Unstable Path

The draft for this project has changed three times since starting – mostly due to resource constraints on my end.  I’ve bounced between hardware, hypervisors, and focus but I’ve settled on an approach.  My immediate needs outweighed the need for a full VMWare stack.  What I really needed was a FreeNAS replacement, and after trying a few different options I’ve ended up right back on FreeNAS 11.  This platform will support most of my storage, media, and VM needs for a year or so.  It will also support several options for backing up and securing my data, allowing me to get off the cloud as much as possible. Continue reading “Lab setup”

TCP and UDP are two very different protocols.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years explaining these two issues to our power engineers and technicians.  What better topic to post here. Continue reading “Differences between TCP and UDP”

Here’s a Splunk query to list any changes to privileged Active Directory groups: Continue reading “Splunk query for privileged group modification in Active Directory”

I’ve decided that one of my new habits is to keep my social media footprint to a bare minimum.  Listening to the newly discovered Complete Privacy and Security podcast has definitively changed my mind on how I handle my opsec. Continue reading “Decluttering your social media”

I live in far Northern Maine – past the end of I-95. I would not have been able to earn my BS or MS degree without reliable internet at an acceptable cost. Continue reading “Repealing Net Neutrality will hurt rural areas”

Some sources for incident response playbooks for those who are interested: Continue reading “IR Playbooks”

I’ve been toying with getting this certificate for a while, but now I see this seems to be a golden ticket to get past the HR filters at larger companies. The cert demonstrates a broad knowledge of the overall security landscape and appears to be best suited to management types (queue pointy haired boss). Continue reading “CISSP certification”

After a couple hours of boredom waiting for a conference to start, I decided to fire up Wireshark and see what I could see across the wireless.  I was greeted with the first few packets appearing to be my machine reaching out to random domains on the internet (see below). Something was attempting to lookup random hostnames on every domain in my search list.  This freaked me out more than just a little.  Was my machine infected with malware randomly trying to call home? Continue reading “Random DNS lookups by Chrome”

My family is approaching a major life crossroad: My stepson will graduate from high school next year and heading off to college.  Continue reading “At a crossroad”

After a week of being very busy with other things, I wanted to take a few minutes and check on my blog only to be greeted by “Site cannot be reached.” SSH’ing into the site resulted in a similar response. So what happened? Continue reading “Sendmail took down my site!”