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Cake day: March 28th, 2024

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  • Race weekend! Camping overnight beforehand. It should start raining at about 11 pm. Race will start at 9am. 25k / 16-ish miles with ~4000 feet of climbing, and it will be raining the whole time.

    I just picked up some goops for extra calories and a new rain shell. It packs up small so I can stuff it in my pack once I get too hot and accept my inevitable sogginess.

    It’s going to be an experience. I don’t have any other events planned for after this one, so we shall see if I can keep the training up.


  • Running!

    Last weekend was the end of peak week, did 11 and change around a reservoir. I’ve managed to be consistent since then, between 3 and 5 miles per day.

    I’m not sure what the running plan is this weekend, probably relaxed a bit / no long runs.

    The race is next week, and I’m feeling prepared. I could do it tomorrow if need be, but it would be tough. Having a few rest days leading up to race day will be excellent.

    I’m still on my shoes from last year. The soft parts are basically smooth. No tread. I’ll get new ones after this race, it’s too late to break in new ones now.








  • 2014 impreza. No screen at all. I bought a phone mount that shows waze and charges my phone.

    I have cruise control and heated seats. And I can operate both with gloves on!

    Don’t need a backup cam because my windows and mirrors are good.

    I will drive this car until it dies, and then I’ll replace the head gaskets and drive it until it dies again. And then I will replace the cvt and drive it until it dies a third time.

    Unfortunately there’s nothing you can do about the NY road salt. The frame will be left, flake by flake, in the gutters of 490. It’s the only thing that can take this car from me, and it is its inevitable fate.






  • Anything exposed to the internet will be found by the scanners. Moving ssh off of port 22 doesn’t do anything except make it less convenient for you to use. The scanners will find it, and when they do, they will try to log in.

    (It’s actually pretty easy to write a little script to listen on port 20 (telnet) and collect the default login creds that the worms so kindly share)

    The thing that protects you is strong authentication. Turn off password auth entirely, and generate a long keypair. Disable root login entirely.

    Most self-hosted software is built by hobbyists with some goal, and rock solid authentication is generally not that goal. You should, if you can, put most things behind some reverse-proxy with a strong auth layer, like Teleport.

    You will get lots of advice to hide things behind a vpn. A vpn provides centralized strong authentication. It’s a good idea, but decreases accessibility (which is part of security) - so there’s a value judgement here between the strength of a vpn and your accessibility goals.

    Some of my services (ssh, wg, nginx) are open to the internet. Some are behind a reverse proxy. Some require a vpn connection, even within my own house. It depends on who it’s for - just me, technical friends, the world, or my technically-challenged parents trying to type something with a roku remote.

    After strong auth, you want to think about software vulnerabilities - and you don’t have to think much, because there’s only one answer: keep your stuff up to date.

    All of the above covers the P in PICERL (pick-uh-rel) for Prepare. I stands for Identify, and this is tricky. In an ideal world, you get a real-time notification (on your phone if possible) when any of these things happen:

    • Any successful ssh login
    • Any successful root login
    • If a port starts listening that you didn’t expect
    • If the system watching for these things goes down (have two systems that watch each other)

    That list could be much longer, but that’s a good start.

    After Identification, there’s Contain + Eradicate. In a homelab context, that’s probably a fresh re-install of the OS. Attacker persistence mechanisms are insane - once they’re in, they’re in. Reformat the disk.

    R is for recover or remediate depending on who you ask. If you reformatted your disks, it stands for “rebuild”. Combine this with L (lessons learned) to rebuild differently than before.

    To close out this essay though, I want to reiterate Strong Auth. If you’ve got strong auth and keep things up to date, a breach should never happen. A lot of people work very hard every day to keep the strong auth strong ;)