When we automate configurations we cannot avoid providing secrets to Ansible. The last thing we want is our secret data running around in plain text files on our control node. Luckily Ansible has a tool for this. Ansible Vault is an integrated encryption tool in Ansible to manage sensitive data like passwords, keys and certificates.…
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The traditional “LAMP stack” means Linux, Apache2, MySQL/MariaDB and PHP for many IT practitioners. It is a collection of software and services for running dynamic web applications with database backends. Linux is the Operating System kernel on which we run these services. Apache2 is a general web server for running static web sites. MariaDB is…
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Podman is an open source Pod Manager. It is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running containers. Their motto on their website is What is Podman? Simply put: alias docker=podman stating that Podman is 100% Docker compatible.
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Sometimes we want to install Microsoft TrueType fonts on our desktop to see webpages in our browser as they were intended to be viewed.
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If we want a cool personal lab environment, then we have to use cool tools and technology. Virtual machines are one of the best inventions for learning and practicing IT in isolated environments. We can simulate and test Operating System changes, kernel modifications and even network configurations from our chair on our PC or notebook.…
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VMWare is a famous name in virtualization technology. If you work in IT it is impossible that you don’t know about the VMWare products. A lot of companies use the vSphere infrastructure with vCenters and ESXi hosts. On the other end of their products there are the home users and small businesses. We can use…
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In a playbook or in a role sometimes we want to run different tasks based on different conditions. In most cases it depends on a fact (detail about the managed host) or some data collected during the playbook run. Ansible conditionals are there to make it possible to run different tasks based on different conditions,…
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Ansible loops and conditional statements are very cool inventions, but they are a double edged sword as well. The limitless freedom they give us can turn our roles into horrible mess. It is our responsibility to balance on the edge and use just the right amount of them in our code while we keep in…
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After we ran ad-hoc commands and created a monolith playbook, we will increase our level of automation. We will separate our code much better with introducing modular, reusable file structures called roles. Ansible roles will load variables, handlers and tasks automatically for us based on a defined directory and file structure.
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Ansible playbooks are YAML files with target host/group information, command execution and some loops and logic. A playbook is a blueprint of an operation on our managed nodes. Playbooks are the first step towards managing infrastructure as code.
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After we installed Ansible and tested that it works well, then we want to make it work for us. There are three methods Ansible can operate. The first one is running so called ad-hoc commands with the ansible command line tool. The second option is to write re-usable code (playbooks, roles and variables) and run…
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We all want to work smarter, not harder. (Or at least some of us…) Automating the repetitive tasks was always a huge leap forward even before the “DevOps times” when we wrote shell scripts and Perl code to create automation out of the box. Today we have the luxury of choosing between a lot of…
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BASH is the GNU Project‘s shell that stands for the Bourne Again Shell. It is one of the most commonly used shells on the Linux and BSD systems. It is conform to the IEEE POSIX P1003.2/ISO 9945.2 standard. At the time of writing this article the current version of BASH is bash-5.2.
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Microsoft Active Directory can be found at every medium/large organization (99% according to the THM room). This is why it is a common target for black hats and other malicious actors. In the Attacktive Directory room we can learn a lot about targeting the services in an AD. I use the THM in-browser Kali Linux…
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We worked with SQL nowadays, and we used some SQL Injections in the web browser and in Burp Suit, but what is an SQL Injection by the way? Let’s make a step back and look at the databases and SQL a bit!
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