See if you can follow this: A couple months ago, I decided to upgrade my desktop machine (quad-core Intel, 8GB ram, blah blah). That left my old AMD 5000 black-edition and motherboard free…so, I decided to upgrade my server to the AMD 5000 64-bit Dual core (4GB RAM). Well, since I was doing that, I thought I would go ahead a upgrade my OS from Debian to CentOS a couple months ago (it’s an upgrade…cause I don’t have SSL holes anymore).

First thing you do – obvously – is your backups. So, I backed up all my VHosts, files, configs, etc and replaced all the hardware… What did forget? To dump my databases! A rookie mistake, to be sure. Long story short, I finally found my external USB HDD case and restored what I needed to.

So here’s the fun part… The new specs. Keep in mind this is a server run out of my home closet and only hosting small sites:

- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 @ 3.1GHz
- 4GB RAM
- 1.8TB Raid5 Storage
- 1TB Raid1 Storage (System Drives)
- 1TB Backup (for that irreplaceable stuff)

I’ve noticed a huge increase in speed in all my LAMP apps, which makes sense, but it’s still quite amazing to me. I also upgraded the Mobo (because I fried the old one…hush…) to an AM2+. The next step is an AMD Quad-core when they come down in price (and up in value).

So that’s my story. A rookie mistake combined with laziness took this site down for just over 2 months.

Anyways, I ended up buying one for home to play around with and – sadly – never really did anything with it. Because, what would I do with it?! I could make a media center PC, but it wouldn’t handle 1080p… I could make a desktop PC, but I have one thats much faster…I could build one for someone else, but the ITX cases were expensive and I don’t like working on friend’s computers. Thats when I found http://mini-itx.com/. The idea was: put a computer in something that doesn’t look like a computer! So, I did!

I had a wicker basked from…who knows what…that ended up working perfectly! I cut the back out, stuffed in the VIA, ram, a hard drive, and viola!

Beauty shot with all the crap around it. Without the camera Flash, you really can’t tell there is anything in there. It looks noce on a bookshelf, and that was sort of the point: Make a computer that looks like furniture.

The inside got kind of crowded (duh) but everything fit pretty well. I still need to secure the hard drive better and maybe tie-wrap the wires to clean it up. But…I still dont know what I’m doing with this thing! I thought about adding a wireless USB adapter, a bluetooth adapter (for keyboard and mouse..and whatever else) and possibly a solid state hard drive, but for a computer that I dont know what to do with, thats pretty pricey!

I installed Debian Linux and I plan to try to use this as an Standard Definition media center (With XBox Media Center) for my room or the kids room. Otherwise…I invested a lot of effort in this thing for a few pictures, a little bit o’ bragging rights, and a blog post…which makes it ALL worth it!

]]> http://www.daleeman.com/wicker-computer/feed/ 1 http://www.daleeman.com/linux-stig-srr-viewer/ http://www.daleeman.com/linux-stig-srr-viewer/#comments Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:41:26 +0000 Daleeman http://www.daleeman.com/?p=63 A while back I wrote a quick windows app to parse out the results of the DISA Linux STIG Security Readiness Review (SRR). In case you’re unfamiliar, the Linux STIG (or Security Technical Implementation Guide) is a set of computer security guidelines put out by DISA. These documents are fairly lengthy, so they (or someone) created the SRR. So I…”fixed the glitch”

The SRR scans your computer for STIG compliance. When it finds an area of non-compliance, it gives you an option to comment on it, or mark it as a false hit. When completed, it generates a huge XML file that is even less readable than the STIGS!

So, I created a windows app (yes, a windows app to read Linux logs) which parses the PDI-DB file (Included in the STIG download) as well as your results file and displays everything in a nice readable format including the finding and the regulation details.

Very briefly, when you launch the application you will be prompted to select the PDI-DB file. You can get that file from the SRR script package (it gets updated by DISA). After that, you simply select your server’s XML results file, and you get something like the above.

Im sure this is not bug-proof, so don’t come crying to me when it doesn’t work. Actually, do…so I can put the fix on my to-do-list. I’ve tested this under XP and Vista…both seem to work!

Download SRRViewer