Eric Severance

I've been getting more interested in honeypots recently. This past spring, I setup a honeypot to learn more about what folks do once they successfully brute-force login to an SSH server. The concept was simple, setup a linux VM with common usernames and passwords (i.e. mysql/mysql, user/user, admin/admin, etc.) and wait to see what happens. I created an isolated bridge network on my linux server, then setup a CentOS VM inside KVM.
Read More…

I have a solar powered home. Well, sort of. It is a grid-tied solar system, meaning when it is sunny outside our solar panels produce more power than we use and we bank that power with our utility company. At night time, we draw from the power we banked during the day. I have a TED5000 energy monitor to keep tabs on how much power we are producing and how much we are consuming.
Read More…

This blog was previously run using Wordpress. Wordpress does not have the best record for having bug free software. To make sure esev.com doesn't get overrun by viruses, I've taken a few additional steps to secure the site. All these steps follow the simple idea that, if it isn't needed for an average viewer of the blog, disable it. 1. Allow only http GET requests Most of the changes to a Wordpress blog happen with POST requests.
Read More…

The SSL certificate on esev.com was updated today. I get the SSL certificates from StartSSL, mainly because they are free and trusted by most browsers. StartSSL only needs to validate your email address and that you are the owner of the domain, then you're free to create as many certificates as you need. So I don't need to look it up again next year, here is the one-liner for generating the server's certificate:
Read More…

I've been searching for a while for a perfect front-end for my home automation and entertainment system. In my setup, the front-end system needs to do the following display media on the tv over HDMI send digital audio to the receiver accept input from a remote control handle HD content streamed over the network run quietly and use little power The front-end doesn't need to have any storage, TV tuners, or DVD/Blu-ray drives.
Read More…

Using my list of requirements, I set out to find the hardware for my new server. I was building this from scratch so at minimum my purchase list needed to include hard drive storage server case motherboard, RAM & CPU Hard drive storage I decided to focus first on the requirements for the fileserver side of the project. Recall that I was planning for 16TB of storage space. At the time, the largest consumer hard drives were 2 TB.
Read More…

If you are like me, and you like technology, you probably find yourself wanting to try the latest operating systems and software. You also likely have a router for your network, a NAS device for your storage, and maybe a web server for a blog or wiki. After a while, you end up with the situation shown in the picture below, a closet full of servers. The picture below is of my server closet from 2004.
Read More…

To make sure I got the right hardware and software for this server I needed to know what the server was going to be used for. I needed to get an idea of how much computing power I was going to use to run all the virtual machines. And since this project started off as an upgrade to my NAS fileserver I also needed to figure out how much storage space I was going to need.
Read More…

I use IntenseDebate for the comment system on my blog. I also use Google Analytics to keep stats on how many people visit my site. To integrate the two, I created a Google Analytics plugin for IntenseDebate. With this plugin, when someone leaves a comment, an event is added in Google Analytics. This event can then be used with advanced segments in Google Analytics to see metrics focusing just on visits that lead to comments.
Read More…