Omarchy - the new darling of the Linux world

 Omarchy is the buzzword at the moment, with it turning up on Network Chuck's YouTube channel. I came across it via DHH's blog post here: https://world.hey.com/dhh/omarchy-is-out-4666dd31 and thought it was pretty neat. I'm usually a Linux Mint kind of dude, but I'm open to change and trying new things so I briefly looked at it back in '25 to see what was happening there. The colours and the set up were very different from the darker greys and greens of Mint, but I stuck at it for a bit, trying to get used to the different way of managing things. It didn't stick and I reinstalled Linux Mint and went on with my life.

Recently I watched the Network Chuck videos on Omarchy and decided to give it a try again. You can watch them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SDkU5VDQEQ I have an X1 Carbon - 6th Gen with an 8th Gen i5, 8GB of RAM and a nice quick SSD. It's got the nice, higher resolution screen, good battery and the keyboard you know I love.

Omarchy took 2 minutes to install completely on the X1. Ready to go. It tried (in vain) to configure my fingerprint reader - which Linux still hates, had WiFi, Bluetooth and everything else ready to go on boot and is snappy. Once I started to figure out the SUPER KEY + to get to menus, maximise windows, close stuff and so on, I found myself starting to enjoy Omarchy. There's tonnes of great configuration options easily accessible including plugins which are used to deliver all kinds of useful tools. For example, the plugin that controls multiple monitors was installed quickly and gave me easy access to manage monitors, arrangement of them and also the resolution. Handy when I had to deliver a presentation the day after installing it on a TV. Everything just worked and this is a bar that I hold dear to my heart. 

Printers worked perfectly and Omarchy found both of mine on the network without delay, printing in colour and double sided without any issue. The themes are comprehensively built and look lovely - the base, out of the box ones are great. Changing between the themes is easy too, and I really like that you can do SUPER + space and get to a menu without taking my hands off the keyboard. 

Omarchy is built on Arch Linux, which has a reputation of being a bit of a challenge to manage - it really needs a Linux nerd driving it to make it sing and dance. What Omarchy does really well is to take that complexity - which really covers a very capable system indeed - and turns it into an easy to use and powerful system. Updates are straightforward and the system manages it beautifully. I just updated it and it asked me to reboot. On a "No", it restarted the plugins and waits patiently for the reboot. Easy! Installing Brave was simple too - SUPER + Space -> Install -> Package -> Brave and boom, it's done. Brave works as advertised and as usual so happy days. Damn this is great! I'm getting impressive battery life from this distro too.

To help put things in perspective, this computer could run Windows 11, but not well. That pig of an OS uses up resources like RAM is free, and is a bloated bastard to run. Omarchy (and Mint) make this old laptop crack along and its still a great machine that has plenty of years left in it. Omarchy has breathed new life into this great little machine. It's an easy install and I can recommend you having a crack at it. Pick an old machine - hell, go to eBay and get a nice little X1 like this (I'm writing this blog post on this machine) and have a crack at Omarchy (or Mint, or any Linux install) and see how you go. It's a great bit of fun, and you never know - you might convert to a wide new world of Linux!

Webtop - an impressive remote access tool

 I've been looking for a while for something that allows me to remotely access my home systems. I can't use a VPN, or RDS to connect back to my systems, so it had to be something useful via a web interface. Finding an option that allows for a Remote Desktop in a web interface isn't easy. I tried a few different options and had very little success, which was annoying and required quite some time to get things to work. Until I stumbled on webtop! You can find it here: https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ and it's worth having a look at.

I'm running it in docker, and I used this https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-webtop to set it up. The process is relatively straightforward and I'm running it in a Linux container. I've found with my server that 4vCPUs, 6GB of RAM and a 30GB disk have proven adequate for my daily computing needs via the webtop system.

It's an immutable file system, so any changes you make will be rolled back on restarting it. Instead, to add more software, you must use the Proot method - this makes the software stick. My needs are relatively simple, so I've installed Obsidian and a different browser. It wall works very acceptably, is fairly quick and usable. I also use the built in Office system LibreOffice for spreadsheets and files. The Documents/Downloads etc folders are not immutable and these retain your changes which is handy. I've had it manage some very sizeable spreadsheet files and it was fine to use. 

