A Little Homelab and Life Update

I'm going to start writing more on my blog. No! Really! You do believe me, right? Ok, can't blame you if you don't. I come back to this from time to time and think this time I'm really going to dive into it, only to get sidetracked in some other direction. I promise I have a good excuse this time.

Since I last posted, I have gone back to school on a part-time basis while continuing to work full-time. I decided it was high time to finally get that Associate's Degree I started on decades ago. My days have consisted of going to work in the morning and going home in the evening to do homework. I just completed the Fall semester which included a Technical Mathematics class and a Speech class. I enjoyed both classes quite a bit, but I must say I'm glad for some down time of an evening for a while. We're on Winter break now and I'll only have one class left to take in the Spring semester which will allow me to finally graduate in May.

I haven't completely ignored my home-lab efforts during this time, however. I've re-done most of what I talked about in my last post, lo those many months ago. Now there is no domain controller, though it may return someday when I have more time to really learn it. It was an interesting exercise and not hard to get setup initially, but I found I really needed focus on other things first.

I finally added a home built pfSense firewall/router as the gateway for my network. It is connected to my ISP fiber modem and then everything else goes from there. I've been learning about vlan's and have setup a couple in pfSense and my old MikroTik RB260GS switch.

I've been learning about Cisco as well and am fortunate to have a couple old Cisco switches a friend gave me. I can hook them up when I need to, though they're both a little too noisy and power hungry to use all the time on my little home network. Those fans really get to going at times, so I only power them up if I plan to spend some time in Cisco training.

I still have my Proxmox virtual machine server running and I've been trying out several different things using VM's on it. Most recently I set up a NextCloud server, a Guacamole server and a Cloudflare Argo tunnel so I can reach the NextCloud and Guacamole from anywhere. Finally, the VM I was using as a file server was getting a little unstable for some reason, so I created a new one to replace it and then removed the old one after migrating all the stored files off it.

I'm off for a couple weeks now since the college is closed for break, so I'm sure I'll work on some more of this stuff soon. I'll try to do a more timely job of posting about it, but I make no promises I can't keep.

Setting up My Learning Environment

First, welcome to my renamed blog. I couldn't think of a good name for the blog years ago when I first started so I just settled for the most boring name I could think of, "Digital Forensics Blog". Granted, that was the main focus but it was just boring. A while back, I tweeted that I was looking for a better name. Phill Moore suggested Pryor Knowledge which I liked, but I decided to change it to No Pryor Knowledge. As I said in my last post, the focus will be a little wider here now but I'll still talk about forensics sometimes while other topics will also be featured as well. So, on with the post.

Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I have many different interests when it comes to tech. My first love was just learning anything I could about repairing computers. Later I deeply fell for digital forensics and was fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from people like Mark McKinnon, Luby Novitovic, Harlan Carvey, Rob Lee, Jimmie Weg, Ali Hadi and so many others. Forensics held my full attention for a good while and is still a great interest. I still do forensic CTF's from time to time and always enjoy learning from them.

Later, I got really interested in security and blue team ops. I've watched countless security related videos and worked through online training environments like TryHackMe and Rangeforce. These things too are still of great interest to me.

I eventually worked my around full circle to my my enjoyment of just doing builds and repairs with the addition of servers and networking. I recently got a job that allows me to work in those areas every day and I'm loving it.

While I'm not over the servers or network, I am frequently involved in work related to those things. I wanted to learn more about networking, servers, Active Directory and Group Policy. I've watched videos, but I learn a lot more from watching the videos, reading books or blog posts and then doing hands on. This led me to set up a new learning environment at home.

I set up a Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) server on an old computer and connected it to my home network. I then set up a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) on a separate computer. I wanted a separate device maintaining all the backups I knew I'd be making of my virtual machines.

Once that was all in place, it was time to set up my own local domain. I certainly didn't "need" a domain for my home network but it's nice having it as a learning environment that I can restore from backup anytime I mess it up.

 I decided to build a domain controller with the Zentyal Linux distribution. Zentyal allows you to set up a controller compatible with Microsoft Windows Active Directory and that allows you to administer your Active Directory environment using Windows tools in Windows instead of having to use Linux. I thought this was my best option because Zentyal is free to use (there are paid subscription plans as well) and I could still administer it with the tools available from Microsoft.

I decided my domain controller would exist as a virtual machine instead of running yet another computer. I downloaded the Zentyal ISO to Proxmox storage and then created the new machine. I gave it 6 gigabytes of RAM and a 250 gigabyte virtual hard disk. That was more than enough disk space, but I'd really like to have a little more RAM available for it. Still, it works pretty well for my home network. It would need a lot more RAM if it were a production network for a business. I'll go over the setup of my domain in greater detail in a future post.

In addition to the domain controller, I also set up another virtual machine on PVE to use as a file server. This VM is an Ubuntu Linux Server and I use it for simple file storage as well as using it for a DNS server for my network with Pi-Hole. I have a second install of Pi-Hole running on a Raspberry Pi and duplicate my settings between the two. I have both of them set up as DNS forwarders in my domain controller and they take care of that mission plus blocking ads too.

I still have very much to learn. I've just barely scratched the surface of working with AD and Group Policy. It's fun learning new stuff and getting a better understanding of what our admins are doing at work. My future plans include adding a pfSense or OPNSense router/firewall to my network to learn more about networking and vlans's.

I'll end this here for now. I have a lot of ideas for future posts and will hopefully be back with another one soon.

Ch Ch Ch Changes

I came back to this blog a little over a year ago or so thinking I'd really get back into writing. I was missing talking, thinking, doing and writing about forensics. I still do miss all those things but it seemed like I just couldn't find the time to really do anything about it. My job consumed so much of my time and energy that there just wasn't much left for anything else. My last post here was nearly a year ago.

Since then, life has taken a very positive turn. I enjoyed the work I was doing in the home improvement store electrical department but it wasn't really where my heart was. I knew I still wanted to be working in some type of tech related job but I didn't see much chance for that. That changed back in February when I fell into a job I absolutely love. My daughter texted me about an IT technician job for our local community college she'd seen posted. I taught an introductory computer forensics course there a few years back and knew it was a great place to work.

My first thought upon receiving the text from my daughter was "I've got to apply for this now!" The second thought came from my ever present self doubt saying "they'll never want to hire me" and I proceeded to forget about the job for a while. A few days, maybe a week later I decided to go ahead and take a chance and apply. Much to my surprise and delight I was called for an interview. A few hours later I got a call offering me the job and I immediately accepted.

I had no experience working with IT on this level before, so it's been a fun learning experience so far. While I ran my own part-time IT business for many years, my clientele was largely home based with just one or two computers or other devices. In this new job I'm enjoying learning about working with computers and other devices on a large network. To help me learn about things like Active Directory and Group Policy I decided to set up a domain on my home network. I've got that up and running now and will be doing a new post about that "soon".

My plan at this time is to start blogging more but broaden the subject range. While I will still write about digital forensic topics from time to time, I'm also going to write about other tech stuff that I'm learning and doing.

So I'm wondering if my blog needs a different name. It currently has the most boring name I could think of and it would be nice to change it. Someone suggested I change it to "Pryor Knowledge" a while back (EDIT: It was Phill Moore who suggested Pryor Knowledge...thanks Phill!)

"Pryor knowledge"

— Phill Moore (@phillmoore) October 16, 2020

I considered that but came to the conclusion that "No Pryor Knowledge" might be more appropriate. If you've got a good name for the blog, make a comment below and let me know!