Quickly Analyzing Security Datasets with DuckDB
DuckDB has been making waves in Data Analysis and Data Engineering circles, circles that security professionals in detection and response should strive to be a part of, but that’s for a different rant. There’s no sense in repeating the benefits from DuckDB since it’s outlined nicely in this Why DuckDB page. On the main DuckDB page, there is a large quote: All the benefits of a database, none of the hassle.
Managing Hugo With Git
As previously posted, this blog is powereded by Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare Pages. For most of my career, my exposure to git was cloning repos or downloading releases from GitHub. It was not a pattern for me to use git in any of my previous roles, so as you can imagine, I was a bit of a fish out of water when having to deal with git. This post may be very 101 for most folks, but for me, I wanted to document updating this blog using git.
Ditching Jumpboxes for Tailscale
Having a homelab can be valuable for continuous learning and somewhat accessible for most people given the cost of computing power. I like to have some isolation between my homelab and my home LAN just for the sake of organization and operational security. The isolation strategy is very basic given my use cases. I deployed a pfSense firewall VM with two virtual network cards, where the WAN is actually my home LAN, and the LAN is the isolated lab environment.
Extending EC2 Elastic Block Storage
One of the biggest pains is under provisioning a compute instance with respect to disk size. I was going crazy troubleshooting an agent problem just to realize I utilized all of my disk space. I was just going to annihilate my compute instance and reprovision it until I realized I could just resize the EBS storage and extend the file system. Go to the volume that’s attached to the EC2 instance and reszie Extend the block storage acording to the AWS instructions Extend the block storagen each volume You may run into issues to extend the volume since it needs to write some data to /tmp You can remove apt-cache to make some space resize the filesystem ubuntu@pde-test--3700:/$ sudo file -sL /dev/xvda1 /dev/xvda1: Linux rev 1.
Blogging with Hugo and Cloudflare Pages
I wanted to blog again without dealing with the excess of a Wordpress blog and the costs of hosting it somewhere. After experimenting with a few different platforms, I settled on Hugo. At first, I set up this Hugo blog with Azure Static Apps + Github, where I used GitHub actions to deploy this blog everytime I merge a change into my blog repository hosted on GitHub. I was struggling getting a custom domain configured with Azure Static Pages which probably stemmed from user error and some nauances with Cloudflare SSL.