Introduction
When I embarked on my personal lab project five years ago, my goal was clear: to make significant progress in understanding and managing my IT infrastructure. Over the years, I’ve made commendable strides, accumulating a wealth of resources both on-premises and in the cloud. My journey has been one of constant learning and adaptation, with a particular focus on securing my setup. I’m proud to say that, through diligent effort, I’ve established a set of security measures that are not only reliable but have been tested and refined over the past five years.
However, as with any technological endeavor, new challenges inevitably arise. Currently, I find myself grappling with two main issues: Observability & Automation. Operating in Egypt presents its own unique set of challenges for my on-premises setup, including scheduled power outages, high operational costs, and the need for fast incident response. These obstacles underscore the importance of being able to monitor my infrastructure efficiently and automate responses to incidents as they occur.
After much consideration, I’ve chosen Zabbix as the cornerstone of my Observability strategy. Zabbix stands out for its ability to provide a centralized view of all resources or hosts within my network, whether they’re located on-premises or in the cloud. Moreover, it offers the added benefit of enabling automation, which is crucial for managing my infrastructure effectively and responding to incidents swiftly.
Inspired by the potential of Zabbix, I embarked on a personal research project to explore its capabilities firsthand. I successfully installed and configured Zabbix as a proof of concept (POC), integrating it with various types of Resources, including routers, VMs, PCs, laptops, and services. The success of this POC has not only bolstered my confidence in Zabbix but also motivated me to share my experiences with others.
I believe that by documenting my journey and the steps involved in setting up Zabbix, I can assist others who are looking for a straightforward way to install and configure this powerful tool. My hope is that this document will serve as a helpful guide for anyone seeking to enhance their infrastructure’s observability and automation capabilities, regardless of their location or the unique challenges they face.
Read More
Introduction
VMware Automation has always piqued my interest, but I lacked a personal project to experiment with until I encountered a significant problem. The issue at hand was the excessive heat generated by my servers and the subsequent high consumption of electricity. While I initially mitigated the problem by installing external fans on the server rack, I knew that this was not a complete solution.
After a period of time, a lightbulb moment occurred. Why not automate the process of shutting down the servers when I leave the office and automatically starting them up when I return? This idea stemmed from the fact that I had network appliances, such as firewalls, running on these servers to control the office network. It made sense to power down this network when it was not needed and activate it on demand.
Motivated by this vision, I embarked on a personal project to leverage the power of VMware Automation. In this article, I will share a sample automation workflow that showcases the immense capabilities of VMware Automation in addressing network management challenges and achieving optimal resource utilization.
Through this technical article, we will dive into the intricacies of VMware Automation, exploring how it can empower administrators to seamlessly control and optimize their IT infrastructure. The sample automation provided will serve as a practical demonstration of how VMware Automation can revolutionize network management, enabling administrators to achieve greater efficiency, cost savings, and flexibility.
Let’s dive in and discover the wonders of VMware Automation in network management!
Read More
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.
Read More
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++”
Read More
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 ………
Read More
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.
Read More
I’m using OPNSense Unbounded DNS feature for intercepting DNS Queries on the network and perform many tasks like forwarding DNS Queries throw VPN, Blacklist/Whitelist and etc.
Unbounded DNS Blacklist/Whitelist gives you protection at DNS layer against Malware, Ads, Tracking, Phishing, etc.
There is many layers of protections OPNSense provide like Suricata, Sensei & Unbounded DNS. Each one of them handle different type of threats and mechanisms to deal with it.
To activate Unbounded DNS Blacklist/Whitelist, you should provide lists of IPv4 Host files which provide a lookup for unwanted domains you want to block on your network. You can find the lists you want at FilterLists website.
These lists provide many types of protection but sometimes these lists block something you want to enable on your network, and here is the problem. How to unblock the domains you want from these massive lists and generate a RegEx to whitelist the domains in Unbounded DNS.
In this article, i will explain my method and tools i use for such task.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
I have small datacenter at my home and i use FreeNAS & OpenFiler for managing SAN/NAS storage with VMWare ESXi/vCenter.
My OpenFiler server OS was corrupted so i needed to recover the data from the server after making new installation of OpenFiler.
OpenFiler use LVM to mount & manage the storage partitions and here is the steps to mount the lost partitions and backup your data.
Read More
RoofMan Official Blog 