One of the great things about using Webtop is having a foothold outside of the office, so if I'm doing pen testing, or vulnerability scanning I can do it from outside the production network and see what I can find. It also allows me to access different websites than what I can see in the office. For example, if we have a class of websites blocked, like AI ones, but I'd like to read about Claude Mythos I can't at work, no matter how important it is for actual work. So I can use webtop to do that research without waiting until I get home. 

It's handy also, because you can drag stuff to the webtop page and upload it into your desktop or file system. As an exfiltration system it could be very good, so I made sure our DLP was up to the challenge - and it proved an interesting test system to verify that the DLP rules were working and firing when they were supposed to. 

I haven't go screenshots for you to see - instead go and check out the developer's site and spin it up in a docker container. It won't take long and the outcome is a great tool for work and play. 

Playing with Proxmox

 Up until recently I've used Hyper-V for most of my virtualisation needs. Hyper-V is a fully integrated Type 1 hypervisor and comes with most "Pro" versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11, and of course Windows Server. There's plenty of nice stuff with Hyper-V, don't get me wrong - I do like it and retain it. The trouble is - you need Windows for it, and if you don't have a copy of Windows Server, well - that's a bit of a problem. Enter then - PROXMOX! (That's supposed to be dramatic). 

Proxmox Virtual Environment - or Proxmox VE to be precise. Details are here: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overview but the summary is this:

Proxmox Virtual Environment is a complete, open-source server management platform for enterprise virtualization. It tightly integrates the KVM hypervisor and Linux Containers (LXC), software-defined storage and networking functionality, on a single platform. With the integrated web-based user interface you can manage VMs and containers, high availability for clusters, or the integrated disaster recovery tools with ease.

 I can hear you now - that's freaking amazing, but so what? Well, a Type 1 hypervisor with a full feature set is very nice to have - management of all your resources is very good, and you get access to ZFS for managing disk - oh and Ceph is built in! If you don't know what Ceph is, then Network Chuck has a great video on it here: https://youtu.be/jJrnJ9rj6fs?si=3KOunfnbodFLnFlw 

I haven't had time to play with ceph much yet, but I look forward to doing so shortly. Back to proxmox. I recently acquire a HPE ML30 server. The specs are reasonably modest:

• 8 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 v6 @ 3.70GHz (1 Socket)
• 24 GB of RAM (now 32)
• 3 x 960GB SSDs on a SAS RAID array.
• along with all the normal HPE server stuff - a neat and tidy lay out, with extra SATA and plenty of power for extra disks.

In the Proxmox console it looks like this:

The ML30 came with Windows Server 2016 - and this isn't ideal. Installing Proxmox was a bit of challenge though - the 3 SSDs were in RAID5, and Proxmox did not recognise or acknowledge this array. So adios array - I deleted it and set up a ZFS array. I also put a 10TB HDD in from an external drive I had floating around. The end array looks like this:

Now here's something that is a bit cooler than good old Hyper-V - you can run virtual machines and containers:

I haven't messed much with containers - but now I have, I am really impressed. And here's why - this server hasn't got a huge amount of RAM, so when I run a virtualised server I have to make sure I'm not running out of memory. Using containers means that the virtual machine shares elements of the hypervisor, which reduces the amount of RAM (and CPU) that one needs to expend on a virtual machine. Happily, this means that even with a fairly modest 32GB of RAM, I can run the following servers in containers:

• Linux server for secure connections to other servers
• Linux server to manage my Cloudflare tunnels (more on this later - so awesome!)
• Linux server running Jellyfin - this is the heaviest container I've got and runs really well with 4 vCPUs and 4GB of RAM.
• Linux server running NextCloud and helpfully set up using an LXC script. This was a very easy way to set up a Debian server, and all the necessary bits and pieces. I'm playing with NextCloud a bit - I'll write up some stuff down the track on it once I've worked with it a bit.
• Linux server running torrent management for the legitimate torrents I download (like Mint and Ubuntu Server).
• and finally, a Wazuh SIEM server running as a full VM. This is the big momma of all my VMs with 8GB of RAM and 4 vCPUs. This thing pushes the server load up when it boots quite significantly. 

This runs on the server at about 50% of the available RAM. CPU is up and down but rarely sits above 20% even when I've got a couple of movies or TV shows being streamed. 

