Log aggregation systems are fantastic. As are time-series metrics databases. But that’s not what this post is about. These methods aren’t a replacement for those systems at all, but a basic way to implement the core basics of monitoring and alerting. You see, the strength of a SIEM or log aggregation system is its numbers. It correlates data from hundreds or thousands of sources, giving very important insights about overall system usage patterns, login activity, audit trails, and more.

Similar to another post about WAN latency, this is a simple system to automate periodic internet speed tests. The two main components are speedtest-cli and ElasticSearch. These were chosen because I already had both set up and running, along with all the visualization and analytical software. To get a basic POC set up, just install ElasticSearch and Kibana with Docker. Once the node/cluster is running, the ‘speedtest client’ server can be set up.

This is a simple, ‘quick and dirty’ way to measure network latency over long periods of time. The only ‘complicated’ part is setting up InfluxDB, but I imagine that many folks already have it set up. To get started, check the official documentation. Network latency will be measured with the good old ping command, then formatted with generic Unix tools. Then, statistics are stored using the influxdb write endpoint using the line protocol format.

In my endless quest to essentially create a Cisco Firepower firewall for poor people, I found a bit of a gap in the open source security ecosystem. While we have great tools for detecting malicious network traffic patterns, we don’t have easy ways of detecting malicious files in transit. So, a bit of fiddling around later, and I have a fairly basic system for integrating Suricata’s ‘filestore’ functionality with ClamAV’s real time scanning, thereby producing a log containing the source and destination addresses of any malicious files detected.

The idea of this setup is to protect the Small Systems as well as we protect the Big Systems. This solution uses a proven stack to protect webservers from modern threats. Using OSSEC, Suricata, and the built-in firewall capabilities of a modern Linux system it is possible to build a low maintenance and stable threat protection platform with relatively low performance impacts. It’s been specifically designed to be simple. The idea is that it will keep you on a ‘need to know basis’ and otherwise stay quiet and do it’s job.

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.