For those that don’t know I’m a Chef for a living. Not the kind that works with food but one that works with code. What you may not know is I’m a FreeBSD guy, or at least claim to be one. I’ve been building a new FreeBSD workstation and discovered that there is no chef-dk for FreeBSD. Building it isn’t bad, but there is a trick to it. So without further ado, here is building Chef-DK for FreeBSD 10.

Not a big blog, but a quick problem I got solved on IRC that I thought might help others.

I have a Gateway LT4009u with an Atom N2600. It’s my “hacker/workshop” laptop. The atom N processors are a bit gimpy so sometimes things don’t run right. One thing is GNURadio on Pentoo. Pentoo runs hardened and this pisses off the Atom N.

I, like many sysadmins, really want to monitor all the things I actually care about. Monitoring is in general hard. Not because it’s hard to set up, but it’s hard to get right. It’s really easy to monitor ALL THE THINGS and then just end up with pager fatigue. It’s all about figuring out what you need to know and when you need to know it. So in this case I really need to know that my machines are staying in compliance with chef There was a few ways you can do this.

All right! You read my post SSH Keys on a USB jump drive on Mac OS X (Mountain Lion Edition) and want to take this to the next level huh? Maybe having your config posting back to a jump drive and having to have it plugged in every time you want to log into something is sooooo lame! You often just leave it there, plugged in when you walk away from your work station.

Here I address the eternal struggle I want to store all my private keys on my jump drive I wear around everywhere. I use Win, Linux, but primarily Macs to do to my work so it needs to be some FAT variant formatted. I want to use the absolutely least hacky way. Windows and Linux were easy to overcome. In short for windows you use putty to make a putty key and in linux you do something shockingly similar to what is below… but I get ahead of myself.

Ok, so we have all our Nagios configs being sanitized and checked by Jenkins, why not Puppet: IT Automation Software for System Administrators? WHY NOT PUPPET!? A lot of this is going to be rehash of the PRIOR article but I wanted to document this out for later anyways since it’s slightly different. Step One: Assumptions and Layout I’m going to stop and assume we are well past the Jenkins setup phase.

Ok… so that is not the best name I’ve every come up with. Sorry, but whatever. This is a quick but fun one. I have been collecting malware with my BunnyPot for a while and have been finding some diminishing returns coming to me. I started thinking that I can set up more of these low interaction server honeypots but how can I get even MORE goods? The ability to grab random files pushed to any server seems like a limited way here…

I know this isn’t the most revolutionary tip ever but my google searches pulled up nada when I tried to figure this out. I’m an IDA Pro MAC user. Bastard child of IDA right? Not really, except for plugins usually which is the point of this short tips post. If you are using simpliFiRE.IDAscope to help you dig through malware you are collecting with your bunnypot (and gods why aren’t you?

Welcome to another edition on how to automate the hell out of your workflow. Preface One thing I have been addicted to since I learned it was source control. I don’t understand how some developers work without it… and I really don’t understand how any syadmins live without it. I have actually found it more useful as a sysadmin as a programmer, but only because at my day job I have used it in most of our major configs.

Since the beginning of the year I have been mildly obsessed with reversing and malware. Studying ASM and low level debugging is put an awesome edge on my understanding of computer science, programming, and hacking in general. A week or so ago I started reading the Malware Analyst’s Cookbook and DVD: Tools and Techniques for Fighting Malicious Code where they recommend you build up a honeypot to collect malware. Of course I can’t a simple suggestions and set up a normal honeypot; Being a SysAdmin at heart I have to automate the hell out of everything.