In this image you can see I've got a container as a template. I set up an Ubuntu server, set password, SSH config and a couple of other things. I patched it up, and then shut it down for later on. I've used it to create all the container VMs, except the Cloudflared and NextCloud VMs - you can search up a script that you run and it downloads/configures the server. This was excellent as a quick way to get started - especially after I screwed up the first implementation and had to start all over. Oops.

So the final word is this - the problem I had with choosing a hypervisor with plenty of features has been solved with Proxmox. I've got a few other bits to work up now - messing with ceph, installing the Proxmox backup system from here: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-backup-server/overview and pushing this server to its limit. It needs more disk, and I've given up on trying to find RAM for it - bastard of a thing must have the most rare memory type ever. At any rate, it's a solid server, and now it's running reasonably well I'm quite happy with it. If you're looking to try something new out, I can recommend giving proxmox the once over. Some of the home lab projets on YouTube are wild - guys running NAS servers using passthrough for disk, other guys running AI systems with video card passthrough and all kinds of other stuff. 

elementary OS 5.1 Hera - a review and a revisit

 It's been ages since I used a desktop Linux distribution - being up to my ears in the horror of implementing ISO 27001 doesn't leave you much time to play around with computers - too busy writing policies, auditing and generally trying to improve security to a formally acceptable and risk managed level. I need a quick, small OS though to do the occasional network scan, view the contents of a dodgy file on and for general, low impact activities. I remembered reviewing elementary OS ( elementary.io) some time ago ( see https://www.ryv.id.au/2015/01/elementary-os-review.html ) from 2015 so I thought it was worth a revisit. 

I downloaded the ISO from their website, forgoing to donation for the moment while I review it. If it turns out I'm going to keep using it, I'll send them some love. The ISO is 1.38GB in size and I booted it in a VMware Player instance. From go to whoa (I won't include the install photos here) it took about 10 minutes with a dual vCPU and 4GB of RAM instance on my HP ProBook. It's really a lovely looking distribution, and within a few minutes of being logged in, it asked to install updates and identified the virtual OS package to be installed as well. After this, the screen re-size worked nicely and the thing picked up some speed as the virtualisation became more optimised. So what does it look like?

A nice clean desktop experience to begin with. Status bar up the top, menu down the bottom. The icons and images are rendered beautifully and the whole thing has a polished finished to the graphics. It reminds me of the Apple's attention to detail.

The Application menu expanded out. Not much in there yet, just the basics so far.

System settings are neatly laid out and everything is easy to find.

This is a nice touch - I'm very used to have fl.ux running on my machines and having a built in night light is great. Note the icons - neat and elegant.

Finally, the browser on the desktop. elementary OS uses grouped apps - curated and non-curated. Curated apps have: "Each has been reviewed and curated by elementary to ensure a native, privacy-respecting, and secure experience."

I have yet to ascertain the veracity of these claims, however, so stay tuned while I play with this thing a bit more. That being said, the AppCentre looks really good:

Pretty! When you install non-curated apps it throws up some warnings thusly:

Good to know these things going forward. There is quite a breadth of curated applications so generally I'll stick with them. 

There are dollar amounts next to some of the apps in the AppCentre - some of them are pay-what-you-want which is a great concept. I like to try stuff out before I invest and this works for me. Once I like a product I tend to spend on it - particularly to help people continue development.

From a performance perspective I'm pretty happy so far. Everything goes quickly, apps launch in a timely manner and it puts very little strain on the system. The Chrome tab I'm typing this in now is using more RAM and CPU than the Elementary OS virtual machine is, and I have the AppCentre, web browser and applications tabs all open while I take screenshots and mess about. It's billed as a system to re-invigorate old hardware (something I enjoy doing) and it's clear that the demand on resources has been managed well. Unlike Windows 10 for example.

The final word is this: download it and try it out. You've got nothing to lose and it really is a lovely looking OS that is quick and fully functional. I take my hat off to the team there and look forward to their future work.

Review: Linux Mint 19 "Tara"

Since I changed jobs and no longer use my big Linux box day to day, it's been harder to find the time to work with Linux, and in particular Mint. I love Mint and I've been delighted to use it for many years now. When I took my work PC home, and fired it up I was poignantly reminded how much I enjoyed working in the Linux desktop world and how I'd missed it. Windows 10 just doesn't compare and even Mac OS X (while very good) still lacked a certain something.

