twm

What is this "sort-of fail2ban?" I talked about in my last post, you may ask. Simple...

I wanted some sort of syslog aggregation but found the popular software packages way too big and complicated (plus in one certain case: cumbersome to configure and poorly documented). Settled on a central syslogd instead.

Having the central syslog was nice, but "grep" was insufficient for more structured searches, so I wrote a small tool to feed it all into a PostgreSQL-DB and a small command line client for querying the DB without having to write a full SQL query every time.

"Hm, when I feed it into the DB I could already extract the interesting parts and have a small and fast index for those?!". Done.

Having that I now can do two things:

1) A single SELECT gets me an accumulated list of bad actor IPs that I can feed into "pf" periodically.

2) A VIEW and another single SELECT gets me an RSS feed of things I like to know about.

These two things were not planned at all when I started with the log aggregation, yet turned out to be incredibly handy.

The whole project has only about 900 lines of code (mostly Perl, some SQL, a tiny bit of Go).

Which selfmade tools do you have?

My tiny allround VPS at Hetzner has a sort-of fail2ban, mainly to prevent the logs from filling up with garbage that won't work anyway. The ban-list usually had around 120 entries of repeat offenders. Starting this year the list had grown to a constant 200+ entries, and this morning it's at 380. I don't have any statistics, but my guess would be the machine sees more abuse attempts than actual traffic. Do you notice a similar trend?

Can I get a Macbook Neo, but with an Intel N150 and Slackware? Low end, low budget, yet portable and sturdy - that segment is hugely underrepresented in the x86-64 market. My old Acer Swift 1 fits some of these aspects, but not all.

So I've been using Fastmail with my own domain name for several years now. Fastmail is excellent - simply the best e-mail service I know, but it's also a bit on the pricey side, and I'm not sure if this is worth it any longer for my usage.

Many years back my e-mail was mostly personal correspondence with friends. Nowadays it's just bills, confirmations, notifications and newsletters. These things (well, some of them) need to work reliably, too, but I just don't feel "invested" in e-mail any more and think about switching to a simpler and more affordable service, most likely Posteo.

How has your use of e-mail changed over the years?

Just updated the small collection of shell scripts and m4 macros that makes up the configuration management for all my machines. Yes, you read that right: m4. How does this make you feel?

Woohoo, new Donny Benét mini album »il basso« is out. Do you like 80s synths and funky slap bass? Then give it a go! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g3DF7EHDDU #TheDon