Posts

Twitter? Garbage. Facebook? Garbage. Do you enjoy having your data harvested and sold? No? Good. Back in the day, there was this thing called Internet Relay Chat. What if I told you… It still exists! Internet socializing without all the Silicon Valley data theft! But due to how the ecosystem works, any time you’re not connected to the server, you don’t receive any messages. This means that you don’t get to see conversations that happen while you’re offline, even if somebody mentions you! ...

We have recently begun a project to replace all of our core switches at our various remote locations. We have around 40 locations and 2 core switches for each location so, whilst not the largest undertaking, it’s an operationally significant project for a team of 1… We’ve used HP switches for a long time (we’re even still using some of the 3COM switches…) and we have a supplier that gets a good discount on these so I went shopping. Now that HPE have purchased Aruba, there’s some nicer models that we can get our hands on. We don’t have any stupidly high bandwidth requirements yet either so we’re not looking in the upper ranges, we usually stick to the SMB style switches (plus I have a hard time justifying the price increase with our use cases!). ...

Tell me if this rings a bell: You run something from pip and get told that your pip version needs an upgrade. You run pip install --upgrade pip and then think about how many other packages might need an upgrade… So, you run pip list --outdated and it returns a tonne of packages. You then spend a stupidly long amount of time trying to figure out why there’s no auto-upgrade option for pip which eventually results in you upgrading each package manually, cursing every time. ...

So I had a need earlier on today. The need for simple end-user notifications. This need has some backstory, however… The plex container that I run on Docker is basically bulletproof. It does everything super quickly and is easy to restart for updates or to clear out some disk I/O issue with my NAS. The NAS is the only thing that’s really causing it issues because it’s a 5 year old Drobo which is in serious need of an upgrade! So if the Drobo locks up and kills all of the I/O to it, the containers need a reboot. Oddly enough, the Drobo itself doesn’t need a reboot (or even to be remounted) but that’s an investigation for another day. Here, we come to my need: to alert users when the container was ‘down for maintenance.’ ...

Week 2 of “Isn’t AutoIT Cool’ is a brief one. More of a code snippet than the last post. It’s something that I figured out when I was looking into exfiltrating data from a target machine. The idea was this: plug a flash drive into a PC, have it automatically run an exe (this was back in the autoexec.bat days so the theory was that you’d call said exe from autoexec.bat) and copy a bunch of interesting files to itself and then prepare for removal. This was back before the days of the USB Rubber Ducky as well (I think the USB Switchblade was the new hotness at that point). I’ll eventually get into my full script for this process, as it wound up being quite useful. Nothing quite as useful as the LEDs on the Bash Bunny or anything but this was many years before the Hak5 crew had those for sale. ...