I've been using Mint 18 for some time and enjoyed it, so when I finally caught up to checking out "Tara" I was very interested to see what the go is. Here is the link to the release blog post about it: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3597 It's a Long Term release (LTS) so it'll be good until 2023. I've found Mint to be updated and looked after for the full term of their LTS releases - something to commend the team on. Now, what to run the test install on?

I managed to get my hands on a 4 year old HP ENVY TouchSmart Ultrabook (or "Sleekbook" 14-k124tx is the model) for this review. It's stats are fairly impressive for an older machine: Intel Core i7-4500U, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD drive. It has a touch screen, and dual video adaptors (low power Intel and nVidia for the good times), and multi touch mouse pad. This one had a dodgy Windows 7 install on it that kept blue screening, even with a fresh install of Windows 7. I've been running Mint as my primary workstation on it for several days now with nary a worry.

Into the review then:

I booted into the LiveUSB version of Mint for a quick poke around. Everything looked the goods so I chose "Install".

The installation of Mint was flawless - it identified the UEFI nature of the boot system, and asked if I wanted to change it around, or was I happy to blow away the previous install and just go with Mint. I let it get rid of Windows and move through the familiar installation process taking the default options for everything. I like how it is specific about the encryption option for the disk leading to a more secure install.

First boot was not long after and very fast - particularly on this rather lean little machine.

The initial impression was that the presentation of the desktop environment was polished and had the usual, rather plain theme applied. I'm more than happy with this though as I find too much flash gets in the way of doing what I need to. The new crop of desktop backgrounds are lovely - lots of colour and sharp imagery to enjoy. It was very fast too - launching Firefox took mere moments and everything was quick.

I was delighted to see the operating system ask me if I wanted to set up backups when I first tried to run Mint Update. This is a very clever idea and uses a built in wizard to run the flamboyantly named "Backup Tool". Not only will this use rsync to back up one's files, but it will also backup your software selection (and restore both groups of files as required). Given this computer is a test bed and I expect to mess around with it a fair bit, I didn't bother setting it up. The initial update was smooth and a quick reboot got me back into a fully patched machine.

Uh oh though - no wireless! Aargh! This machine has some fairly specialised hardware and requires some third party apps. I've found this to be hit and miss at times in the past, but found it to be no real issue here:

In the background you can see one of the superb "Tara" backgrounds. Everything works now - WiFi and the nVidia drivers as well. I'm not sure if there really is a boost in the graphics as I'm only doing desktop stuff on it (and even then mostly web based activities) so check out a gamer's review for that sort of thing.

Another quick reboot (now up to 3) and good to go. Installed Chromium, nmap and a few other bits and bobs and all good. Mint is effortless to manage apps with - much like Debian and Ubuntu and this is a big part of the reason I like it.

The install base wasn't huge either. On a laptop like this, where a Windows 10 install can smash a 128GB disk in no time, the disk usage looks like this:

You can see that it's only 11GB for the whole install, and applications (and also my imaginative naming scheme for computers!).

With regards to usability and stability - Mint offers the usual round of suspects for desktop productivity - LibreOffice, VLC, Transmission, Firefox and the like. In the last few days of using Mint on this machine, there have been zero issues, no failures, no stoppages. This is on a machine recently removed from our fleet for stability problems! It wouldn't make a day without a BSOD on a fresh Windows install. Pretty good!

Anyone who reads this blog knows I'm not big on fancy pictures and stuff, just the meat of my thoughts and for what its worth - Mint is great. I was very happy with 18 and it's variants, and thus far, I'm very pleased with 19. For older computers, for computers kids will touch or for people willing to try something new, it is my choice for a Windows or Apple alternative. In fact, even if you're a power Windows user, it might be worth putting the ISO onto a USB and Live booting it for fun and seeing what it can do. Over a USB3 connection and a USB3 thumb drive it's very usable. The install from there is fast and simple.

*** Update to this post:

I've since upgraded my home PC to Mint 19. The desktop PC experience is every bit as good as the laptop experience and the straightforward in place upgrade from 18 to 19 was easy. There is a lot to love about this install from a user perspective. Get around it!

osTicket - updated review

Some time ago I published a comparison of OTRS and osTicket. I've now had the chance to use osTicket as a daily task management tool, so I thought it might be worth updating my initial impressions.

