I’ve spent the last week working on implementing chef. The experience is frustrating to say the least. Instead of whining I wanted to take the time to write out some of my pain points and hopefully offer some constructive fixes to what I see as the wall in the learning curve. Now to be clear up front. Most of my problems aren’t with Chef, Ruby, or most of the core product; it’s with implementing it.

Actually I should have called this where have I been. This seemed catchier though. In short the answer is I have been at my new job at http://slickdeals.net They have keep me as busy as can be. Because of this major shift I changed a lot of habits; I stopped writing here as much, I stopped actively contributing to Pelican1, and I also stopped posting to github. Be not too afraid.

It’s time for my monthly or so post! I wanted to go through and post about my OpenBSD firewall I built but that’s not 100%. Also I’m not ready to go on about anything amazing with puppet because without my lab being done puppet isn’t useful so lets go back to talking about my dev environment! I know Justin has been asking for this for a little while. Preface: Going “back” to vim As a sysadmin at work I use vi a lot.

All right! You read my post SSH Keys on a USB jump drive on Mac OS X (Mountain Lion Edition) and want to take this to the next level huh? Maybe having your config posting back to a jump drive and having to have it plugged in every time you want to log into something is sooooo lame! You often just leave it there, plugged in when you walk away from your work station.

Nope, not something to help unmount and flush your transmissions, it’s some tools for Transmission, specifically MY tools. I just though I would share that I redid this repository completely and cleaned up the Move & Stop script to cover some possible bugs and be a bit more python modern. If you had any problems with it not moving single files or just wanted some slightly cleaner code go grab the new version.

Here I address the eternal struggle. I want to store all my private keys on my jump drive I wear around everywhere. I use Win, Linux, but primarily Macs to do to my work so it needs to be some FAT variant formatted. I want to use the absolutely least hacky way. Windows and Linux were easy to overcome. In short for windows you use putty to make a putty key and in linux you do something shockingly similar to what is below… but I get ahead of myself.

Ok, so we have all our Nagios configs being sanitized and checked by Jenkins, why not Puppet: IT Automation Software for System Administrators? WHY NOT PUPPET!? A lot of this is going to be rehash of the PRIOR article but I wanted to document this out for later anyways since it’s slightly different. Step One: Assumptions and Layout I’m going to stop and assume we are well past the Jenkins setup phase.

Ok… so that is not the best name I’ve every come up with. Sorry, but whatever. This is a quick but fun one. I have been collecting malware with my BunnyPot for a while and have been finding some diminishing returns coming to me. I started thinking that I can set up more of these low interaction server honeypots but how can I get even MORE goods? The ability to grab random files pushed to any server seems like a limited way here…

I know this isn’t the most revolutionary tip ever but my google searches pulled up nada when I tried to figure this out. I’m an IDA Pro MAC user. Bastard child of IDA right? Not really, except for plugins usually which is the point of this short tips post. If you are using simpliFiRE.IDAscope to help you dig through malware you are collecting with your bunnypot (and gods why aren’t you?

Now who would have thought, I start blogging about git and people have advice. This post isn’t just my personal learning but also some advice I received from others! git reset HEAD^ From Alexis: Something I’m doing a lot is when I mess up with git, I sometimes need to uncommit something but keep the changes I had just before the commit. git add -i From Alexis: “Use this…” Brief but powerful advice.