Automating infrastructure code audits with tfsec

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ll know a few things about the Cloud: Functionality and capabilities released by Cloud vendors are expanding at an exponential rate. DevOps paradigm is (seemingly) here to stay – the several cold days of building physical hardware sat on the floor of a […]

AVG & FUD?

Like most techies I get the job of fixing and maintaining relatives’ PCs. As part of this after fixing whatever is broken I have some common clean-up and install routines that I go through to both help the system run faster and to extend the period before I’m called back, and I’ve used AVG free […]

SSH Tunnelling Example

A fairly common setup; you’ve got an internal resource (for example an intranet wiki for documentation), this is in turn protected by a firewall that only allows access from trusted location. Under normal circumstances all staff can access the resource without problems, and any malicious sources (human or automated) can’t access the service.
Solution?: SSH tunnels

John the Ripper 101

For those that don’t already know, John the Ripper is: a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix, Windows, DOS, BeOS, and OpenVMS. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords. Besides several crypt(3) password hash types most commonly found on various Unix systems, supported out of the box are Windows LM […]

SSH Port Forwarding 101

I’ve tried messing around with SSH port forwarding in the past, but always struggled to get my head around what I was trying to connect to where, and ultimately didn’t result in anything useful. This time around I’ve put in some dedicated time to get to the bottom forwarding ports within SSH tunnels. And I’m glad I did, my with only a handful of connections the possibilities are making my head spin.

Kippo SVN build

This morning I cause myself a problem. Annoyingly it was foreseeable and avoidable, this is my excuse (not great, but I’ll stick to it). But as every problem is merely an opportunity in disguise whist I’m re-building systems I might as well document the process. The original InfoSanity guide for installing Kippo was based off of the latest stable version, but I rapidly migrated to the development SVN on learning of the MySQL logging capabilities, so this guide covers that.