It has taken a bit to get used to osTicket coming out of a CRM and OTRS as my task management platforms. Specifically, understanding how tickets and tasks relate to one another. The way I've been thinking of it is this:

A ticket is almost like a mini-project - it can be used standalone, with references back to a client creating the ticket and keeping it updated, with tasks (like a work breakdown structure) applied against the ticket. The ticket can't be closed until all the tasks are completed.

Tasks on the other hand, can be autonomous of a ticket and are quick and easy to start, fill in and then to close. There is no link back to a creating user though.

I've used both extensively - many of the tickets I have running have numerous tasks dependent on them (although it is a mutual dependency) and I can farm tasks out to different people to get the job done. In fact, within the work I'm doing now, I've been using OpenProject (which I'll make some notes on soon) to manage the top level project stuff, then breaking the project down into tickets and tasks within osTicket to keep on top of the whole process. It's working pretty well. The project review meetings look at both products and bring it together.

OpenProject isn't great at task management - rudimentary at best, but is great at the higher level project management activities. osTicket isn't good at bigger project work, but handles the lower level complexity very well.

It's important to note too that I have had to migrate osTicket from a XenServer VM to an Azure VM. I simply ran an SQLdump of the whole database and a backup of the install folder (/var/www/html/osticket), set up a brand new osTicket installation, then copied the data I'd backed up across. Restarted the webserver and away we went. I'd like to also point out that I love Let's Encrypt for providing SSL certificates to secure it all.

osTicket reporting is something to be investigated further - the dashboard isn't bad and satisfies my manager that work is getting done, but I'd like to extend it a bit further. Capturing time on tickets is another requirement I need to investigate. These are relatively minor in the current application of this software though and I'm quite pleased by it.

I installed and configured osTicket based on the walk through here:
http://idroot.net/linux/install-osticket-ubuntu-16-04-lts/

It's well worth a look through and I used Digital Ocean's method of applying Let's Encrypt to make it all work as advertised. You can find that link here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-apache-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-16-04 

Viva la Open Source! A huge shout out to the devs behind these wonderful products and these wonderful walk through pages. We're looking at getting enterprise support for both osTicket and OpenProject to support both. Check them out as alternatives to a paid ticket system and Microsoft Project (and save yourself some real coin!)

Find osTicket here: http://osticket.com/
Find OpenProject here: https://www.openproject.org/

Mint 18.2 Review

Linux Mint 18.2 in the wild!

I’ve just upgraded to Mint 18.2 from 18.1 being the (sort of) early adopter that I am. Realistically there was no good reason to do this - 18.1 was running well and doing everything I need, except to get any new bits and pieces that come with .2. There are some nice new desktop pics (quite beautiful ones actually), but not much I can see that is really different. It's still running Cinnamon, so there haven't been any gigantic changes in the UI in a while. I’m running it on a Lenovo M series desktop that I’ve had for some years and it’s a beast of a machine so any performance upticks in the new version aren’t really noticeable. Here are the release notes : http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3289 and they're worth a quick perusal.

I did find that my desktop icons all disappeared. As a result I experienced sadness :-(

Fortunately I found the solution. The nemo-desktop application is no longer running. I found it (/usr/bin/nemo.desktop), ran it and voila - icons are back! I’ve added it to the startup applications and that fixes that.

I really enjoy the ease of the upgrade process - it’s fast and straightforward using the excellent Mint Update Manager. The download was around 400MB but the mirrors are all quick and it was quite painless. A fast reboot and I was back in business. I also took the opportunity to upgrade the Nvidia drivers I have (for my whiz bang graphics adaptor) and after another restart I was done. As a result, my primary work computer was fully upgraded and operational in about 20 minutes - much better than the Windows 10 computers I've just got that need a 4GB upgrade out of the box (!)

Mint 18.2 “Sonya” new stuff:

• LTS release so supported until 2021
• Cinnamon 3.4 apparently has many new icon management features (I’ll have to try this out now I’ve got icons back!)
• Plugins for Cinnamon run in their own process
• Add-ons called “spices” have been added - check them out on the Cinnamon Spices website here: https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/
• Various app upgrades including xed, update manager, xviewer, xreader and LightDM - the new login manager.
• Ships with Linux Kernel 4.8.0-53

Get it via Update Manager or from the Linux Mint website: https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

pi-hole - awful name, great product!

