SysteMajik Consulting

Author: Bill Thorsteinson

  • Installing WordPress on Ubuntu

    WordPress is available as a packaged application for Ubuntu.  However it requires a bit of post installation configuration. The installation will install the apache2 multi-user server if no server is installed. I modified the installation to run over top of an existing site.  The default installation creates directories under /var/www, which I move to /srv. (more…)

  • Setting up Windows

    The following guide is intended to help install Windows on system in a secure manner.  The steps here are intended to limit the exposure of the system to malware during installation.  However, it does not guarantee that malware will not infect the system.  There are many known vectors used by malware, some of which are known to bypass the following steps. (more…)

  • OpenWRT and Ubuntu dnmasq setup

    Now I have replaced my old firewall with OpenWRT, I needed to enhance the configuration of dnsmasq to support the network.  The old Ubunutu based firewall was already running dnsmasq, as does the DNS server on the LAN.

    I run a mixed network with wired and wireless clients on separate address ranges. DHCP services are provided by the OpenWRT router. An Ubuntu server is the primary DNS server for the wired network. (more…)

  • OpenWRT syslog-ng Installation

    When I went to process my remote firewall log output from OpenWRT, I noticed that the entries were truncated.  A quick check with tcpdump indicated that the syslog packets were truncated to 256 characters.  As syslogd and klogd are both provided by BusyBox, I decided to replace them both.  The obvious solution was to replace them with syslog-ng.  opkg indicated that it was available, so installation was simple.

    Unfortunately, configuration is not yet automated.   A default configuration file is provided in /etc/syslog-ng.   This simply logs to /var/log/messages.  It also assumes that klogd is active.  After some research and experimentation, I came up with a configuration. It can provide a local log in /var/log/messages. More importantly it provides complete firewall log entries to the remote server. (more…)