Weekly Update 11: I'm speaking at BSides Ottawa! (2019)

On October 21st, I received the good news email, my proposed talk had been accepted and I’m going to be speaking at BSides Ottawa (2019). I’m really excited about this opportunity and I can’t wait to share this talk with everyone! My talk is going to be

reflecting-on-life

Reflection on running my own servers

I’ve came a long way since I first started building software and running my own blog. My first website I published in early 2000, it was a subdomain of my fathers domain. I focused on my dog on this website, and made him a little HTML fan page. I

weekly-updates

Weekly Update 10: Museum, Podcasts and Code

It’s been an incredibly busy and crazy week. It flew by so fast, and before I knew it, it’s Monday again. Today’s the day to vote in the Federal Election and I’ve got to be honest, there just isn’t any single good candidate to vote

DDoS Protection: My experience

At 9:30 PM last week, my infrastructure received a denial of service attack. The infrastructure hosts this blog, my wifes blog, my wifes eCommerce store and some work-in-progress projects that I’m preparing to release. In addition, it also hosts a VPN for when I’m on the go,

Privacy in a digital age

Is there such thing as privacy in any modern digital society? In recent years, privacy has been a very hot topic. With the Snowden leaks and continuous reports of violations across the world, there’s a strong case against privacy in a digital age. I’d argue that you should

Why I’m running Cloudlinux

I’ve been a long time user of Debian to run my stack, and it’s been pretty resilient on my small websites. Alas, as my websites grow in traffic I wanted something to provide more security and isolation, while offering individual limitations for non-priority resources. I first spotted Cloudlinux

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy thanksgiving to all my fellow Canadians, may your day be filled with happiness and love with the ones around you in your life.

Weekly Update 9: CDN Prep

As you can tell, this site relies on cloudflare for its CDN. It’s not the best CDN but it’s been getting the job done, alas, my traffic has outgrown the free cloudflare plan and it’s time to upgrade. I’m preparing to upload all my assets to

Weekly Update 7 & 8: Geek CMS gets a new name, and new features!

It’s been a long and tiring week that’s for sure. My weekly updates have been pushed back later than I want them to be, and I’m swamped with work in a good way. I’ve been working on a new hybrid blogging/content management platform with automation

Bitcoin: The gift that usually keeps on giving.

Back in the day when Bitcoin was worth peanuts, I decided to invest some money into it and bought a single coin. Boy, I regret those days. When Bitcoin finally rose to about $10000 apiece, I cashed out all I had left after some poor cash-out decisions, I walked away

enhancements

WordPress Optimization: Part 1

WordPress is a bulky application by nature, and with its ecosystem makes it easy to install anything you can imagine. This comes with some reasonable consequences as there will be more weight on the application during load time. For part one, we’re going to focus on the server-side of

homelab

Plesk: I'm impressed.

Update: I’ve updated this blog post as time’s went on, please see the bottom of the post for my review over one year. As you may or may not know, I’ve been running this blog’s server using Plesk Onyx (now, Obsidian). It’s stable, it’s

development

Developing Geek CMS: Alpha edition

As I’ve outlined in my past weekly update, I’m developing a Content Management System I’d enjoy using, with features suited to flexibility of development, automation, and ease of use. Like a hybrid Ghost and WordPress, I’ve aptly named, “Geek CMS” (tentatively, of course). While I realize

weekly-updates

Weekly Update 6: It's about time!

I apologise for the delay in my weekly update, it’s been a crazy week and I’ve lost track of all time. This week I’ve began a new task: building the next evolution of my blog. My blog right now receives between 89,000 to 121,000 hits

geek-isp

Why I'm switching to Blesta for billing customers.

As you may of read on this blog, I’ve started to become an ISP in my area. Previously, I’ve been billing customers with QuickBook invoices and manually marking them as being paid, however, I haven’t given the simple options most people enjoy of paying online without delay.

dashboard

Monitoring my servers with Prometheus

I love to monitor all my infrastructure, and it’s came a long way since I started doing it. My first pass at monitoring was years ago using Nagios, then I evolved into using influxdb. Alas, as time changes and my needs evolve, influxdb just wasn’t sitting very well

chaos

Finding balance in chaos.

If you can’t already tell, I’m a fairly active person with a long day, by choice. I’ve often described my life as balanced, but from time to time it’s thrown into chaos. It may be as simple as an unexpected event, or dreading finding out news

reflecting-on-life

Why I wake up at 5 AM Every Day

It’s crazy to most, but I wake up every day at 5 AM and don’t sleep till midnight — sometimes later. That gives me 5 hours of sleep per day. I’ve been like this most of my life, I find this is the perfect balance between productivity and

sysadmin

New Website Design!

After using the free Primer theme by GoDaddy for a long time on this blog, I’ve decided to switch it up. I was browsing through other technology-gaming-pentesting related blogs and saw that most use darker themes, and are usually pretty clean. I wanted to strike with something darker, good

pentesting

How I got started pentesting

It all started when I was 8. I was writing some basic pages to host on my fathers home server to show off to my classmates who could access the internet. My love for the internet evolved very quickly, and when I was 11 I was hit by my first

education

Certifications: My personal goals and struggles

Being an adult with no post-secondary education can be challenging when it comes to getting jobs. I’m fortunate in my current job that my boss is also self-taught and gives everyone an equal and fair chance, however, when in front of my peers who have post-secondary education I’m

weekly-updates

Weekly Update 5: It’s been a long week!

It’s been an incredibly long week, from long car rides to ongoing scares, it’s not been the funnest week! Not much has been done this week, aside driving about 250km in total, and lacking sleep. On the work front, we’ve began to rotate all important credentials, and

hackthebox

Owned by git hooks

While enumerating a new hackthebox machine, I was stuck at the www-data user and no clear path to go. I knew I could dump the database, look at redis, and likely would find credentials to elevate — but I wanted to do some unique trickery! The sudo -l command showed me

weekly-updates

Weekly Update 4: The road to OSCP

I love to learn, break, and fix — usually not in that order. After trying different avenues of security (red team / blue team), I find the most joy being on the red team. The rush of breaking into things, maintaining presence, and snooping outweighs the rest. As I’m learning more,

htb

HTB: Writeup Write-up

I’m an avid doer of hackthebox machines, and writeup seems like a great fit to be… written up! First, let’s start off by doing a basic nmap scan of this machine to see what we can find! After some enumeration, I found there’s a directory called /writeup,