Rob the Geek

Category: Misc

  • Loving the Summer in New Zealand

    As we’ve got our fair share of folks who have only recently come to New Zealand in our team at work, we were discussing the many and varied things that can be done to soak up the incredible sights of summer in our region. One of our guys really enjoys the outdoors and suggested “Epic […]

  • Testing NAS speeds

    So, recently I had reason to try bench-marking an off the shelf NAS server against an Opensource alternative and I wanted to ensure the tests would be as fair as possible (and quick to implement). As an aside, I thought that because it has been literally YEARS since I’d publicly documented any of my IT […]

  • Looking at logs…

    I have recently had cause to pay a little more attention to the logs generated by my home firewall. While I use SARG for the day-to-day analysis, I needed a quick and easy command to fire at my squid logs to see what a particular device had been up to. This entry is by no […]

  • pfSense: SARG Reports (v2.2.6 Update)

    This post follows on from my (surprisingly popular) article “pfSense: SARG Reports Not Showing“ After an update to v2.2.6-RELEASE I had re-inherited the same Error: Could not find report index file. Check and save sarg settings and try to force sarg schedule. error. On jumping onto the firewall via SSH, it appears that, at some […]

  • Backing up the Pi

    We’ve just had some work done on one of our systems (which runs from a Raspberry Pi v2) so, aside from the config file backups that we can collect from the systems interface, I thought it would be prudent to grab an image backup.. this is how it was done:

  • Grabbing Video (back) from YouTube

    Usual Disclaimers Apply: This guide should not be used to subvert copyright restrictions. Responsibility falls to the user to ensure they are not breaking the laws of the country in which they reside or breaching any restrictions placed on content published in, or on infrastructure where other jurisdictions and/or terms of service may apply. Ignorance is […]

  • CentOS 7 – CLI to GUI

    I’ve been playing with a few VMs as I try to figure out a new infrastructure for our office, and as part of this I’ve taken a particular shine to CentOS as a minimal build for my virtual servers. I then decided I wanted to get a few sandbox environments running with desktop software and, […]

  • pfSense: SARG Reports not showing

    This appears to be a somewhat common problem with the more recent pfSense installations, when SARG reports are accessed ({Status} > {Sarg Reports} > [View Report] Tab) the UI responds with: Error: Could not find report index file. Check and save sarg settings and try to force sarg schedule. Edit: 02/01/2016 – After an update […]

  • PASSWORD MANAGERS, CRYPTOGRAPHY, AND TRUST

    So, a friend* of mine asked me yesterday, (following my posting of an article), what I thought of a particular password manager – I obviously wanted to answer her question. I then decided that since I was in for a penny, I might as well be in for a pound and here we are, (hopefully) […]

  • UPnP – Why I don’t allow it on my Home Network

    The UPnP protocol has a long standing history of security problems, not the least of which being that it allows unauthenticated devices to connect to and through your home network. TLDR; UPnP is a flawed protocol which has been leveraged numerous times to conduct widespread attacks via large numbers of insecure devices. Do not enable […]