Last Friday of 2024

Well, it has been a soul-searching couple of days, and they have been hard ones to say the least.  My brother-in-law passed away which was a shock to everyone.  It puts a lot of things into prospective and made me think about my life situation.  I am unable to go to his funeral because of money constraints which I wouldn't be in if I had a job.  I definitely think it is time to step up and switch into second gear.  I haven't been able to focus on anything this week even though I have been doing a lot of online stuff.  Next week I will have to hit the ground running.  I am starting my New Year resolution before the 1^st of next year and it is to be a better me.  I think I can handle that one as scary as it is to think about now!

Here's to 2025 and all it has to bring!!!!!!!

Hapy Friday 😀

Off to the races!

I successfully completed IcedID Blue Team Lab at @CyberDefenders! 

https://cyberdefenders.org/blueteam-ctf-challenges/progress/jeffery.johnson51/174/  

  

#CyberDefenders #CyberSecurity #BlueYard #BlueTeam #InfoSec #SOC #SOCAnalyst #DFIR 

I hope they get easier after this one!

Happy Tuesday 😀

Merry Christmas

We have made it to the weekend!

Well, it is Friday, and I have made it.  I had an issue this morning with my laptop connecting to the internet that , wait for it, was ADGuard/Twingate? related.  It could also just be this laptop since it is old!!!  I will have to consider going to a new system which will cost money I don't have right now lol.  It is what it is, I guess.  I wanted to get Wazuh installed on the server this week but maybe I wil get it done next week.  Working on my AD setup and playing around with Home Assistant.  I knew there was a reason I held off installing that in my environment.  Oh well, it was a learning experience overall.

Now I just plan to work on stuff around the house and watch the remaining shows on my Tablo so I can free up some recording space.  Next week is Christmas and I have not mailed out the Christmas cards yet.  I am a bad person, definitely on Santa's naughty list lol!  Here's to a productive weekend!

Happy Friday 😀

Ugh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOL

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, lol!

Finally got the twingate connector update on my server without having to create a new instances on another server/computer.  Even though I need to do that for redundancy I am glad I got it updated without having to do it now.  The fact I have to do this manually is a big pain in the butt.  I also have to manually update Immich, and portainer.  Not sure about photoprism and home assistant yet but more than likely they will have to be manually updated too!  Maybe it is a good thing.  Manually having to update gives me the opportunity to let the updates be tested before a deploy in my homelab.  I should probably start taking that mindset for when I get back into production blowing up the network can be really bad moneywise.  Well, it is what it is!  Everything is a learning experience in IT.

I having been playing with home assistant and working on this twingate update the last 2 days.  I told my self I would put off going down the rabbit hole of getting my devices but I keep going back to the console to see what more I can learn about it.  I need to work out the issue with my bluetooth adapter but I think it is just that home assistant doesn't like that adapter since I know ubuntu see the adapter fine.  It is a $1.75 adapter off of Amazon, lol!  Here's to what I will learn this week.

Happy Tuesday 😀

Friday Again!

It is Friday again and I am more or less done for the week.  Spent the week in online sessions for Microsoft and Blackhills Infosec.  Learned a lot during this session but yesterday was definitely off the hook.  I have been running Immich on my server for the last couple of month and it works very well for backing up photos and videos from my phone and tablet to my local server.  The issue I had with Immich a couple of weeks ago prompted me to look at another program for managing my photos and videos locally as a backup to the backup lol!  I had heard a lot about Photoprism and thought I would try it out but it was a pain to get setup on my server.  Still not setup yet but I at least know what the issue is and the solution to get it running.  Why do Linux users think that it is the solution to getting away from Windows when it is so hard to get stuff setup and running on it.  Well, unless you buy what is supposed to be free for the support.  Crazy!!!!!!!!!

I will continue to work on my homelab which I should have completed by the end of this year.  Running Plex/Jellyfin, ADGuard Home, Tailscale, Wazuh(SIEM), Twingate, Home Assistant, CrowdSec, Webmin(Deprecated), Portainer(Docker containers), Sql server, Proxmox, Microsoft Server(2016, 2019, 2022), Ubuntu Server Core 2022 and Kali Linux.

Happy Friday 😀

TGIF

It has been a long week, but I have survived it.  I had a couple of online events I attended and they were very informative.  I am playing more with Tailscale now since I had an issue the other day with my client install on my server.  The key I used to bring up my connection had expired.  I was able to figure out how to do it since it was a little different than with my chrome, IOS, android or windows setup (running in Ubuntu core lol)!  I also went and did the install of the client on my TV sticks for my office, bedroom and livingroom tv's.  Not sure when the opportunity will arise for me to use it on them but at least it is done for now.  Still learning a lot about tailscale, twingate and adguard running in my environment.  Now I need to explore the monitoring side.  Watched a lot of videos on SIEM implementations both in the cloud and on-prem.  Now it is time to pull the trigger on setup them up in my environment.  I think I will start with standing up a Wazuh server this weekend and work my way up.  I have my AD environment setup and will probably start testing it next week.  Running windows server 2022 trial edition with the possibility of rolling out a 2016 and 2019 instance in the future.  so much to learn and so little time to learn it.

Happy Friday 😀

Epic Fail

Well, Watchtower was suppose to update my twingate connector but low and behold it is not updated.  I have the twingate tokens backed up so that I can just redo it a new but I don't want to do it that way.  I need to get this Watchtower instance to do it for me.  Spend a couple of hours researching the twingate connector setup and watchtower and have learned a lot.  Watchtower is scheduled to run the update again tomorrow so I will cross my fingers.  Not sure why the logs don't show an error from when it tried it last week.  I just show that there were no failures but no updates either.  At least If I got an error, I could look into it lol.  Oh well, live and learn!

Happy Monday!