I disagree! They can be great options, inexpensive and reliable. My current home server is a Dell r620 with xeon CPUs, 64gbs of RAM, and 2 terabytes storage in raid 5. It serves several vms, a mix of Windows and Linux. More than enough for many home set ups. Boots the os off a 16gb flash card. Cost me $185. Thing has been a tank.

I bought two short L brackets from home Depot, and have it hanging flat against the wall. It’s been fabulous.

Derp, thanks for the prompt. I’d like to move to a position for more income. Government or private. Currently at $127k / yr.

Looking for cert guidance!

I’m a late-40’s life-long IT guy, working as a cybersecurity architect / deputy CISO for a state govt agency the last few years. I have my CISSP and bachelor’s in IT mgmt from WGU.

I have access to free microsoft classes & cert tests through my employer. Thinking about going back and getting some certs. Does it make sense to do the security certs in order?

SC-900, SC-100-200-300-400, AZ 500

Or am I overthinking it and I should just jump in and try a test to see how I do?

Also off work today, so it’s pet-project time: I have some scripts that collect local housing rental prices. I’ve been collecting this information in a sqlite db using python webscraping libraries, so I can chart the effects of gentrification and homelessness in my (small, rural) community.

Thanks for doing these. We’re here, this community is growing, and your encouragement and nudging is good 😀

Nice!

I could use a resume review.

I’m a security architect in the public sector, state government. I started as an entry level sysadmin around 2000. I’m being strongly encouraged to apply for the CISO position here. I’m 46, and currently lead a team of 3.

Every time I apply for the private sector, including lower level jobs, it’s crickets. If I apply for govt work, I get people banging on my door.

How do I get a resume review, or someone to point out what I need to make the jump from govt to private sector?

Always love these kinds of questions, and love how you are working to build this community.

I work for a government agency as a deputy ciso, and I’m putting together a decision package for legislature to request new staff. I’m looking for five new members of my team, which would slightly double our size. It’s a very long process, which involves a lot of capacity planning, reading strategic plans and tying it to things other people have talked about, demonstrating work bottlenecks through metrics from our soc, and leveraging relationships and capital Goodwill that I’ve built over the last couple years.

Cross your fingers for me.

This is excellent, very useful for continuing to make images accessible on the fediverse

t every company should have? Is there even a frame

I was the lone security person there for a bit. Now there’s 4 of us. I broke it down into two risks:

service / system outage data breach / loss

The way I approached shoring up defenses was with specific activities each week:

vulnerability remediation audit & compliance incident response governance & policy security awareness program

It might help to think of things in a maturity model. Putting in a SEIM is a big job, and maybe more appropriate for when the security program at your org has matured more. What you can do is spend time working on the other stuff - what’s your endpoint protection? What compliance requirements do you have? How’s your inventory & asset management? What’s policy look like? Do your AD accounts all make sense? What’s the password policy? Do you have any old service accounts?

Picking little stuff allows you to make progress, and gets you ready to move to the bigger things. A mentor once told me to use a checklist (for life in general, but applies to cyber):

1 Did they ask you for help 2 Do you have it to give 3 Have you done enough for now

Good luck!

Usually labeled as P series.

This is how I do my home system, Dell r710xd I believe. I bought it used via craigslist and I think it came from the local power company. In the States we have government surplus sites that have stuff cheap.

You can mount a rack mount system vertically on the side of the wall, hanging down with a couple of shelf brackets.

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Ayy, nice work getting started down the selfhosting route! Start by remembering that security is a maturity process. To find out if you’re doing the right things at the right time, ask yourself:

• Do I know it needs to be done
• Have I done enough (this day, week, etc)
• Do I have it to give

If you’re just one person and it’s a self-hosted home setup, remember you can’t patch all the things all at once. Asking yourself regularly if you maturing your environment over time is essential. Do a little work each week and you’ll make good progress.

When I think of security, I think of a few things

Authentication & Access - each system should have just enough accounts with just enough permissions to get work done. Change default passwords. Make them long and unique. Use MFA whenever possible (often impractical for self-hosted; cut yourself slack when this is the case!). A note on logging - if you can, while you’re doing this homework, check how long it saves logs. Shoot for keeping logs longer if possible; I like 30 days, but you might want more. Also make sure you have a time server, or at least that you’re getting accurate time stamps. If something weird happens and you’re investigating, having timestamps on logs that line up and make sense helps you recreate what happened, so you can decide if you need to wipe something and reload it.

Patching - automated scanning of your stuff for vulns would be fantastic if you’re interested in going that route, but a Saturday morning checklist to run updates on everything works too.

Attack Surface Management - if you’re not sure you’re exposed, scanning externally can be a big help. I have a Racknerd server ($40/yr, it’s amazing) in San Diego and I periodically run scans of my home network to see what’s forwarded. This is using nmap, although I could also use a free version of Nessus Essentials on there. This gives me an idea of what I look like from outside my network.

Inventory - do you know what you have, and what’s it doing? Even a pencil drawing of your network, IP addresses, and services they have can come in super handy. While big orgs have an index of critical data and where it’s stored, just knowing what containers are running on which VM or physical box can help if stuff goes sideways. I redraw mine periodically, yes it’s hand drawn because it’s fast and does the job lol. Do what works for you, though, to keep an inventory of your stuff. You need to know what you have, what it does, and where it’s supposed to be going.