Sorry, this was a little late, I spent the last few weeks rebuilding my Raspberry Pi NAS, again. I’ll be doing a write up on that in the near future.
This post is the fourth part of the series building my OSINT VM to do Open Source Intelligence. These are my experiences using a different Xubuntu for my base, compared to Michael Bazzell’s walkthrough in his book, which used Ubuntu.
There are two sections to this posting. Chrome, and TOR. Though I didn’t do much with TOR.
Welcome back to my series of setting up Virtual Machined to do OSINT. I’m setting up an OSINT investigation system based on Michael Bazzell’s 7th Edition OSINT book, but I’m using Xubuntu instead of Ubuntu. Remember, this series is about the differences I found between the walkthrough in the book and setting up my environment on a different Distribution.
In this post, I’ll be talking about the personalization steps covering the differences between Michaels’s text and the steps to do the same in Xubuntu. As I stated in the last post, I’m building a new OSINT Investigations VM based on Michael Bazzel’s book. In the previous post, I covered the differences between his book and my choice of using Xubuntu instead of Ubuntu.
In the latest edition of his book, Michael Bazzell has decided to teach OSINT investigators to be self-sufficient when it comes to their tools. Gone is his OSINT powerhouse VM Buscador. Gone are the free tools he used to host. Instead, because things change and disappear, he has decided to teach people to build their own tools.
He uses Ubuntu as the base for the Virtual Machine in the walkthroughs. I didn’t care for Ubuntu, mainly because I’m not too fond of the default desktops. Honestly, I prefer running Debian with XFCE. But for quick installations, I go with Xubuntu. I say quick installs because it usually works out of the box, whereas Debian usually takes me days of tweaking to get it right.
In the past, before his old investigation image, and it’s replacement Buscador, I would build my own VMs based on either Debian or Xubuntu, and replicate the things he had done in his builds. This time around, I decided to build my own Xubuntu image, following his guide for the tools.
Here are the things I had to change to get Xubuntu based system set up.
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.
Over the weekend I updated my mail server. Turns out if you have Dovecot installed and configured with Postfix, and Dovecot fails, Postfix stops working too. When I was trying to fix Dovecot I had mail in my mailbox, I could see it if I ran the mail command on the server. But I couldn’t see the email in my desktop client. After fixing Dovecot, I couldn’t see any new email in either place.
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?”
I thought I’d share some troubleshooting related items to setting up my raspi-NAS the other night.
A couple of years ago, I don’t remember when, I built a small NAS using a Raspberry Pi 2 B version 1.1, and two 128G USB flash drives from Microcenter. It is called “raspi-nas”, and I built it following the How-To Geek Guide: How to Turn a Raspberry Pi into a Low-Power Network Storage Device. It worked well to back up our phones. Which is all it is used for. It used wireless for the network connection.
So as mentioned previously, I’m looking at using Python’s Virtual Environments, to keep code straight. Figuring out how to set it up was a bit of fun. I’m sure there are some great plugins for Atom, but I haven’t found them yet.
So far here is how I’m using it. I’ve created two directories, .venv and Projects. Both are in my home folder. When I create a new project directory, like AtBS_Udemy, I create a matching env directory under .venv. In AtBS’ case, it is AtBS_Udemy_env.
It’s actually working out pretty well so far, but I’ve only done this on 2 *Nix based boxes so far. A work VM and my travel-laptop. We’ll have to see how this goes long term.