On the 19th of January 2020, a malicious actor launched an attack against my home infrastructure. At 42 minutes after midnight a device located in Buenos Aires, Argentina began attacking my proxy server. For the next six minutes, approximately 150 malicious HTTP requests were made. Fortunately, every single one of these requests was met with a HTTP/400 response, that’s because I don’t use Apache Struts 2 which this bot was attempting to exploit.

Over the years, I’ve chewed through quite a few different routers, firewalls, even virtual appliances to connect my home network to the internet. Though most of these provided positive experiences, all of them had at least one point of friction, sometimes to the point of being a dealbreaker. PFSense is a great platform, but has terrible ethics. Sophos is proprietary and has an awful CLI. Untangle feels more like an ad than a product.

Do you live in North Korea or Iran? Is your totalitarian government cracking down on dissidents? These are serious concerns for some, but for the rest of us it might be time to re-think the modern threat model. Why to people use VPN services? I think at the very core of the VPN subscription market is the belief that as a consumer it’s possible to buy privacy. That’s simply wrong. Privacy is a process, not a product.

TL;DR The default settings for Logstash index rotation are bad and will break your cluster after a few months unless you change the rotation strategy. If you’re anything like me, you probably read somebody’s cool blog about how awesome ELK stack is and just had to have a piece of it. So you went through the quick start guide, googled your way through getting it up and running, then BAM you had an awesome logging system with all the bells and whistles!

Think of it like, “OpenStack for cheapskates." There are plenty of ways to automate the provisioning of virtual machines, and while this isn’t the best way it certainly works great for me. I am fortunate enough to have a very heterogeneous environment at home; aside from a few appliances nearly all my virtual machines are running Ubuntu 18.04. This approach certainly won’t work for those who have a mixed environment with different versions Linux, Windows, and BSD derivatives.