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The Random Adventure That Is Life (RATIL)

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A collection of 39 posts

Head Against Wall: Odd Bootable USB Behavior

Head Against Wall: Odd Bootable USB Behavior

So for work, we provision devices to send to clients using a bootable USB Ubuntu installer with a bunch of custom options and additional software. This all happens without hiccups generally...until this week, when I needed to clone the drive for someone else. After much weeping and gnashing of

Unattended Install: virtualbox-ext-pack

Unattended Install: virtualbox-ext-pack

On 30 September 2019, Ubuntu updated the virtualbox-ext-pack package to no longer auto-accept the EULA in order to align with legal requirements and their desire to be very clear about non-open-source software installed through their repositories. Reference: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/virtualbox-ext-pack/+bug/1844654 As such, attempting to

DIY Barn Door

A common architectural feature out here in Colorado is to not actually put a door between the master bedroom and the master bathroom. So we decided a barn door was the best option but given the non-standard (wider than normal) size of our doorway, the only pre-made options were going

Verizon Wi-Fi Calling Firewall Config

Verizon Wi-Fi Calling Firewall Config

UPDATE: wo.vzwwo.com is an additional domain that needs to be allowed. This is short and sweet. If you want to get Verizon Wi-Fi calling enabled on a restrictive network here is what you need. UDP ports 500 & 4500 open to sg.vzwfemto.com and wo.vzwwo.com. The

pfSense With CenturyLink 1GB Fiber

pfSense With CenturyLink 1GB Fiber

We just recently moved into a neighborhood that offers CenturyLink 1GB fiber into the house. I mistakenly though the change would be as simple as plugging in my current setup to whatever modem they provided. Turns out that is not the case and that a little more work is required.

pfSense Insights

pfSense Insights

This post will be updated as I find out interesting tidbits while working with my pfSense. Usually this will be getting something in the house to work as expected with out opening up the firewall to everything. Amazon Shopping App UPDATE: The solution listed below no longer works. The Amazon

SANS Holiday Hack 2018

SANS Holiday Hack 2018

I have to be honest, life is just too busy this year for me to actually write a full report in the context of the story. Suffice it to say, I really enjoyed this year's challenge, much better than last year in terms of not having to actually play games.

Sump Pump Replacement

Sump Pump Replacement

Over the holidays I went over to my mom's house to visit and as I walk in the door, she is pulling everything out of the closet under the stairs and I could hear a high-pitched alarm going off. Her sump alarm was going off. My mom really is not

Hack The Box: Jerry

Hack The Box: Jerry

Jerry: Retired 17 November 2018 If you are interested in learning more about penetration testing, Hack the Box is a great way to get your feet wet in a legal and well built environment. Head over to hackthebox.eu [https://hackthebox.eu] to get started. This box was almost too

Hack The Box: DevOops

Hack The Box: DevOops

DevOops: Retired 13 October 2018 If you are interested in learning more about penetration testing, Hack the Box is a great way to get your feet wet in a legal and well built environment. Head over to hackthebox.eu [https://hackthebox.eu] to get started. Been a while since I

Server Migration

Server Migration

I had a need to migrate this server to a different provider for cost reasons. This was also a good chance to document my process since I did NOT do that last time. I ended up going with Digital Ocean [https://www.digitalocean.com/].Amazon [https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/

Pikler Triangle

Pikler Triangle

First off, I am no wood worker, I just found this Instructable and followed it pretty closely. In the areas where I did the same thing, I will just gloss over it, but if I did something different or needed additional information, I will add that in. Follow this guide

Reducing Image Sizes For Entire Blog

Reducing Image Sizes For Entire Blog

I am lazy and when I add photos to this blog I do not do ANY resizing or adjustments. Well, over time, I have realized that having multiple multi-Megabyte size images on a page is not great for load speeds. So I looked for a way to reduce all of

theHarvester For Open Source Recon

theHarvester For Open Source Recon

I was using theHarvester the other day and had to do a little extra work to get the data I wanted out of the results. There are plenty of posts out there about how excatly to use theHarvester so I am not covering that. The current version from theHarvester GitHub

InsightVM (Nexpose) Slack Bot

InsightVM (Nexpose) Slack Bot

Link to the repo at the bottom... Precursor to this post: https://ratil.life/slackbots-for-fun-and-profit/ [https://ratil.life/slackbots-for-fun-and-profit/] A few months back I decided to find a way to lighten the load of ad hoc vulnerability scanning requests by our system owners. One of our biggest time sucks was

My Brewing Process

My Brewing Process

A friend at work and I got on the topic of brewing and though I brew on a somewhat regular basis, that conversation really re-invigorated my passion for this hobby. As such I though it appropriate to detail my process for two purposes: 1) So that some new brewer somewhere

Timestamp Keyboard Shortcut In gedit

Timestamp Keyboard Shortcut In gedit

I do not know why this was such a hard problem to find a solution to given that the solution I arrived at was extremely simple. On multiple teams I work with, we have a need to take timestamped notes of our actions. Often we are operating on locked down

Testing With Python: First-Timer Perspective

Testing With Python: First-Timer Perspective

Certainly nothing groundbreaking here, just my experience diving into the world of code testing. Code Testing Any book, blog, or article about software development is going to tell you that you should always write tests for your code. Even more so, you should write the tests before you ever even

Hack The Box - Bashed

Hack The Box - Bashed

Bashed: Retired 28 April 2018 If you are interested in learning more about penetration testing, Hack the Box is a great way to get your feet wet in a legal and well built environment. Head over to hackthebox.eu [https://hackthebox.eu] to get started. Bashed was one of the

SANS SEC660 - Advanced Penetration Testing, Exploit Writing, and Ethical Hacking

SANS SEC660 - Advanced Penetration Testing, Exploit Writing, and Ethical Hacking

UPDATE: I took my exam and PASSED! I felt that the actual exam was a bit harder than the practice tests but I also get my best score out of the three. The material covered in class is great but you really have to have read the text in the

Hack The Box - Sense

Hack The Box - Sense

Sense: Retired 24 March 2018 If you are interested in learning more about penetration testing, Hack the Box is a great way to get your feet wet in a legal and well built environment. Head over to hackthebox.eu [https://hackthebox.eu] to get started. Sense was an easier box

Slackbots for Fun and Profit

Slackbots for Fun and Profit

This is the general process/flow for creating Slack integrations, nothing groundbreaking here, just wanting to consolidate the info that I used when building bots. In the future (once I get approval) I will publish the details of a bot in Ruby and a slash command in Python. Bot/Slash

New NAS and Backup Strategy

New NAS and Backup Strategy

I finally got a NAS (Synology DS216se) for the house to keep our photos and other important files safe. I was starting to get really nervous about losing data both on the home computer and this server as well. The new NAS required a good backup strategy. I really wanted

Cloudflare - Free Tier

Cloudflare - Free Tier

While researching ways to improve the speed of this website, I recently found out that Cloudflare offers a free tier of service to personal websites and blogs. Everything I read made this seem like a pretty easy move and the benefits of increased security, speed, and DOS protection seemed like