Jean's Blog – Page 3 – Thinking too much is like swinging – you're busy but you're not getting anywhere.

Setting up Suricata in Debian Bookworm running in KVM with af-packet as IPS

Suricata is a Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention System as well as a Network Security Monitoring engine. For now I am using Suricata as an IPS and here I’ll show you how to set it up.

Setup a central logging instance (and use it to block traffic using fail2ban)

A very light-weight approach for storing logs centralized is by just using rsyslog. My virtual machines all use rsyslog. That rsyslog sends it’s logs to another internal virtual machine which runs rsyslog as well. A fail2ban instance is checking all these logs and sending a block command to the firewalls. Here is how.

Encrypting existing volumes in ZFS using zfs send and zfs recv

Let’s say you want to encrypt your previously not encrypted data – in my example a ZFS pool. A good way to do so is to simply use zfs send and zfs receive. These commands can be used to transfer ZFS data streams. The procedure is pretty simple. Create a snapshot, transfer this snapshot using zfs send and receive it using zfs receive.

Encryption of ZFS volumes using a remote / external key-system written in PHP

I thought a long time about what security benefits I have if I store the encryption key of a volume on the same system (locally). Let me share some of these thoughts with you. Then I’ll show you my approach using a self-written key-system in PHP (using RedBeanPHP and Sqlite) and finally I’ll show you how to use this with ZFS.

Setting up MinIO in AWS Lightsail

MinIO is a high performance, s3 compatible object storage. I’m using it for some years now. In this article I’ll show you how to setup your own MinIO stack using Amazon Lightsail.

Nextcloud Linux Client on a Chromebook (ARM / aarch64)

Short explanation on how to get the nextcloud linux client working in a chromebook. This is because the android desktop client does not offer two-way synchronization as of now.

Using Nextcloud with MinIO

MinIO is an object storage. I like it a lot and was thinking about using it with Nextcloud. Let’s see

Nextcloud migrate to PostgreSQL

Also getting the famous “1213 Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction”? A few users reported switching to PostgreSQL fixed it. While I did not believe at first… Yes… It solved that issue for me as well.

Setting up Nextcloud

Just a quick guide how I do install Nextcloud. This is Nextcloud 25.0.1 with PHP 8.1 on Debian Bullseye with Redis, APCu and MariaDB.

Amavis’ cool features

I guess that most people use amavisd-new together with spamassassin and for example ClamAV. Probably a few more use features like DKIM verification and signing with amavis. However, there are some features which aren’t found in the usual howtos. Here are some of them.