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.

Do you ever just update everything? There’s a few times you might need to do this. For example, some nasty vulnerability comes along and ruins your week. Or maybe you just want to be super up to date because you have a strange compulsion to have the latest and greatest of everything. Ether way, here’s my solution: Use Ansible inventories to update all your servers I wrote this playbook as a simple way to ‘freshen up’ my homelab after months of neglect.

With the move from sysvinit to systemd, there were lots of small but important changes to the Linux ecosystem. One of them was the move from traditional syslog daemons to Systemd Journald. Now I’m not going to say this is a good or bad thing, as it entirely depends on your old habits and new optimism. What it does mean is a move to a faster and more flexible system log format but at the cost of some added complexity.