A while ago I decided to try and gather a bunch of non-public information in an easy to write and consume fashion. After a bit of fiddling, and testing different potential solutions, GitBook emerged as the best option. By using MarkDown as the markup language, it’s both cross-platform and easy to manage, as the content is nothing but raw text files.

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William Lam has a repository of vCenter Web Client customizations hosted over on GitHub, and I decided to add one of my own.

Botlady

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Since I “launched” my In the Bag series of weekly links yesterday, I figured I should really show what is indeed in the bag. Lifehacker runs a series called Featured Bag and the voyeur in me finds it interesting what other people carry around, and how they organize it.

This is my attempt at doing the same. This is my everyday carry, most of these items are always in the bag when I leave the house in the morning. I’ve been using backpacks for years, but noticed I always just carry it around on righ shoulder, so I decided to go for a shoulder bag instead. For the most part this works our fine, if I’m travelling for more than a day, I tend to re-pack in one of the backpacks I have instead.

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Inspired by Scott Lowe’s Technology Short Takes, Duncan Eppings Recommended Reads and Michael White’s Newsletter here is my attempt at a weekly roundup of things I found interesting the last week or so.

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As mentioned before, I’ve kinda turned my home lab into some sort of Slack-Ops deal, where various services in my home lab notify me of events in a private Slack channel.

The latest rendition of that, is adding Slack notifications from phpipam. Once phpipam detects a new device picking up an IP in my network, it notifies me like this:

In order to get this working, I had to edit the /var/www/phpipam/functions/scripts/discoveryCheck.php file in phpipam. discoveryCheck.php is the script that is run when phpipam does local subnet discovery  check, so this was a natural place to add my custom curl command.

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Robert Graham of erratasec has created a small honeypot tool called telnetlogger.

This is a simple program to log login attempts on Telnet (port 23). It's designed to track the Mirai botnet. Right now (Oct 23, 2016) infected Mirai machines from around the world are trying to connect to Telnet on every IP address about once per minute. This program logs both which IP addresses are doing the attempts, and which passwords they are using.

For those still unaware of what the Mirai botnet is, it’s basically malware that scans for vulnerable devices with port 23 (telnet) open to the outside world, and tries to log on with known hardcoded credentials.

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VMworld Europe 2016 in Barcelona is a couple of weeks old now, and most of the dust has settled. Besides the general announcements around vSphere 6.5 and surrounding products, the next big thing might just be Cross-Cloud Architecture and of course VMware Cloud on AWS. The announcements around vSAN 6.5 (yes, it is now vSAN and not Virtual SAN/VSAN anymore), are also very interesting. Perhaps it’s time I revisit my earlier VMware VSAN; More than meets the eye post and update it for vSAN 6.5?

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After yesterdays announcement of VMware Cloud™ on AWS everyone and their distant relatives have published their opinion pieces on the relevance of the deal, and what who got the short end of the stick in this deal.  I guess this is my attempt, or me too post if you will.

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Since I set up a public jumphost for my homelab/network, I’ve been looking for an easy way to manage my SSH tunnels. After trying a couple of different managers, I’ve chosen to use Secure Pipes.

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Did you know that Dell has a bootable linux ISO with firmware upgrades for their servers available? Neither did I, but luckily I found it today when needing it at a customer site.

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