Hi fellas'! I've heard about your little nerdherd over on Reddit, and I thought
all that pornographic window managers looked fuckin' awesome, so I had to take
a look at this community. I only recently (Like .. six months ago man.)
converted to Linux and I have to say, it's fuckin' awesome. I exclusively use
the Ultimate Edition of Ubuntu (check it out
here, they just released a BD-version of their operating system, I mean .. how
fuckin' awesome is that?), I even replaced my Windows Home Server with it, and
the VNC-server runs .. I guess you know what's about to come .. fuckin'
awesome, haha! Anyway, would love to take about some tech stuff with you folks, I posted some cool screenshots on my Facebook profile, check them out and leave some comments. ;)



For those of you who made it through the first paragraph - which was as painful
to write as it probably is to read - congratulations, you are now getting some
real bits about me. I usually go by the nickname dot|not, but special characters are not exactly welcome
by most forums. So dtnt it is.

I am your average, boring nerd. During the day I work with
computers, trying to make the Internet a not-so-malware-infested place. During
the night .. I tend to sleep. But the few hours each day that are not occupied
with work, exercise, sleeping, food and personaly hygiene are mostly spent in
front of a computer, playing videogames, monkey-patching stuff to avoid people
noticing my failure, idling in IRC channels and watching people chat away,
or trying out obscure software for no practical gain, all
while listening to music. (I'm an avid CD / Vinyl collector. Ironically I don't
know anything about the technology behind it, so if my vinyl player dies I'm
[x] rekt. Because there is no way in hell I could replicate the settings
properly.)

My ricing days are long gone, I'm mostly using stock (in the sense of visuals)
configurations of MATE and / or Xfce with the occasional booting of a virtual
machine running Arch and i3 (just to realize that I've forgotten everything I
have ever known about ricing and that I should potentially do something more
productive), but since ..

.. I'm into OpenBSD (or the BSDs in general), including exposing one of my boxes to the wrath of the Internet
.. I'm certain that one day I'll dive into $scripting_language deeper than picking out a few nibblets I need to make this #()#%!@! legacy code work again
.. I'm enjoying wasting hours on practically useless ideas involving computers

.. I figured that I still might fit in here. And since talking about some of your projects is apparently very popular, this' what I am 'working' (read: pushing away from me) on right now:

* Migrating my jumphost from an old, outdated OpenVZ-container to a new, shiny, OpenBSD-VM
* Switching my machine-to-machine VPN from a static secret to a sane PKI (How high was I when I thought static secrets might be a remtely good idea?)
* Utilize a configuration management (in my case, Ansible) for more than regularly updating machines
* Build a backup for my media that's working more reliable than 'carpe diem' (aka 'yolo')
* tons of other things I should probably do

Sorry for the formatting, (g)vim did horrible things to it. \o

We all spend a lot of time with computers.
Welcome to nixers.

Hi .!

I actually read your WHOLE presentation and must say I love your dedication!
For someone who's been nixing for 6 monthes only, you look really interrested and motivated, which is really refreshing to see. We mostly see people that are (way to much?) into ricing, and I'm glad to see some fresh blood that's actually more into using their computer than making it look good.

I got a few questions about your installation actually :P

How many boxes do you actually run overall? Are they all dedicated to your "malware detective" tendancies?
You say you try a lot of obscure softs (something I love to do myself!) What's your latest discovery? Also, did you try multiple VPN software, or simply openvpn because of the "criticallity" of your network?

Also, how's your current backup working? What would you want to achieve in a dream world?

Oh, and BTw, welcome to the forum ;)

Quote:I actually read your WHOLE presentation and must say I love your dedication!
For someone who's been nixing for 6 monthes only, you look really interrested and motivated, which is really refreshing to see. We mostly see people that are (way to much?) into ricing, and I'm glad to see some fresh blood that's actually more into using their computer than making it look good.

I should have mentioned that somewhere: Ignore the first part completely, including the six months timespan. I've been using Linux (or, if you are an ideologist, GNU/Linux) for a number of years now. So I don't reeeeeally count as fully young blood anymore. Not even fully by age-standards. (Which is a bad thing. Having to act like a responsible adult being is exhausting.)

Quote:How many boxes do you actually run overall? Are they all dedicated to your "malware detective" tendancies?

The number of physical machines outside of my home is, if I did not forget a box, nine. The number of virtual machines is .. I have no idea. But since most of my hardware is idling around probably no bigger than 20, including my VPS, with maybe three of them actually being used. Only one of them runs a honeypot (plain kippo with a marginally modified fake filesystem) which automatically forwards all samples to me - which then spend weeks in my mailbox without even remotely being looked at. Procrastrination is fun! 'not-so-malware-infested' was actually just a workaround to describe my job, which is relatively difficult to describe. My dealings with malware are mostly on an intelligence / IOC base, rather than on a technical level.

Quote:You say you try a lot of obscure softs (something I love to do myself!) What's your latest discovery? Also, did you try multiple VPN software, or simply openvpn because of the "criticallity" of your network?

I like alternative networks such as Tor, i2p, GNUNet, Freenet (which is unfortunately infested with content displaying child abuse) and so on, and I have taken a greater interest in meshnets lately - which has lead me to cjdns. I plan to join Hyperboria,which is the biggest cjdns network out there, soon (Admitedly, not _that_ obscure.).

Concerning my own VPN: I tinkered with tinc (pun, pun, pun!), Openswan and Debian's own implementation of IPSEC, but stuck with OpenVPN since I, at least somewhat, know my way around with it. On 'criticality': I could pull the plug on all my boxes out there today and the impact would be minimal. So no criticality here, the joys of a hobbyist!

Quote:Also, how's your current backup working? What would you want to achieve in a dream world?

For servers and more important stuff such as documents it works alright, four different, physically separated locations. Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly backups which would get me up to five years of backups if I can manage to make the boxes run long enough. I've only briefly tested restoring stuff, but that worked fine too. My problem is that I've got 'a lot' (well, for me it's a lot. Probably not more than 200GB) self-ripped music, which would be a pain in the butt to re-rip - and the backup solution for those is somewhat shaky. They currently reside on a RAID-1 for availability and are mirrored to an 8TB archive disk that resides on my backup NAS. But.. there is huge room for improvements. In a dream world? Way too many things. :3

Great first post! Welcome.

Quote:.. I'm enjoying wasting hours on practically useless ideas involving computers

I can concur. My professional life does not involve computers the way I use at home. This is my hobbey to free my mind of business clutter. Good brain exercise too! And great people!

dot|not! So glad to see ya here! Hopefully we can talk in irc sometime. If I'm on IRC, it's probably #nixers on the IOTek server. Welcome to nixers buddy.

I must say I'm impressed! I'm starting to have a few accounts here and there myself, and am planning to buy a second dedicated box online. But that's not even remotely similar to your personnal infra!

All I need now is more projects to run on these boxes :P Tough a bit of replication wouldn't hurt...

Hi, welcome to nixers.
About ubuntu ultimate edition, if I had to go with ubuntu I still prefer ubuntu-minimal.

Let us know about your projects, since you like IRC you can join our channel, #nixers at irc.nixers.net

Welcome to the forum

Hey,

Great to see some knowledgeable fresh blood round these parts. Welcome to Nixers and enjoy your stay.

Welcome to Nixers!

Thanks for the welcome! :)

welcome!