Pi-hole: The dns blocker

” A black hole for Internet advertisements”. I’ll vouch. The amount of DNS blocks I’ve seen and how much snappier everything loads and runs has been an amazing improvement. PiHole is a software primary built for a Raspberry Pi 3 (or 2 I believe) and blocks known DNS entries of advertisers and trackers. It was a quick project to implement and has been working like a charm since.

Continue reading “Pi-hole: The dns blocker”

Overly Complicated Project: FTP backups on local network

With the revision of my Cloud backups from CrashPlan to Backblaze, I lost the ability to handle backups from a network share. There are complicated ways to install devices and make network shares work as local disks, but it seems like a mixed bag of results. I’ve had the idea for a while now and I decided to make it happen: FTP backups on my local network from any Linux systems and possibly Windows.

Goal: Backups to be as easy as possible and require little to no future proofing after install. Think I got it down.

Continue reading “Overly Complicated Project: FTP backups on local network”

Backblaze backups: Initial impressions

Welcome back! I received an email this week from CrashPlan (CrashPlan for small business account) that they will no longer be supporting backups with such extensions as OVA, VMK, VMDK, etc. This knocks out several of my backups (OVAs are what I use from my ESXI system) and will make my online backups no longer effective.

Continue reading “Backblaze backups: Initial impressions”

Hacker’s Toolkit (2019)

As part of the security work I’ve previously done, I keep several tools on hand when out and about for reconnaissance and data gathering. The last BSIDESROC convention reminded me about some of the tools I haven’t used in a while so I figured I’d go over what’s in the bag!

Continue reading “Hacker’s Toolkit (2019)”

Unleash the beast: New Gaming pc

With 2019 comes a new year and a new rig! I upgrade to a 1070 SC card recently and realized my second gen Xeon Sandy Bridge wasn’t cutting it (3.3GHz quad core, e3-1245). I was only using about 20-40% of the GPU under the heaviest load so the CPU was a massive bottleneck. It went downhill from there.

Continue reading “Unleash the beast: New Gaming pc”

Email server issues: ClamAV not working and delaying messages

After spending some time troubleshooting this morning, I finally came across this gem hidden in the mail log: Clamav was having issues scanning emails, causing them to reject and delay.

Continue reading “Email server issues: ClamAV not working and delaying messages”