Advertised as "A Black Hole for Internet Advertisements" pi-hole (https://pi-hole.net/) goes a long way to living up to this reputation.

What is it?

pi-hole is a domain name server that can be installed with one command onto a Linux box or Raspberry Pi running Raspbian or similar. Once this is done, an update to your site's DNS records and all queries get pushed through the pi-hole, blocked as appropriate and then sent out to the world.

We are running it on an Ubuntu 14.04LTS virtual server, with 1GB of RAM and a single vCPU - and the DNS response time is quite acceptable. A tiny server will run this software quite easily.

Why use it?

If I'm looking at websites and browsing around, typically I'm not just getting my content that I want - there's a bit more sneaking through. Ads! Most sites will use advertisements to make money and I have no problem with this. My issue usually stems from having too many of the damn things popping up and chewing up resources like bandwidth and screen space. That's where pi-hole fits into the picture. Currently it's blocking over 100,000 different sites. We've noticed an improvement in web page speed and in testing - by going to www.news.com.au , we found that there was quite a few domains blocked.

Here is an example of our office's information from this morning (midnight to noon)

5% of our queries blocked! That's a reasonable amount of traffic in a 5 person (at the moment) office. Imagine if it were 100 people or more?! The amount of DNS requests and the traffic would drop considerably.

Additionally, pi-hole has provided some protection from malicious attacks via dodgy websites - these seem to get blocked as well and the additional safety is great to have - particularly when the cost is virtually nil. Combine it with OpenDNS as the relay (the next step in the DNS resolution trail) and the possibilities for controlling your DNS with a high degree become more realised.

We've been happy with our little pi-hole (oh that name is dodgy). Try it out :-)

Dell T110 Server - older tech still doing the yards

The last time I was out in Coober Pedy, I saw a lot of Toyotas running around. Landcruisers mostly - a great vehicle and out in the Red Centre with some pretty harsh conditions, they were the vehicle of choice. Solid, reliable, amazingly well built. It's a bit like the older Dell servers still kicking around.

To my case in point - the Dell T110 Server. These servers, brand new, with a Xeon Processor, 4GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD were around $1400. We got several cheap, added RAM, disk and an OS and sold them to customers. The basic spec was pretty sound:

• Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3430 @ 2.40GHz 
• 4GB of RAM (maximum 16)
• Dell PERC S100 onboard RAID (fake RAID but still OK)
• space for 4 disks
• tower configuration

 About 18 months ago I was given one of these servers by a grateful client after a particularly painful weekend migrating one server to another. After thinking about it for a bit, and knowing the S100 RAID card is Windows only (Linux won't see the arrays, just the disks - use AHCP if you're using Linux), I decided to pop Windows 2012 Server on and run a bit of the Hyper-V action for shits and giggles. In order to do this and to solve a tricky customer problem, I upgraded the server a little bit.

I added two 250GB SSD disks and made them the primary array, with the two 250GB HDDs as a data array. I installed Windows 2012, set up Hyper-V and then built a 2008R2 server as a VM. I also added more RAM to max it out at 16GB. Now, the 2008R2 server boots up in under 20 seconds! It is so quick and as I was using it to try to repair a broken SharePoint (see my previous post on this) I was very happy to have a machine that would restart in the blink (almost) of an eye.

Fast forward to about 3 months ago, I ditch the 250GB HDDs out of it and upgrade them to 2TB drives giving me a data array of 1.8TB for stuff. I've used the machine to create (and destroy) about 20 different VMs for testing and it has been reliable and solid for all the time. Suffice to say I'm very happy with it.

I was puttering around on eBay about 3 weeks ago and saw one of these for sale for $150! I grabbed it, as quick as possible. It turned up with the base spec. Using some old stuff lying around I've upgraded it to be a 2012 server, with 16GB of RAM, a 1TB HDD based primary array and a 1.8TB HDD based secondary array. This one is as solid as the other! I've since moved the bulk of the family data to it, configured some nice backups and off it goes. I've even put Hyper-V on it and run up a 2016 test server - it goes quite well.

All in all, I've spent under $1000 for these two servers and they comfortably handle everything I'm throwing at them. The original server, at one point, was running 2008R2 with SharePoint live for a client with 20 people using it, several Linux servers and a Windows 2012 based file server - all on hardware that is 5 years old. The SSDs really make the machine fly - a worthwhile upgrade indeed. In fact, as they get cheaper I can see myself upgrading the data array to SSD... it'll be pretty good!

