Known Element Enterprises Corporate Blog

I have a few final things to finish up before I start my month of bugs project. 

1) Rollout various items to my production virtual machines via Puppet

Bacula configuration
Active Directory integration (Working on this. Lots of issues getting it to work manually.)
SNMP / Zabbix settings 
Vmware tools installation  (Done. Manually. I have a writeup of how to do it and will hopefully be able to produce a recipe for it soon).

2) Setup Zabbix for resource monitoring. 

I think thats about it. After Defcon and Toorcon I will resume my VPN project work for the talk I am giving to UUASC. 

I will be blogging this weekend about the various items mentioned above. As always any custom code or documentation I produce will be posted here.

I wanted to let everyone know, that I will be doing a lot of posting over at my new blog ( http://thehackshack.blogspot.com/ ) on a project I am working on to fully automate the vulnerability and exploitation life cycle. I plan to launch it at DEFCON in August. So this blog may be fairly quiet for the month of July.

I have started another blog over at blog spot. It is related to the security research I am involved with. Check it out at:
http://thehackshack.blogspot.com/ 

psionic telekinetic mutants

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I have deployed puppet to

1. My VPN server  (more for testing right now)
2. my storage server (samba)
3. my internal server (mysql/apache/tomcat)

I have uploaded the latest version of my puppet installation script. Please re download if you have used my previous one.

I will now be working on rolling out vmware tools to all of my virtual machines via Puppet. Will post a recipe once I have it figure out.

So I was attempting to purchase the Microsoft Technet Magazine CD archive.  Clicking the link (it was an upsell after getting a free subscription to the print magazine) I get this page which tells me to go to : http://estore.websitepros.com/1779793/StoreFront.bok 

News flash for the third party that Microsoft uses to handle magazine fullfillment: If you want to upsell a customer make it easy! Don’t require them to copy and paste a link to purchase an upsell item. Oh and if your going to make it difficult, don’t return a 404 when they finally go to the link!

So I have decided to get my puppet system up and running. There are several things I want to do on all of my systems in a consistent fashion that will help close out various projects. The most pressing being

1) A consistent /etc/apt/sources.list file
2) Bacula configuration
3) Active Directory integration
4) SNMP / Zabbix settings
5) Vmware tools installation

This will get all of my core infrastructure work done and allow me to begin work on VPN stuff (which I need to have up and running fairly soon).

In support of this I have written a Puppet installation script for Ubuntu Dapper Drake Server (6.06 LTS). It can be found here. I will also be writing and releasing a vmware tools installation recipe and a vmware provider (which will simply be a wrapper around these scripts

I wanted to let my audience know that I will be speaking in Southern California at the Unix Users Association of Southern California (UUASC) Los Angeles chapter on October 2nd. I will be covering Linux Networking. In particular

1) Load balancing (with Linux Virtual Server/Director)
2) OpenVPN (road warrior and site to site integrated into Active Directory)

For those 2 items I will be covering:

1) Setting them up (general over view and demo)
2) Making them a highly available pair (both active/passive and clustered)
3) How do I centrally configure and manage them (hint I use Puppet)
4) How do I take the process from Dev->QA->Load Test-Production (and how do I roll back)

These things are stuff I have been meaning to learn anyway and are part of my overall 2006/2007 project (SoCal LUG net).

Hope to see you all there!

My investigation into Puppet begins tonight. I have setup a VM to be my Puppet server. Install subversion for version control now. Right now I am keeping everything local to the VM but once I have done basic testing and validation, I will be moving the back end to my Samba VM.

I am looking to accomplish two tasks with Puppet (to get started)

    1) Roll out a consistent /etc/apt/sources.list file to all of my virtual machines.
    2) Join my production Linux virtual machines to Active Directory.
  

This should be a good learning experience with Puppet. I will learn how to deploy configuration files and install packages and make file modifications.

I will be tracking my progress in this blog as always.