep up maybe half of them if that, Red side, Blue Side, The Art of Defense, I Understand in the Art of Cyber warfare the best Defense is.. Defense and LAYERS of it!

But again Last night after leaving had me feeling like a kid again trying to play with the big dogs.. and with work on Ten hour day there’s no time to get caught up with them currently.