Tech

Hi everyone, If you’re like me, there are tons of technologies that you work with on a day-to-day basis, but never have the opportunity to touch. In my day-to-day role, for example, I work heavily with networking and even with BGP. But rarely do I have the chance to do anything BGP-related as it pertains to the internet. It’s quite the dilemma! How is one supposed to get the experience of operating large-scale networks, if only very few people have the opportunity to work on them? Let alone set them up from scratch! ...

Hey Everyone! I wanted to share a small (pun intended) improvement to my personal security hygiene. That small improvement is called a YubiKey! For those unaware, a YubiKey is a hardware-based MFA device. It supports an MFA standard known as FIDO2, which is much more secure than TOTP. I’ve begun implementing this across various applications including my personal email, DNS provider, and even 1Password. The main draw for me is that if any of your authenticator apps are compromised, you are still susceptible to a hack. ...

What are your favorite password managers? I used to use LastPass, and while it worked fine for me, I eventually switched to 1Password and haven’t looked back. What I really like about 1Password is the extra layers of authentication. You either need a secret key or another authenticated device to approve your login. Plus, you can stack that with MFA for even more security. Last I checked, LastPass doesn’t have a secret key, just MFA. ...

Hi Folks, I’ve finally made the transition to using IPv6 at home! It’s been a long time coming, and while it took a few weeks to get everything working, I’m excited for this new chapter. I requested a /56 from Verizon, and at first, it didn’t seem to work. But after not checking for a while, I noticed some of my VLANs had started handing out IPv6 addresses! ...

Hey all, I recently decided to purchase a dedicated server from RackNerd with the goal of hosting my homelab services remotely. Previously, I ran a high-availability Proxmox cluster out of my one-bedroom apartment in NYC, powered by a few Dell Optiplex 4090s. A few months ago, I moved into a new place and had to decommission that setup. Since my new setup is remote, it presented a few challenges: How am I going to administer my lab? How can I secure it? What services will I host? ...

The mdrfckr SSH Key On March 29, 2025, my Cowrie SSH honeypot caught something interesting: a known malicious SSH key used by an active botnet campaign. What Happened While monitoring my honeypot, I noticed a connection attempt that stood out. After a successful brute-force login (using root credentials), the attacker executed the following command: cd ~ && rm -rf .ssh && mkdir .ssh && echo "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAAQEArDp4cun2lhr4KUhBGE7VvAcwdli2a8dbnrTOrbMz1+5O73fcBOx8NVbUT0bUanUV9tJ2/9p7+vD0EpZ3Tz/+0kX34uAx1RV/75GVOmNx+9EuWOnvNoaJe0QXxziIg9eLBHpgLMuakb5+BgTFB+rKJAw9u9FSTDengvS8hX1kNFS4Mjux0hJOK8rvcEmPecjdySYMb66nylAKGwCEE6WEQHmd1mUPgHwGQ0hWCwsQk13yCGPK5w6hYp5zYkFnvlC8hGmd4Ww+u97k6pfTGTUbJk14ujvcD9iUKQTTWYYjIIu5PmUux5bsZ0R4WFwdIe6+i6rBLAsPKgAySVKPRK+oRw== mdrfckr" >> .ssh/authorized_keys && chmod -R go= ~/.ssh ...

Hey folks, Quick tip for anybody using DN42. If you’re having an issue making your services reachable on the network you can copy something similar to what I’m doing. In my lab, I’m running plain Docker, with a container that has a private IP of 192.168.77.2. To make it reachable from a remote peer over WireGuard, I’m using two NAT rules: one for SNAT and one for DNAT. Why? Because in the DN42 overlay network, only IPs in the 172.20.0.0/14 range are routable. My little slice is 172.22.147.160/27. The whole setup is similar to your home internet with RFC1918 addresses meaning you need to heavily rely on NAT. ...

Obligatory Hello World! first commit.