I run iptables on Debian, on a cheap aliexpress minipc with dual NICs. Been using more or less the same config for about five years. It’s simple, boring, and works great.

I don’t need artificial intelligence in my terminal. Do you know how many times some troll has posted about “rm -fr /” on Reddit and other shitty forums, which then gets gobbled up and laundered by LLMs? Not letting that anywhere near my prod servers with valuable data.

I did it back in 2020 when we all had nothing better to do. Got as far as installing X11 and Openbox, and halfway through setting up the toolchain for Firefox.

It was fun - the kind of fun digging a big hole is. It’s not for everybody, but I sort of enjoyed it.

Going to go against the grain a little here and say, why bother? If you already have a background in Linux, that will get you further in your career much faster. My education was 100% windows/cisco, but I haven’t touched either in the better part of a decade since I’ve been working with mostly “web stuff” where Linux dominates.

Invest the time you would spend slogging through learning Active Directory and grinding MCSE into something useful like Docker, ansible, bash, infra-as-code, etc. It’s more fun, and it’ll make you way more money!!

I guess this is the next chapter in the endless middle-east war. The British & French got exactly what they wanted when they drew up those borders. It’s truly tragic how many people are going to die in the next decade because of religious and nationalistic despots and their egos.

I did something very similar with Opensearch rather than grafana, but it’s definitely possible. My setup:

• fluent-bit installed on webserver to scrape and parse nginx logs, then forward them over TLS to the monitoring server
• on the monitoring server, a second fluent-bit service runs here to collect the forwarded logs and insert them into the correct index pattern. A filter also inserts geoip lookups into the records.
• opensearch & dashboards set up to exclude known “bot” user-agents from the analytics, and do some other basic data cleanup to make the dashboards pretty

It works well, but could be a bit simpler admittedly. You may choose to use Loki instead of Opensearch/Elasticsearch, and there are plenty of other log parsing tools out there.

Another, much simpler option is to just run Goaccess on your log files, either periodically to generate reports, or as a daemon to create a live dashboard.

It’s fine. RAID is not a backup. I’ve been running simple mirrors for many years and never lost data because I have multiple backups. Focus on offsite and resilient backups, not how many drives can fail in your primary storage device.

Not sure how to do that in docker, I’ve run mine as a plain old PHP-FPM site for years and years. It might be something that can be tweaked using config files or environment variables, or might require building a custom image.

ClamAV is slow and doesn’t catch the nastiest of malware. Its entire approach is stuck in 2008. It’s better than nothing for screening emails, but for a private file store it won’t help much considering that you’ll already have the files on your system somewhere. And most importantly, it slows down file uploads 10x and increases CPU load substantially. The only good reason to use ClamAV for nextcloud is if you will be sued if you don’t!

It needs some tweaks to be snappy. The defaults are really bad.

• change database from SQLite to a proper database like MySQL or Postgres, and configure the database server to use your memory fully
• increase the PHP memory limit from the default (128M on many distros) to >1G, the more the better
• install APCu in-memory cache for PHP
• add Redis as additional cache
• turn off the antivirus extension, if installed (ClamAV is useless)
• use http/2 on Apache/nginx to increase performance with multiple connections

https://docbot.onetwoseven.one/services/nextcloud/

This was my setup from about four years ago. Other than moving suricata elsewhere, it’s largely the same. Worth a shot if it’s something you’re into!

https://nbailey.ca/post/linux-firewall-ids/

OpenBSD is also great, I’m just more familiar with the Linux tools. All the required tools are in the base image, and they have a great official guide:

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html

Yep. Firewall, routing, dhcp, dns, everything you’d expect from a gateway device. Plain Debian (or really any distro) can do it all. With a 1gbps bi-directional connection fully saturated it will run at about 10% cpu on my very crappy low power Celeron CPU.

Plus, there’s no web UI full of janky and insecure CGI scripts to exploit, and software updates are forever (well, until x64 is deprecated, so basically forever).

IPtables on Debian because I like my life to be boring and unchanging.

For about a year I was running a full out of band IPS on my network. My core switch was set up with port mirroring to spit out a copy of all traffic on one port so that my Suricata server could analyze it. Then, this was fed into ElasticSearch and a bunch of big data crap looked for anomalies.

It was cool. Basically useless because all it did was complain about the same IP crawler bots as my nginx logs. But fun to setup and ultimately good for my career lol.

That will never happen. SSL is based on trust, and the trust root will never blindly delegate to whatever happens in random LANs. Subdomain is 100% the right approach for internal network.

Not an arch user, but it’s possible they moved dbus to a user scoped unit now. Might be possible to start it like this (or something similar)

systemctl —user start dbus.service

Most desktop environments you just hit alt+f2 to activate the launcher which lets you run any command you want

I mean it is possible to run your own authoritative nameservers on a server you own with a static IP. It’s a pretty irresponsible thing to self host, but it is possible :)

You can use pretty much any camera with ZoneMinder as long as it supports ONVIF or RTSP and has the right connectivity and power inputs for you. I did something similar with some cheap TP-link cameras with pretty good results. With motion activated recording, I have just shy of 12 month of recordings stored on a 500G SSD.

https://nbailey.ca/post/nvr/

Set up google search console for that domain, then it will tell you why it’s blocked. It might be a false positive you can flag, or it might be that a host or service has been compromised or contains something harmful. Google’s blocklist is quite aggressive and often blocks entire domains if one of their subdomains has a violation.

Yeah, all things considered this is a good case of proper segmentation, working security controls, and good incident response & crisis communication. Compare this to LastPass to illustrate the difference in how it was handled.