The next gen in the T110 - the T110 II has a better Xeon processor in it, with double the RAM capability and they also came out with hardware based arrays. I'm keeping an eye out for one even as I write this.

If you're looking for a server to play with, or to manage a small workforce, then it's hard to go past something like this. Need redundancy? Buy two instead of one and set up live migrations (next on my to-do list).

I love this older tech - I can still get brand new replacement parts (like PSU's) and the original gear is running happily. It's cheap and it works - get around it!

The Foray into Digital Forensics

As part of  my tertiary studies I'm now working on Digital Forensics. Our latest assignment includes some steganography, some bit shifting and writing a forensic report on a made-up or actual scenario that we find or invent.

I thought it might of use to write a bit about the experience I'm having getting into this. From the course we are supplied a variety of different tools with a variety of different capabilities. Being a Linux chap, I thought it would be cool to go into the open source tools. Running ElementaryOS on laptop has made this difficult and more than a little frustrating. Perhaps because I'm not big on what the best tools are, or the install methods - but I'm experiencing annoyance. I'm currently downloading Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop to put the SANS Investigative Forensic Toolkit (SIFT) version 3 on it. Details on SIFT can be found at http://digital-forensics.sans.org/community/downloads. I'll work this later - I'm still waiting on Ubuntu to download. It doesn't help living out in the bush.

The Windows tools I have played with thus far include:

• ProDiscover Basic
• Hex Workshop
• OSForensics
• WinHEX

I've also found Notepad++ to be quite useful. It's a very powerful notepad replacement I find useful for many applications of work - find it here: https://notepad-plus-plus.org. 

The textbook also seems pretty good - "Guide to Computer Forensics and Investigations" Nelson, Phillips and Steuart are the authors. Lots of good examples and methods for working through things. Annoyingly, but this is to be expected, it all has a US slant on it, including laws and rights. Translating them into Australian can be tricky at times. There are a lot of good resources on the Net - SANS as I've already mentioned, CERT and AusCERT aren't bad. Google is, as always, your friend.

I've spoken with some friends about this and they immediately assume its like CSI-Cyber and we use cyber to describe everything - it's a cybercrime, it's a cyberstalking, its a cyberpen I'm writing on this cyberpaper with etc. Of course it's not like that at all. Lots of painstaking attention to detail and writing a *lot* of notes. You can't blow through this stuff on a hunch - stupid TV shows seem to make it a lot easier than it is and people jump around with ideas and stuff all the time. What a bag of pish! At any rate it's fascinating stuff if you have the patience and technical background for it.

I'll update and add a post as I play with SIFT and with the particular case I'm investigating.

I have spent some time on the digital forensic reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/computerforensics/ which has some great info and great help for people. I thank the contributors for their time and effort. Was looking through a bit list of blogs and stuff about forensics. Sad that so many of them have fallen away. There's some gold in amongst it though. On to the SIFT install!

Plone - the open source Content Management System - a review

One of my clients, a non-profit, has a lot of files on it's clients. They need a way to digitally store these files, securely and with availability for certain people. They also need these files to expire and be deleted after a given length of time - usually about 7 years.

These were the parameters I was given to search for a Document Management System (DMS) or more commonly a Content Management System (CMS). There are quite a lot of them, but most are designed for front facing information delivery - that is, to write something, put it up for review, have it reviewed and then published. We do not want this data published ever - and some CMS's make that a bit tricky to manage. So at the end of the day, I looked into several CMS systems that looked like they could be useful.

The first one to be reviewed was OpenKM (www.openkm.com). It looked OK, was open source which is preferable and seemed to have solid security and publishing options. Backing up the database and upgrading OpenKM seemed like a nightmare. I tried a couple of times only to experience great sadness and eventually throwing my hands up in defeat. Scratch that guy off the list.

The next one I seriously considered was Plone (www.plone.org). An open, attractive looking interface certainly helped matters from the get go. I liked it, it looked nice and the decision makers at my client would like it too. Open Source, Linux install - OK good to go. The installation documentation is pretty good, a bit fuzzy at times ( though I do attribute that in part to a lack of solid caffeine) and it was relatively straightforward to get going.

