A House A few weeks ago my wife and I came to Reno Nevada to spend some time with our very good friends. We wanted to catch up because we really miss them, (they moved from Fresno a year ago) do some hiking, and have some fun without the kids. 🙂 We fell in love with this place. It’s beautiful here. The mountains, the snow, the sheer amount of free land you can hike on, camp on, four wheel...
And we are rolling … Have you ever had everything come to a brilliant point in your life, and that totally surprised you? Your passions, skills, life events, seemingly random and chaotic circumstances, and even hardships, all playing together? Like a thread weaving in and out to form a finished product. That happened for me a few weekends ago. We had some friends over for dinner and to...
Hullo MicroK8s! Awhile back the Raspberry Pi cluster was born. At the time, the best thing to run seemed to be Rancher Labs K3s. But soon after I installed K3s, Rancher released a new version and with this new version a lot of things changed, and what I had installed was deprecated. I could no longer update packages. Argh! So …. I recently reinstalled the entire cluster using MicroK8s. I...
Bit-for-bit My Mac has a lot of stuff on it, and it’s configured exactly as I want it. I would hate to lose the drive or have it stolen and be out of luck. I do use Time Machine to take regular backups of the files, even though my capsule died and I had to replace it with a 5TB drive. The concern I have with Time Machine is that it’s not a bit-for-bit copy of my hard drive that I can...
Training I just finished the 4 day course titled Active Defense & Cyber Deception through Antisyphon, and it was excellent! This was one of the Pay What You Can classes that they offer, which made it affordable for me as a noob. The class did start to get a bit over my head, but that does not mean it was not super valuable. I now know what I don’t know. All the reading I have done, all...
The need for a VM This week I am taking the Active Defense & Cyber Deception class with John Strand and in preparation for the class I followed this guide. Mac One of the steps is to install VMWare. So I try this on my Macbook. It’s an M1, and I forgot when I was downloading to make sure to grab the right download. That failed because I have the M1 chip. I grabbed the right one, but it...
For All (Really) In October of last year I stumbled upon a YouTube channel that looked super nerdy and fun. Indeed it was! Network Chuck is the guy’s name and he was building a K8s cluster using a Raspberry Pi. Bare metal install of K8s? Yes please! After thinking about it a few days, I decided I had to do it. So I did! I blogged about it of course and you can take a peek at K8s Part I and...
Month Three This is it! The end of my 3 month sabbatical. I can’t believe how fast it went! This is really bitter sweet as it has been such an amazing experience to have three months of no work, but at the same time I miss it. I love what I do, I love my work people and I have had some FOMO for sure. I am ready to dive deep in, especially with all of the leveling up I have been doing. I had...
TryHackMe Over at TryHackMe you can get into the Christmas spirit and hone some of your hacking skills at the same time! The Advent Of Christmas event is a free event geared at getting started with cybersecurity. It’s a lot of fun. So far it’s been very, very basic, but I hear the difficulty is going to be increased as the month proceeds. There are prizes for completing the challenges...
Month Two Last month when I posted my Sabbatical Update I talked a bit about my 4 goals and where I was. I thought I’d do the same update, because it’s easy to reuse the post. 🙂 I. FITNESS Last month around this time I had not yet started on the fitness goal, I totally blame both being busy and some profound laziness. But this month I have defeated laziness and settled into a fitness...
C++ This week as I am going through the Jr. Penetration Tester course on INE, we are covering programming in C++. This is leading up to a C++-assisted exploitation, the next section is much the same but using Python. Oh man, I am reminded of why I never got deep into C, despite my father having years and years of experience with it. It’s not C, it’s C++, but going through this course...
Month One My paid three months off started October 1st. Sadly my plans are not going as well as I had hoped. I have four goals I’d like to accomplish by the end of my Sabbatical in January of 2022. Goals I think are good. Maybe? Regain my pre-Covid fitness level.Level up on Python and build proficiency in Cybersecurity by spending several hours a day on HackTheBox, TryHackMe, and BugBounty...
Today I Learned: I studied for over 10 hours today! I learned quite a bit, as well as a lot of review. One of the most fun things I learned at HackTheBox was this: Using Burp Suite and the repeater (as one method, you could also use cURL, etc.) you can send the following: username=admin&password[$ge]=0 Along with changing the content type to: application/x-www-form-urlencoded to attempt...
LET’S BUILD A CLUSTER AND RUN KUBERNETES! PART II – Deploying NGINX (And A Service) In Part I we built the hardware and installed K3s on our Raspberry Pi cluster. Now we are going to deploy some pods and a service. The first thing we are going to do is deploy 12 NGINX servers across our cluster. We do this with a manifest file that we deploy on the master node. Manifest: Specification of a...
Let’s build a cluster and run Kubernetes! Part I – Building The Cluster & Installing Kubernetes I was doing some cybersecurity research on YouTube one day when I came across a somewhat related video where a guy built an 8 node Raspberry Pi cluster and got it to run Kubernetes, or K8s as it’s widely know. Well actually this is running K3s, which is basically K8s. I was hooked...
Here is a list of some of the things I am taking advantage of at Automattic. I am hoping these entice you to apply. You can see even more benefits of working at Automattic here.
An alternative to my daily use computer I feel a lot more comfortable accessing and using HackTheBox and TryHackMe from a different computer than the one I use daily. Tonight I took one of my Raspberry Pi’s and installed it with the Raspberry Pi OS with desktop image. Following this guide and using VNC to work with the two sites, I feel a bit more secure. As an added step I also have the...
*holds breath* It’s about 80% there. There is a lot I am not happy with, but I am proud of it. Every beat, every note, every sound is mine. Playing with synth, a drum pad, getting it all to mesh. It’s way more difficult than I imagined! I think the first thing I’ll be doing is cutting some sections out and making it shorter. The more I read and learn, the more I see my mistakes...
Updating WordPress Core via the CLI. Updating WordPress via the CLI is pretty easy. First make sure you have wp-cli installed. I’ll use my Linode as an example. # wget --2021-08-02 03:09:12-- Resolving raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)... 185.199.108.133, 185.199.109.133, 185.199.110.133, ... Connecting to raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)|185.199.108...
Return to creativity Music is probably one of the most influential forces in my life. Whether I am creating it, listening to it, or writing it, it’s something that brings me peace and fulfills that creator drive inside. Music has always been a part of my life. I learned guitar and piano when I was 6 and have always had a keyboard and guitars around. In college I studied classical guitar and...
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