SecTalks Brisbane talk
This week I gave a talk at SecTalks BNE0x18 about how I solved last month's boot-to-root CTF. I've put the slides up now (you'll need to enable JavaScript for the remarkjs slides to work).
Don't believe the non-programming hype
Background This will be a shorter, less-polished post than usual. It's really just a way to start to bring a bit of structure to my thoughts. Feel free to add some comments or weigh in on the linked Twitter thread. I came away from a recent...
telegraf support for NTPmon
Yesterday I updated NTPmon to include telegraf support; if you are interested in the code changes see github compare for details. It should be considered alpha-quality at this stage; it communicates with telegraf using the TCP or socket listener,...
NTP talks
I presented my talk based on the blog posts here at Linux.conf.au 2017; thanks to everyone who responded - your feedback is appreciated. Here are some links for anyone who's interested: Talk slides Youtube video Downloadable video There won't be...
The School for Sysadmins Who Can’t Timesync Good and Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too, part 5 - myths, misconceptions, and best practices
In this post, I'm going to address some of the more common myths about NTP and how to avoid the mistakes which they produce. Some of these myths are grounded in fact, and in many cases it's fine to accept them if you don't need highly accurate...
The School for Sysadmins Who Can’t Timesync Good and Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too, part 4 - monitoring & troubleshooting
(See the menu for other posts in this series.) Am I in sync? So now that we've configured NTP, how do we know it's working? As Limoncelli et. al. have said, "If you aren't monitoring it, you aren't managing it." There are several tools which...
The School for Sysadmins Who Can't Timesync Good and Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too, part 3 - NTP installation and configuration
(Part 1 one of this series gave the background and rationale, and part 2 covered the basics of how NTP works.) Getting NTP Depending on how you install Linux, you might already have a pretty workable NTP client, but for the tools we'll be working...
The School for Sysadmins Who Can't Timesync Good and Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too, part 2 - how NTP works
(Part 1 covered the background and rationale. Part 3 is about installation and configuration.) What is NTP? NTP (Network Time Protocol) is an Internet standard for time synchronisation covered by multiple RFCs. "NTP is [arguably] the longest...
The School for Sysadmins Who Can't Timesync Good and Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too, part 1 - the problem with NTP
(With apologies to Derek Zoolander and Justin Steven. And to whoever had to touch the HP-UX NTP setup at Queensland Police after I left. And to anyone who prefers the American spelling "synchronization".) (This is the first of a series on NTP. ...
A bad runner's journey into bad running, part 2 - how I run
(You can read part 1 first, if you want.) When I first started running, I naturally fell into what I considered to be a proper running pace, but I found that I was not able to run as far as I wanted, and it wasn't until I made a conscious effort...