Home Lab – Firewall PC Engine APU1D4 DYI Build

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Got the first firewall for the lab. It is a PC Engine APU1D4 D.Y.I Kit from Netgate. This hardware has been going out of stock constantly. I got the 30 gig flash drive from Amazon, for less. I should have taken pictures as I was building it, but was just excited to be building it.

The good:

  • easy open packaging
  • other than the heat spreader it went together really quickly
  • Online documentation available

The bad:

  • No Instructions in the box
  • The heat spreaders didn’t like to stay on the chips
  • the heat sink move pulling the spreader off with it while putting the bottom on. Didn’t cause problems, but had to stop and reline up the head spreader to the chips (stuck to heat sink).

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Getting Real book review

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When I first started doing the book reviews it was because a professor asked me what books I think should be on every Information Security (Information Assurance) student’s bookshelf. One of the books on that original list was Rework by the guys at 37 signals Basecamp. On my bi-annual reading of the book, I noticed they made comment to a previous book called Getting Real (Amazon affiliate link). So I ran out and grabbed a copy of it.

It really felt like a draft version of Rework. It was ok. There were some great quotes in the book from people who have used the same frame of thought to make a new company or run a business.

There were parts of the book that countered what I remembered from Rework (remember I read this book every other year), the biggest being how to deal with the competition, and seeing what they do. It felt that the two books were at odds on how to deal with the competition.

I would only recommend this book for the quotes, but think that Rework is the stronger and better of the two books to read.

* Update 2024-10-01: changed to Amazon Affiliate Link, which I earn a commission from qualifying purchases.

Home Lab – Phase 1 – More annoyances

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I got a free LCD tv recently, 32 inches. I was hoping to use it as the monitor for the VMWare box for a bit. Until I could save the money to replace it with something nicer / actual monitors (dual display ports).

Problem is, ESXi is designed to be a type 1 hypervisor. I never knew that’s what bare-metal systems were called. I’ve worked with Citrix Xen in the past. It was nice, but I hated to do the work over the network.

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Grad School

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Got my acceptance letter to University of Maryland University College this week. I start my Masters of Science degree in CyberSecurity this fall.

I was on the fence of CyberSecurity or Digital Forensics and Cyber Investigations master, but think CyberSecurity gives me more opportunity after graduation. The cool thing is, I can take 2 more classes on top of my degree and get the Digital Forensics and Cyber Investigation Master Certificate.

After I get those taken care of, I’ll go back one last time to get a MBA, which will be 3 more classes if I get accepted to the business school.

apt-get upgrade spamassassin error

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I’m sure I’ll forget about this again. Trying to upgrade spamassassin, I kept getting the following error. I fixed this a couple of months ago, but forgot what the

dpkg: error processing package spamassassin (–configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of sa-compile:
sa-compile depends on spamassassin (>= 3.3.2-8); however:
Package spamassassin is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing package sa-compile (–configure):
dependency problems – leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
spamassassin
sa-compile
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

The cause has to do with the hardening I’ve done on my linux box. If the entry in /etc/password is a service account, the shell gets set to /bin/false. To fix the errors above, I need to change it to /bin/bash, and then change it again after the upgrade.

However I’m sure I’ll forget about this again, and forget that I wrote a blog entry for it.

vmware problem trying to share bridged interface

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I’ve spent the last 2 days trying to get Vmware Player on a Windows 7 host, to provide internet to any of the guests  using bridged mode.  I have 2 firewalls installed. Windows firewall, and Avast’s Firewall (part of the Internet Security Suite). I had both installed previously before I rebuilt my laptop in September, and didn’t have a problem or had to do anything.

If I turned off one of the firewalls it worked fine, for bridged interfaces. But with both on, it didn’t work. Even though there are rules in place for avast to allow vmware.

After digging I finally found a thread dealing with the same issue on VirtualBox. The fix is to turn on Internet Connection Sharing in Avast. This doesn’t turn it on for Windows but just Avast from what I can tell.

Two book reviews on Personal Security.

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Two books I read on personal safety recently were “Alone and Afraid” by J.J. Luna (also known for “How to Be Invisible“) and “Escaping the O Zone” by Doug Cummings.

I reviewed both of these books on Amazon. I have “Alone and Afraid” 5 stars, and “Escaping the O Zone” 4 stars.

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Home Lab – Phase 1, start with what I can.

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As I said in the last post, I’m going to have to piece the lab together slowly. However that doesn’t mean I can’t do other things with the lab until then. The current plan for later phases is PFSense on the micorserver, Security Onion on a Microserver, the network switch, and a new network drop.

However, I have old PC hardware laying around and vmware player on my current laptop. I should be able to build and play with a couple of things.

  • VM for PFSense
  • Physical for Security Onion

Currently the old PC has Untangle on it. It  worked well. It was set up for a RuCTFe CTF a few years ago. It was fast and easy to set up. This time I want something a little different. First though, I need to reconnect the old drives and backup all the data off those. I also want to swap out the mother board with a newer one I got. I think the newer one handles 64-bit. It has multiple network cards.

Once it’s rebuilt, I’ll attach it to my existing network connection to monitor what is coming through that gateway. I’ll write those up in stages as I do them. Should be 3 posts.