I got an email saying that my site auto-upgraded. I wasn’t happy about it, some of the settings I on the server should have prevented that. But it did the auto-upgrade anyway.

When I logged in, the dashboard said to update to PHP I checked the terminal, since I’m self-hosting, and saw I had the newest available in the repo installed on the server. I had to do testing to find out, no it kept pulling the older version.

I searched around, and all the howto guides were for people using Cpanel or some other hosting tool. They also suggested the PHP text tool. Which I used, and it said all my plugins would work. But the howto guides for hosted accounts past that point wouldn’t work for me though. I’m self-hosted. I finally found a blog post by someone saying what to change, the webserver to point to the right files. So I did.

And the site broke.

The error wasn’t much help, but more searching found I could turn debug on get better information. So I did that. The page was tossing errors. Google those, and found a walkthrough to fix Crayon Syntax Highlighter.

I also had to toss Attack Scanner, which made me sad, but that plugin was shut down in 2017.

And I thought getting Let’s Encrypt fixed a couple of weeks ago was a pain.

There was a poll on twitter recently asking about making a new blog.  My suggestion was to self-host WordPress on a VPS, and then use the attacks against both as case studies for the blog itself.

The real question comes down to, “what is your goal?”

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Last Thursday I listened to Risky Business 377. The part that really got me engaged was the section with the sponsor, RSA. They were talking about how they are working with schools to build educational SOCs.

What they were talking about though, and I’m paraphrasing from my point of view, was making Universities less theory like and more Trade school like. For example why not add a check point certification class to get students out with some experience and a certification after 3 months of class?

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So for those that hadn’t heard, I started a new job about a month ago. I’m no longer doing firewall audits, secure network design, and mainframe web emulation. I was kind of sad to leave some of the projects I was working on un-finished, but that was the nature of the beast.

So now I’m working in a Security Operation Center, as a CIRT Event Analyst (or at least that was the job description they sent me after I interviewed of what the job was going to be).

The downside is I now have a 2+ hour daily commute. It should take 45 minutes or less, but well we only have 2 seasons. Winter and Road Construction. It also means I have less time to work on things I want to. Reading and projects have been affected.

I’ve also been less than healthy lately. I got really sick before Bsides Detroit. The night before the con, I was at the hospital. I also ended up missing the con because of being sick. A fever for a week, and everything spinning regardless if I was sitting standing or laying down. Turns out I had an inner ear infection. Got drugs that helped but didn’t make me better. I wended up running a fever for 3 weeks. Now I just have this annoying cough.

I graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a BS in Applied Information Assurance. Now that is done, I’m working on some stuff that I want to do. I also am trying to to get accepted to UMUC for a Master of Science. I’m unsure if I want to go for the Cyber Security or Digital Forensics and Cyber Investigations degree.

Some of the projects:

• My Raspberry Pi WIDs modifications
• Study for my CISSP
• Hacker’s Challenge (from 2001)
• R Programming (Coursera Data Science Program)
• catching up on leisure reading
• Studying for my General Amateur Ticket
• Designing a new home lab
• some other things not for open consumption