
Introduction
As someone who has been working in the computer field for many years, I firmly believe that tools are what make us capable and special as humans. From the discovery of fire to the present day, our ability to build tools has been essential to our progress. In the field of computers, building a personal computer lab is crucial for making progress with your tools, which in this case means machines and software.

You cannot solely rely on companies to provide the resources you need to learn and create. It’s important to create your own failure space where you can fail without judgement. Some companies do not forgive failure, and that can be frustrating.

Therefore, the first idea that came to my mind when building my computer lab was networking and online security.
The question I asked myself was, “How can I build the ultimate network security for my computer lab during the most aggressive period of the internet?”.
I’m willing to invest in my computer lab but i needed to protect my work & experience, which comes from my 13 years of work in the field.
IT’S MY CURRENCY, losing it is a catastrophe.
Building a computer lab requires investing in several sectors like Network Storage, VMWare Cloud, Network Infrastructure, Fault-Tolerance, Observability, and Cyber Security (Network & OS). However, I started with security as my first concern. If you cannot secure your work, you can expect ransomware, malware, backdoors, and other catastrophes at any time.
My main project from four years ago was Virtualization & Network Security, which involved building ready-to-use appliances that I could clone to any machine. With a simple installation process, I could build the functionality on demand in any network I had.
To achieve portability for my network security appliances, I built them as VMs using VMWare ESXI as the base hypervisor that I could install on any machine, workstation, or portable powerful mini-pc. These appliances provide not only network security but also network connectivity. I can use Site2Site VPN to link myself always anywhere with my lab infrastructure, which is a brilliant investment.
In this article, I will explain my experience and the design of the network. I will also discuss the tools I used to build such a network. By following my approach, you can create a secure lab network that meets your specific needs.
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From 2 years ago, i started a hacking project for challenge in WebScraping domain to scrape the whole Pahe.ph website which leaks movies, series, anime & more.
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Introduction
From one month ago, my ISP implemented a mechanism to throttle any encrypted traffic on TCP or UDP and that upgrade affected my ShadowSocks Proxy which i use to tunnel my VPN and escape censorship.
ShadowSocks & VPN speed became very slow and connection became unstable.
After some investigation for alternative, i have found Cloak.
Cloak is an encrypted proxy utilize HTTPS as Transport Layer.
Cloak consist of two software packages
- Cloak Proxy: Responsible for HTTPS transmission and mainly uses Plain encryption (No Encryption)
- ShadowSocks Proxy: Responsible for encryption and tunneled throw Cloak proxy.
After implementing Cloak in my internal network as global proxy for the firewall (OPNSense), i have been able to bypass the ISP throttling because HTTPS throttling is very hard task for the ISP.
In this article i will explain how to setup Cloak in your network.
For more understanding about OPNSense & ShadowSocks review this article [OPNSENSE + NORDVPN + SHADOWSOCKS (ULTIMATE SECURITY)]
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From 6 years ago, I heard about technique of hiding data in images & videos called Steganography, it differs from Encryption because Encryption obfuscate visible information but Steganography make it invisible by nature.
Hiding the information in another files like images or videos makes the Steganography a powerful tools for leaking information without detection.
I needed such tool in point of time, so I searched the internet for Steganography tools and I found very good resources & projects on GitHub, but I wanted to learn the art of Steganography and how to build such tools for myself, plus I had some ideas to improve and make a simple tool for such application.
So I decided to build my own Steganography tool which hide information in images and I called it “SecuPad++”
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Currently my main job is Microsoft Dynamics Technical Consultant which responsible for developing and customizing features in Microsoft Dynamics 365.
I was facing an issue in accessing my own work which i exported from the environments i’m developing on.
Microsoft let you export your project in format called *.axpp which help you take backup of your project for archiving or relocation.
This feature is awesome but the problem was what if i want to access the content of the exported file and extract some of my old codebase in the current projects.
For that i was re-importing the project in test environment so i could open the files in Visual Studio and extract the content i want, UNTIL ………
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I have a low specs proxy server in the cloud with 1 CPU, 1GB Ram which act as a connector between my firewall/router and VPN provider.
This proxy server was getting cyber attacks from unknown sources and the proxy server relay this traffic to my firewall as normal traffic.
My home firewall has a special software called IPS Suricata which receive these attacks and thinks that the proxy is the machine which perform the attacks and block it and that action makes my VPN restart on the firewall and disturb my internet connection.
This behaviour happens frequently, so i decided to install Suricata on my proxy server to defend itself and prevent such traffic to arrive to my home firewall.
After installing Suricata on my proxy server i faced a CPU utilization problem. Suricata at first will perform fine and the CPU utilization will be low, then after awhile for unknown reasons the CPU goes to 99% and that will cause speed downgrade on my home firewall cause i’m tunneled throw that proxy server.
After two days troubleshooting, i decided to write a monitor script to act on my behalf, if the Suricata CPU goes beyond certain threshold the script will kill the process and restart the service immediately.
After deploying that script and run it as daemon, the problem is solved and the internet became stable at my home and the attacks disappeared.
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After using OPNSense firwall for a while to tunnel my traffic throw VPN directly from the network infrastructure level, i’m really satisficed with the experience but while i’m monitoring the firewall traffic, i discovered a traffic leaking happen in some cases.
VPN traffic should go to the VPN Interface, but i find a traffic on the WAN Interface which originated from the LAN to VPN and the firewall pass it and that cause leak.
To prevent such leaking i configured the firewall rules to drop any VPN traffic that escapes to the WAN Interface by tagging the VPN traffic in the network and on the WAN i will check the traffic tag, if the traffic is VPN traffic the firewall will drop it to prevent the leak.
In this article i will explain the configuration to prevent such leak on OPNSense.
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After while of using OPNSense firewall, i needed to resize my disk on ESXi and scale up the disk space for OPNSense.
After investigating this issue online, i found that i need to resize the disk from command line and i could not find one clear source to help me on this task.
The problem for me was the swap partition, cause the new free space appended on the end of the disk and i can’t used it because the swap partition is on my way. To scale up root partition the free space should be continuous and available after the target partition.
I had two options
- Remove the swap partition (Not recommended)
- Move the swap partition to the end of the disk (Recommended)
In this article i will describe how to move the swap partition to the end of the disk and scale up root partition for OPNSense.
The steps don’t require shut downing the firewall or use live usb, it’s straight forward steps while the firewall is operational, but be caution and alert to what you are doing.
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