I followed the instructions and started to build the site. It was pretty straightforward and offers different workflow types - so for an internal site, there is no publishing option available. Posts (or uploads of files) are set to either "For Review" or "Private" which is perfect for the application we have at hand here. File size uploads are relatively straightforward to change - there is a config file, much like MediaWiki or similar, that allows for changes to the site that are outside the scope of the in-application setup.

After the build, and setting up internal DNS, outgoing mail and accounts, I set it loose with the client. They have logged in, tested it and come back with a plethora of questions - many many of them. I have changed the security options several times and it's handled it all quite well. Before the system goes into production I'll be making sure backups and restores work. Phone has internal ones that I still need to do more testing on. Stay tuned!

XenServer 6.2 update woes

Recently I was required to update a number of XenServers that I've taken over. They were running 6.2SP1 but were about 6 updates behind. No problem, I'll just queue the updates up and shoot them over. Had 2 Windows VM's (2008R2 and 2012 server) and 5 Ubuntu 12.04LTS Linux Servers. The updates were fairly straight forward - I followed my own guide :-)

After the final update was completed I booted up the VMs only to find the two Windows Servers came up no problems, and none of the Linux servers booted. None of them. They started up, black screen and white cursor in the top left hand corner and that was it. No boot no errors, just gone.

I ran through some basic repair work and had no joy. I changed the GrubConf.py from if arg.strip() == "${saved_entry}": to if arg.strip() == "${saved_entry}" or arg.strip() == "${next_entry}":. Still no luck. I re-installed Grub - no joy. I booted from the Ubuntu server CD and tried to run rescue the broken install. On several of the VM's I couldn't even get the system to run a shell in the / file system (/dev/xvda1 typically on these setups). It was incredibly frustrating and after three weeks of banging my head against this, I've still not managed to get this all going.

Luckily I had backups of most of the servers and so I haven't lost everything but I have lost some critical data. The message here, dear friends, is multiple:

• test the updates one at a time to make sure everything starts up. Yes it will take longer and it's a bit more frustrating, but believe me, you want to know if things are going to shit themselves.
• backups backups backups - are not important. RESTORES! are the important part. Believe me, I cried into my beer when I couldn't get one of these machines back up and going - it just wasn't going to happen. I lost a wiki with data that wasn't anywhere else and that's caused me no end of grief. The extra work it's caused is phenomenal and I feel very bad about it indeed.

I've reached out to the collective wisdom of SAGE-AU (www.sage-au.org.au) but sadly no luck yet. I'm open to suggestions!

elementary OS Review

I came across elementary OS on LifeHacker I think and thought it looked pretty interesting. I've been looking for a lightweight operating system that's reliable and fairly full featured (I accept it won't be totally featured - that's the cost of lightweight) for use on various older laptops and the like.

elementary OS is a free download with donations as optional. I downloaded it and burned it to a CD. Alas my favourite test laptop has gone the way of the dodo and is never to return (much like the dodo). I found a HP Pavilion D6 floating around, replaced the hard disk (it was toast) and the RAM (also toast) with 6GB. It's an i3 which doesn't really qualify as a lower end machine, but what the hey.

elementary is based on Ubuntu linux and is quite heavily customised running a lightweight desktop called Pantheon. The current version of elementary is called Luna and it's nice to see they are in development of new versions and it seems like an active development environment. Midori is available for Internet access - I installed Chromium as that's my preferred web browser. There is a calendar app, Geary Mail (which I haven't used), Shotwell for photo organisation and Empathy to tie in with Jabber, Facebook etc.

The interface is slick and looks good and the laptop boots a rocket. All the apps are fast and updates etc are easy as pie. There is an application for updates which is simple and straightforward and the whole thing is well organised and designed. It's quite a joy to use actually. The application install package - Software Center - looks good and is straightforward to use, offering a large range of packages. All the stuff I like to use I was able to install and get on with the job. I have a pretty small requirement list though, in the interests of full disclosure. Chromium has to work, I have to be able to burn CDs and DVD's and I need terminal to be fully functional. Pretty, fast and stable are the other three musts for any OS and I find elementary to check all those boxed.

I now run Mint and elementary side by side on laptops and desktops - the speed difference is quite noticeably between the two, and with their ultra stable Ubuntu (Debian) ancestry it's lovely to use. I've enjoyed using elementary OS Luna and I'll be keeping it on my Pavilion for the future - well as long as the Pavilion holds together!