So I decided to save a few bucks, bought the significantly cheaper 64GB version of the Steamdeck along with a big old (1TB+) microSD. The OS runs on the included m.2 drive, the games are installed on the microSD, and all is well... for a while. There are two
You should definitely be using encryption wherever possible. That includes encrypting data at-rest. If you are an organization using Active Directory and any number of Windows client machines, you're going to want to make sure that if those devices are lost or stolen, the data on them is
I LOVE DEBIAN! Debian -- Reasons to use DebianReasons to use Debian Debian is a stable linux distribution, and is used as a foundation for most of the biggest linux distributions on the planet (including Ubuntu, Proxmox and TrueNAS). Just about every linux application ever made comes in .deb format
In case you haven't heard, the team behind the world's best free & open-source hypervisor Proxmox has released something really cool... It's called Proxmox Datacenter Manager. Why is it cool? Well, previously the only way to manager multiple Proxmox servers was to put them
If you haven't yet heard of it, Zoneminder is a super cool open-source application for recording IP camera footage. It works with just about every IP camera in existence, and it costs exactly $0 (assuming you have the hardware that is...) In this post (and at least a
If you, like me, choose to deploy your operating systems via PXE boot using FOG Project instead of Microsoft's WDS/MDT, good for you! There are literally dozens of us! I recently discovered, having changed the IP address of the underlying OS (Debian, of course) that FOG itself
I won't lie, this post is in large part for my own benefit. I set up a lot of Proxmox systems, and there are a few steps that need to happen for hardware passthrough to work correctly. This is the quick and dirty guide to get it working.
This may be the shortest post I ever make. Sometimes a disk fights with you, and all you want to do is quickly obliterate the entire partition table & every partition on it. The command I have found to work the vast majority of the time, even when dealing with
Say we have a system where we need a single encrypted drive for all our rare and expensive Linux ISOs. Say we don't want to enter a password to decrypt the drive every time we boot. Say in the event the drive gets stolen or tossed, we don&
I was searching for an image of a progress bar and found this. So there's that. Irrelevant cover photos aside, It is in fact possible to set up Debian to automatically update all of the things and reboot if necessary. Is it smart? Probably not. Do I use
Hehe... the photo is of a shell. Get it? Like Secure SHell? It was funnier in my head. Anyway, the two most common ways to access a remote computer CLI via SSH is using a username and password, or using certificates. Certificates are far more secure, and not nearly as
I used Debian a lot. Occasionally I get oddball locale issues. This is the code I use to fix said issues. It effectively strips out all the locales except en_US.UTF-8 Technically this is not best practice, as there is a small chance it will cause issues under certain
Linux
I've done a lot of experimenting, and I have found a really great combination of settings for Proxmox to optimize the performance of Linux-based VMs. It's not as difficult as wrangling Windows VMs but there are a few potential pitfalls to avoid. Let's get
Google Workspace
In my last post I talked about a recent string of security breaches, and my frustration in dealing with Google Drive permissions in an effort to protect my district. Here I'd like to discuss some of the solutions I have discovered. First, what does a perfect solution look
Windows
If, like me, you have decided to force your users to log in to MS365 with their Google accounts, I recommend this gentleman's guide. Doing this the other way 'round (using MS to sign into Google) is incredibly easy, but us Google-centric orgs have quite a bit
Linux
Recently we had some electrical work done on the NOC. The Air Conditioning had to be disconnected for a few hours, and we watched the temperature in our Server room slowly creep up. It got us thinking; Is there an easy (and cheap) way for us to get alerts about
Tutorial
fail2ban is a magical little program that does precisely what it says on the tin. Fail to authenticate properly enough times, and you'll be banned. Banned from what? Well, just about anything. fail2ban is super flexible; It reads log files and executes commands when certain conditions are met,
Investigation
So a while ago, I followed a guide to enable using Google as the login provider for all our MS365/Azure/Entra/Whatever accounts. This was a pain in the ass, as for some reason using MS to authenticate with Google is like 3 steps, but doing so the other
Linux
I was digging through logs with journalctl --since=yesterday to verify our Proxmox servers were good to go, and I saw plenty of nonsense. When in doubt, I tend to skim for the bright red things that say Error. There were more than zero, and some were a tad concerning.
Google Workspace
Google, being an company funded almost entirely via advertising revenue, is attempting to kill AdBlockers (with a fun side-effect of potentially ruining the internet) with their new Manifest V3. What is Manifest, you may ask? This has been discussed ad-nauseum elsewhere, but here's the TL;DR; Manifest is
Windows
I work in K12 Education. Student accounts in AD and Google Workspace are automatically provisioned with the help of Classlink's OneSync. Staff accounts on the other hand, are much more difficult to automate, as their are many different positions with different needs. Those have historically been created by
Tidbit
I didn't think it was possible, but Google Workspace's options for controlling permissions regarding Calendars is actually worse than those of Google Drive. Really the only way to get a list of all the calendars for your domain, is to use GAM. Setting up GAM has
Tutorial
The amount of school districts getting absolutely bulldozed by hackers is an unpleasant reality that keeps me awake at night. In no small part due to my insistence, our school district has been on an absolute security rampage this past year. An integral part of a good security posture is
Google Workspace
More accurately, giving end users the ability to do whatever they like, and leaving Administrators with hardly any controls over what is shared and with whom, is a recipe for disaster. Last month (November 2023) it was revealed that a threat actor known as SingularityMD was exploiting misconfigured Google Groups