Yeah, I’ve been watching this guy on youtube, pretty funny. I wonder if he’s right about the Coast Guard being called Beach Boys.

Another consideration is that expertise in a domain highlights ignorance. I’ve known experts who refuse to dabble outside their expertise because they’re keenly aware of how much they don’t know and feel they’d be doing a disservice to the requester if they agreed to help out. Better to leave it to the right experts.

That’s a certain kind of person. I’m not like that. I don’t mind breaking things so long as their mine or it’s agreed to up front. Some people are more anxious about these things though. I’d guess none of us know the fellow, so it’s all speculative anyway, but it’s possible this angle is the source of refusal.

Absolutely. VMs and Containers are the wise sysadmin’s friends. Instead of rolling my own ip blocker I use Fail2Ban on public-facing machines. It’s invaluable.

That sounds pretty good to me for self-hosted services you’re running just for you and yours. The only addition I have on the DR front is implementing an off-site backup as well. I prefer restic for file-level backups, Proxmox Backup Server for image backups (clonezilla works in a pinch), and Backblaze B2 for off-site storage. They’re reliable and reasonably priced. If a third party service isn’t in the cards then get a second SSD and put it in a safety deposit box or bury it on the other side of town or something. Swap the two backup disks once a month.

The point is to make sure you’re following the 3-2-1 principal. Three copies of your data. Two different storage mediums. One remote location (at least). If disaster strikes and your home disappears you want something to restore from rather than losing absolutely everything.

Extending your current set up to ship the external SSD’s contents out to B2 would likely just be pointing rsync at your B2 bucket and scheduling a cron or systemd timer to run it.

After that if you’re itching for more I’d suggest reading/watching some Red Team content like the stuff at hacker101 dot com and sans dot org. OWASP dot org is also building some neat educational tools. Getting a better understanding of the what and why around internet background noise and threat actor patterns is powerful.

You could also play around with Wazuh if you want to launch straight into the Blue Team weeds. Education of the attacking side is essential for us to be effective as defenders but deeper learning anywhere across the spectrum is always a good thing. Standing up a full blown SIEM XDR, for free, offers a lot of education.

P. S. I realize this is all tangential to your OP. I don’t care for the grizzled killjoys who chime in with “that’s dumb don’t do that” or similar, offer little helpful insight, and trot off arrogantly over the horizon on their high horse. I wanted to be sure I offered actionable suggestions for improvement and was tangibly helpful.

You can meaningfully portscan the entire internet in a trivial amount of time. Security by obscurity doesn’t work. You just get blindsided. Switching to a non-standard port cleans the logs up because most of the background noise targets standard ports.

It sounds like you’re doing alright so far. Trying not to get got is only part of the puzzle though. You also ought to have a backup and recovery strategy (one tactic is not a strategy). Figuring out how to turn worst-case scenarios into solvable annoyances instead of apocalypse is another (and almost equally as important). If you’re trying to increase your resiliency, and if your Disaster Recovery isn’t fully baked yet, then I’d toss effort that way.

It is difficult to consider a greater rube than one who interprets open mockery as lavish praise.

Your comment reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2RXoqB1LjA

A recent ~2 minute video from the ever-excellent Dr. Dan McClellen. The opening sentence is: “Every last attempt to identify divine commands in the Bible that are relevant to anyone today requires negotiating with the text.”

Your comment makes no sense and helps no one.

I keep seeing this sentiment and I don’t understand it. Are you speaking purely out of anger and ignorance? The recent No Kings protest was either the third or first largest protest in the history of the U.S.A. and some communities have literally been running ICE gestapo out of their towns.

The Christian Conservative minority have gridlocked the American government, silently stacked the judicial system in their favor, and partnered with the American oligarchy to bankroll fascists and create the most pervasive, effective, and enduring propaganda machines ever seen (that’s already worked its way into Australia and had been finding footholds in Europe).

The idea than Americans aren’t doing anything about this or that there could ever possibly be a single unified movement that magically fixes “the issue” is incoherently reductive and impractical. If I see a comrade struggling for air I don’t yell at them to just breathe. I help them remove the pig standing on their neck. What are YOU doing to lend a hand or show lost comrades that there’s still hope?