about

This is really Iong and boring, so it's up to you if you want to read it.

AND I like to rant every once in a while.

This does give a sense of progression through my learning of linux, and my experiences with it and what I know about linux, and what I might be able to do for an employer.  Thank you for being patient.

I got into my first computer around 2000.  At that time a friend of mine installed  a dual-boot system for me, Windows and Mandrake Linux.  About 2 months into having this computer I got a blue screen of death.  I tried to reinstall from the disk that my friend had given me, just in case something happened, and it spun and spun until it said that "it couldn't install".  It was missing one file.

So I decided to go to the store and look at buying new disks to do a fresh install.  When I started to notice how much Windows was going to cost, OS, Office, anti-virus, etc, etc.  I seen the Mandrake linux disks on the shelf and noticed that it was under 10% of the cost for Windows.  Well, I decided to choose linux and haven't looked back since.

From Mandrake, I started to learn more and more about linux.  Since I was a carpenter at the time, I had access to meeting all different kinds of people and could get their old computers for next to nothing or free.  From that I learned how to configure the kernel to run on old machines and decided to make a firewall that ran off of a 'floppy disk' using iptables along with learning how to configure different devices, i.e; sound cards, video cards, network cards, etc.

So, with me, I wanted to know more, learn more, experience more, I decided to get a domain name, cerberus.cc (it's owned by someone else now).  Once I learned about having a public domain, I realized that there where all of these little script kiddies, more likely someone that had a trojan on their system, that wanted to get into my server by using ssh.  From my log files filling up, I was getting tired of them trying to hack into my system and decided to make a script that would gather all of the "Illegal/Invalid" attempts on my server.  That script is written for syslog, since I was running debian at the time.  Then I decided to release it and had to start to study where other distros logs where located, and learned I had to know about virtual machines to be able to do that without building a new server for each distribution.  In time I wrote another script that would find out what distro that you were running and then go to the log file that would find the offenders.  Different distros had kept there ssh, "Illegal/Invalid" users, in different files.  Debian, was /var/log/syslog; Red Hat, was /var/log/security; Suse/Fedora was in /var/log/audit.  So to be able to make things work for all distros, I had to learn about virtual machines, and then learn more.

Now that most systems use systemd, their logs are kept in /var/log/journal.  Now one of the things is that, still, not all distros are the same, some use ssh as the unit log and others use sshd, this again posed a problem for me at the time, and again I had to play with my virtuals to be able to check where/how things were logged.

Once I had that, I started to learn about Apache2 and how to set up http and https domains.  And then it sprouted from there into learning more about mail servers/relays, postfix in general, and learning about how SSL worked with SMTP, and learned how to set up my tsl and spf's for my mail server so that I wasn't relaying other peoples mail or having my server being spoofed.

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... RPM systems, and decided to buy another computer, hey had a static ip on my DSL line, so why not.  So I set up my server and started to play around, and then 'hey', killed that from having the wrong permissions.

Well, my friend told me that since I liked to play around with different distros that I should check out Debian and I did.  And from there I grew a love for the apt packaging system.  Tried out many other distros, RPM and apt, and have just found apt easier to use for me.

One of the things that I learned, at this early point (Debian had just switched to the 2.4 kernel), was how to set up a web server using Apache with http and https.  Another thing that I learned was that I was tired of watching my log files fill up with "invalid user" trying to hack into my system through ssh (damm script kiddies).

From that point I really started to become interested in hardening my systems and making sure that my website (apache2), mail server (postfix) and especially sshd where set up properly so that people couldn't get into my system of spoof my mail server.  I also decided to write a script to go through my logs in collect the ip addresses from the scripties trying to hack me and then send an email off to their ISP and inform them that someone on their network was trying to hack me.  (This was before fail2ban was around.)  

Well I decided to keep learning from there and decided to build a wireless router, Soekris 4511, and learn more about networking