Being a college student is awesome because you get access to all this software for FREE! I was fortunate to have access to VMware products for free and I love playing with those tools. However, I graduate soon which means I have to transition to free(affordable) solutions for virtualization. I have decided to go with Proxmox as my solution and this guide will show you how to set it up :).
HoldMyBeer
Cause every great story starts with "Hold my beer"
Category Archives: System Administration
Intro to the ELK Stack on CentOS 7
This is a two part series on setting up an ELK stack to receive syslog and in the next post Bro logs. The ELK stack is an awesome collection of software but a complicated MumboJumboCombo of components. I wanted to help break that barrier for beginners and to help explain how each component works. So stick with me on this two part series! I would like to give credit to this DigitalOcean post writer for the ELK stack write-up which I’ll be referencing. Additionally my Github contains a script to setup the ELK stack for CentOS 7 64-bit based on the guide below.
Part 1: Install/Setup Wazuh with ELK Stack
If you have been following my blog you know that I am trying to increase my Incident Response(IR) skillz and experience. For a class project we had to create/improve a piece of software in the forensic community for Windows(Windows forensic class). From my short time of searching the internet I never found a guide to setting up a logging system for Windows from start to finsh. An effective logging system has an agent/collector, a log aggregator, a data visualizer, and a good alerting mechnism.
The following sytem I have setup has Wazuh(OSSEC fork) for log collection, Wazuh Management for a log aggregator, the ELK stack for data retention and vizualiztion, and elastalert for e-mail alerting. In this guide I will walk you through on how to setup an effective logging system for all operating systems but mainly Windows for free. Additionally, we will be discussing the type of things that should be logged depending on your enviornment. As final note I have included my github repo at the bottom if you want to automated scripts for all of this.
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RC3 Fall 2016 CTF Infrastructure
In this blog post I will be walking you through how I setup my club’s CTF infrastructure on AWS. I take great pride as the RC3 CTF infrastructure captain (with a bit of an inflated ego 🙂 ) that my infrastructure as a whole never had any downtime! Additionally, our CTF attracted a 1,000 users over the course of a weekend, which was a great stress test for my infrastructure.
This post consists of the following AWS services which are EC2, S3, VPCs, Route 53, RDS, and IAM. Our infrastructure utilized software and services such as CentOS, Ubuntu, HAProxy, Let’s Encrypt, CTFd, Bro, and Nginx/uwsgi. Please keep in mind this guide is a sys admin guide and not a security guide. Some of the security measures implemented in the infrastructure have been left out of this guide to thwart individuals from taking advantage of this build in the future. Without further ado, here we go on the wild ride of creating a CTF cloud computing infrastructure in Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) :).