Building a (Cheap) Minecraft Server on AWS

Box Headed Minecraft Men

My oldest kid wanted a Minecraft server for them and their friends, but I didn’t want to pay to run one 24/7. What should have been an easy project turned into a lot of discovery learning. Save yourself sometime and read this.

Workstation Setup

Dev Ops

I’ve been doing dev work for years but have never taken the time to document how I like my setup which means every time I do it again, I have to figure it all out again.

Implementing SSLSplit

A couple of weeks ago I talked about using SSLSplit to at as a proxy so that I could examine the mechanics of a Docker pull. I decided to go ahead a set up a purpose-built VM just for this so I could easily do this again in the future. I wanted to go ahead and document (and share) the steps that I went through for this.

Making Use of Free Time

Advent of Code

So since this whole COVID-19 thing started, I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands. Yes, I’ve suddenly become a teacher (I’m taking care of my oldest, while Liz takes care of our youngest) but I am only working at the office one week out of every three. That gives me a lot of time. I decided among other things to work on my Python (a lot). So I went back to the 2015 Advent of Code and just started going away. So here are the first five days of the 2015 Advent of Code.

Recovering a RAID Disk

DNS-323

Many years ago I was looking for a network drive that I could attach to my home network to centrally save data. Life was good until a year or so ago when the NAS itself stopped working. I had used the drive for a variety of reasons, among them as a place to put all of our family photos.

Setting up Tripwire

tripwire --check

I was doing some research for my firewall project that I wrote about the other day and wanted to add some system monitoring. I figured that the server that I host signal-chief off of didn’t currently have any monitoring going so I would use that (cause why test in the lab when you can test in production?). The system I decided to use was Tripwire which is an opensource project that is part of the Epel Linux repo. I put this together with help from a couple of different tutorials that I found online and combined.

Building a Firewall

This post is probably going to be updated a few times as it’s a work in progress as I figure things out. As I’ve noted before a few times, I like to write things out as I figure them out so that I don’t have to research time and again. Today’s project, replacing a pfSense firewall with a Centos server and Firewalld.

I Hate Amazon

FYI, this post is more of a rant than anything else so feel free not to read it.  Many of you probably don’t know but I have a 10 year old daughter and a 6 year old son.  A few years ago for Christmas we bought them both these Kindle kids editions.  The thing is really just a normal kindle, but it comes with a plastic protector around it (which is actually pretty damn beefy) and more importantly, it comes preconfigured with their “Freetime” application that basically sandboxes the kids account and greatly limits what they can do and get to.  It also comes with free content like a number of applications as well as age appropriate books, etc.

Building a Centos Server Image

System Build Options

This is the first of what will be a number of posts on building out parts of a basic mission network.  This network will be based on Centos 7 (Linux), with an IPA server (Linux version of Active Directory), have a local patching server, and a number of there features.  Today’s article will focus entirely on the basic build of a Centos 7.0 system and will serve as the base system for all of the other lessons in the future