Tag: Linux

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Ai for work and home

As AI is starting to become something many of us are using, it’s interesting to think about the possibility’s of getting an AI to look at our own data.  I’ve set up privateGPT on an older computer and given it data to “ingest”!

It does take some time and it needs a decent amount of ram and cpu grunt, but it does work surprisingly well even on under-powered machines. It also gives you links to source documents you may have got the device to ingest (unlike some products I might mention… cough!).

There is a part of me that thinks that this sort of product could be very useful for insite for a private company (or even an individual). Think about the possibilities of giving it access to all emails sent. What could it learn? All files on the server, who created the most files? Who was involved in which projects and what were the  skill sets of the people involved (past and present).

Lets also think about the possibility of an AI having access to production data and financials!? What could be gleaned from all that information. It’s been said that we will soon have personal versions of AI that can run on phones. I’m sort of looking forward to this … but having recently re watched the most excellent Ridley Scott movie movie Alien Covenant, I’m recommending that we proceed with caution!

 

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Feed your firewalls

So as a few of you know I’m this crusty old Sys Admin dude. I have a number of machines that I look after, and they are nearly all Linux machines. They are on pretty much twenty four seven, this site is an example of such an endeavor.

But the internet has a problem – it’s the continual attack on any machine (Mac, Windows Linux, Unix or something else) and any service that said machine might be running.

It’s not uncommon for someone to attempt to attack this machine every day. Probably the worst I’ve seen is about 30 thousand attempts in one day. Typically it’s about 1- 3 K,  and I have been whittling this number down …  there is a way to manage this.

1 Record what the offensive ip address are (auth log is your friend in this instance)
2 Add these offensive address to the firewall “or better” so that they will not ever have any access, even if it to just rattle the locks on the doors of your computers.

Typically the command, to block an ip address is something like this, it’s not a complex thing .

sudo iptables -A INPUT -s 10.1.1.1/32 -j DROP

People are concerned that one may block out legitimate traffic (and admittedly this is important, especially if you do accidentally add your own ip address!…. do you have physical access to the machine? a plan B?).  But don’t let me scare you, what I’m talking about is not complex (just take care!).

When you think about it there are 4,294,967,296 usable version 4 ip address. My current block list on this small machine is about 880 of these…. that is about 0.0000204891% of all available ip v4 address. It’s not much and my machine is rather low tech.

But the problem is routers. My own network is based on a router that is controlled by my isp. I don’t really have total control over this machine, but it would be good if I could manage that process a bit. But the isp says no – you can have 3 settings!

The up shot is, if I’m serious about security and running may own server from home … I have to manage the abuse from a machine level or add an additional router! ?

It would be better to manage it from a router level because then every machine behind that router / firewall would be protected. But we haven’t really made this jump. I also understand that segmenting the internet is not a good thing but I’m happy with my 0.0000204891 % reduction. I don’t feel bad about this.

 

 

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Recent outage and snow flake servers!

This is a Wombat not a snow flake!

My server hasn’t been working too well over the last 24 hours due to it becoming a bit of a snow flake, that and the fact the the plumber always has leaky pipes! Not to mention that I was running a rather old version of Debian.

What’s a snow flake server you may ask? It’s what all system admins should avoid! It’s a server that does all sorts of things (often rather well) and as such is a precious little snow flake! The problem with this is that the server will not, or is not, easy to manage or update or improve due to lack of documentation, configuration issues, and / or as was my issue- software and hardware conflicts.

There are a number of ways to manage machine production and developer working environments. These include approaches such as blue green servers, machine imaging with products like puppet and Ansible. As well as a VM approach with products like Vagrant or a software container product like  Docker.

Whats also interesting is that with good old fashioned tools like password less key managed ssh access, and shell scripting you can control a lot of the process that the above products like to take claim for.

I’m going to think quite a bit about this snowflake problem some more in the coming weeks. I shall probably write more about how I, as someone with a “production server” and a number of other needs keeps all the ducks on the wall.  The end result is that I hope I can create a machine from scratch in a very short space of time. Or at least learn a few things.

Stay tuned!