General

• [Part 2] Cooking with Chef and Digital Ocean – Bootstrapping your VM

  Thanks for coming back for part 2 of my Chef Guide with Digital Ocean. In this part I will take you through setting up Chef with the Digital Ocean Gem and Bootstrapping your First VM. As a little bonus I will show you how to create a very simple cookbook to manage SSH Keys on your bootstrapped VM. If you have not already Done so remember to check out Part 1

  The Digital Ocean Plugin

  Setting Up the Plugin!

  So now we have our chef server we should maybe put it to the test and bootstrap a new VM. To do this you will need to get the Digital Ocean plugin for knife.

  
  Sep 23, 2016 - 4 min read

• [Part1] Cooking with Chef and Digital Ocean

  As some of you may know I was recently DDoSed and Was Terminated by Linode for being flooded with 5.11MB/s of Traffic 3 times over a 5 day period. This left me looking for a new solution. I only had a ZNC Server and a couple of DNS Servers with them so it was no big Loss. (For DNS I now use AWS Route 53 its awesome) Any way in my search I came across DigitalOcean and must say I am very impressed with their Pricing, and no bullshit infrastructure. I thought while I was at it I would get better acquainted with chef as although I have used chef in the past I never setup my own chef server so decided to do so. I also found out how simple it is to bootstrap and run an SSD Cloud Instance on DigitalOcean with  Chef.

  
  Sep 23, 2016 - 4 min read

• Buffer Overflow: Overwriting the Return Value

  In this tutorial I will walk you through the process of overwriting the return value of an application using a Buffer Overflow. Requirements :

  • A Linux System (i686 or x64) [Disable Kernel Buffer Overflow Protection]
  • A basic understanding of the stack
  • A willingness to learn

  Why would we do this? As far as I am concerned there is no legitimate use for this technique however it is a useful skill to possess and understand how a Buffer Overflow works. Understanding these concepts will help you develop more secure applications.

  What is a “Buffer Overflow”? Well put simply a buffer overflow is an attack vector where you attack an application by overflowing the memory location of a buffer leading to code leaking into the next memory location. This usually causes a Segmentation Fault (SIGSEGV in linux). Using this we can execute arbitrary code or cause the application to execute another piece of code within the application by overwriting the return value.

  Will this harm my computer? Using this guide will not harm your computer unless you do something terribly wrong. Feel free to use a virtual machine.

  
  Sep 23, 2016 - 4 min read

• Setting up NginX, MariaDB and PHP with EL6

  I decided to port this over from one of my Previous posts to give myself some content worth reading. Its a guide I wrote that walks you through the process of setting up MariaDB, NginX and PHP on CentOS 6. This is now the default “lamp” (I suppose its now LNMP) stack of EL7. Pre-Requisites : An EL6 Server (A VPS Will do) 15-20 Minutes of Spare Time Initial Setup First we need to install the EPEL Package source.
  Sep 23, 2016 - 2 min read