AJ's Blog

Zen Browser

The web browser is arguably the most important application on any modern computer. For most of us, it’s the gateway to everything we do online. This includes work, entertainment, communication, and research. I do not think I have posted about web browsers before but the truth is a browser is the application I have used the most in my time on a computer for decades now. Over the past two decades, I’ve navigated through several different browsers. Each one represented a different era of the web. Here’s my journey through the evolution of web browsers. It culminates in my latest discovery: Zen Browser.

Auditing Unix-based systems with Lynis

Linux systems power everything from personal workstations to enterprise servers, IoT devices to cloud infrastructure. Regardless of where your Linux machine lives or what it does, security vulnerabilities can turn a trusted system into a liability. Whether your system is exposed to the internet or tucked away on your local network, regular security audits are essential. You can also run it on a macOS system.

What is Lynis and Why Should You Care?

Lynis is an open-source security auditing tool that performs in-depth security scans on Unix-based systems like Linux, helping with system hardening, compliance testing, and vulnerability detection. It examines file permissions, service configurations, kernel settings, and hundreds of other security parameters. The tool runs on almost all Unix-based systems, including Raspberry Pi and IoT devices. It only tests the components it can find on your system, requiring no additional tool installations.

Netbox

If you’re like me, your home network probably started simple. Maybe it was just a router and a few devices. Fast forward a few years, and suddenly you’re managing VLANs, static IP assignments, multiple Raspberry Pis, and trying to remember which port on which switch connects to what. Sound familiar?

Enter NetBox: an open-source infrastructure resource modeling (IRM) application that’s like having a living blueprint of your entire network. Originally developed by the network engineering team at DigitalOcean, NetBox was designed to solve a problem we can all relate to: keeping track of everything in your infrastructure before the chaos takes over.

Proxmox NAS VM

One of the most useful systems to set up in a homelab is shared storage. Making storage available over the network makes it easier to share files and make system backups. I have tried various setups for shared storage in my homelab and my latest iteration is setting up the same system I have in the past.

Why use a VM for a NAS? Well I am writing this post today because the SSD failed that had the proxmox installation and the virtual disk for my previous NAS VM. This is not really an issue since I am the only user and I can rebuild it with the few steps in this post. The important thing is if the actual data drives are intact and I am leveraging ZFS which is a filesystem with some unique features including mirroring data from one drive to another and taking snapshots of the entire filesystem.

Proxmox Ubuntu 24.04 template

Ubuntu 24.04 was released in 2024 and is a long term support server Linux distribution. We can reasonably expect the publishers of Ubuntu to maintain free security and kernel updates for Ubuntu until 2029. They offer paid support for extended patches past the end-of-life date for a release. For more details, check the Ubuntu website for the current release schedules.

Ubuntu Linux distribution is a good choice for using as a base template for virtual machines. If you are not familiar with creating virtual machine templates for Proxmox, check out a previous post that is more focused on getting started. In most large Enterprise organizations you will find Ubuntu or Red Hat Linux so it is good to practice with one of those.

Setting Up AWS Resources with Terraform

If you’ve never used Terraform before, think of it as infrastructure as code. A way to define cloud resources (like servers, storage, and networks) in configuration files instead of clicking through a web console. Once you define your infrastructure, Terraform can automatically create, update, and destroy those resources in a predictable, repeatable way. Check out a a previous post for more of a general introduction to using Terraform.

Terraform works by using providers, which are plugins that let it talk to different platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or even on-prem tools like VMware. In this post, we’ll focus on AWS to show a practical example of defining some foundational resources.