Monthly Archives: February 2021

DevOps Tales: Install/Setup Gitlab + Gitlab runners on Docker, Windows, Linux and macOS

Are you tired of manually pushing code to production? Are you always searching through your BASH history to find the commands you used to test your code? Do you wish the process to merge code into production had a defined process? Well I have the solution for you! Introducing Gitlab CI/CD pipelines! With Gitlab you can setup Gitlab runners to create a CI/CD pipeline. A CI/CD pipeline will revolutionize your workflow to push code to production.

The purpose of this blog post is to provide instructions on how to setup the necessary components (Gitlab and Gitlab runners) to create a CI/CD pipeline. One of the deliverables from this blog post is Docker composes for Swarm and non-swarm deployments of Gitlab. Additionally, there are manual instructions on how to setup Gitlab runners on Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.04 with Docker, Windows 10, Windows 10 with Docker, and macOS Big Sur. In addition, a Docker Registry is setup and integrated into the CI/CD pipeline for custom Docker images. The instructions and the infra-as-code provided in this post will create the foundation for future blogs that will contain a CI/CD component.

Continue reading

My development server for Vault

During the COVID19 lock down instead of playing videos games to consume my free time, I decided to be proactive. I started taking Udemy courses and one of the courses was on Vault and ever since I have been incorporating Vault into my blog posts. However, each blog post requires a unique setup and I prefer to start from a clean slate for each blog post. But the turn over of new keys and adding a new root CA to my local cert store became extremely tedious. Below is my Vault development setup where I address these issues.

Continue reading

IR Tales: The Quest for the Holy SIEM: Graylog + AuditD + Osquery

This blog post is the second in a series to demonstrate how to install and setup common SIEM platforms. The ultimate goal of each blog post is to empower the reader to choose their own adventure by selecting the best SIEM based on their goals or requirements. Each blog post in the series will provide Docker-compose v2, Docker-compose for Swarm, Ansible, Vagrant, and manual instructions to allow the reader to setup each platform with the deployment method of their choosing. This blog post will also cover how to setup the Graylog with Elasticsearch and Mongo. In addition to setting up the Graylog I will provide instructions to install Osquery + Filebeat on Windows and AuditD + Auditbeat on Ubuntu to ship logs to Elastic.

Continue reading

Getting started with Hashicorp Vault v1.6.1

The purpose of this blog post is to provide multiple methods on how to install/setup Vault. This blog post generated an Ansible playbook, Docker-composes for Swarm and non-swarm, and manual instructions for installing Vault on Ubuntu 20.04. Additionally, over the past couple of months, I have been learning Vault and demonstrating different ways to incorporate Vault. This blog post will be a condensed version of the content in those blog posts and a jumping off point to those blog posts as well.

Continue reading