PLUG Meeting March 5th 2019

[cod3poet]

A bridge 2fa.

It's vitally important for your security that you have unique and complex passwords for the websites and services you access and, for securing your essential online accounts, Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). Member Jason Wallwork will discuss how using a password manager can help you with having unique and complex passwords as well as reviewing some of the popular paid and free options. Lastly, he will introduce the concept of 2FA and the different types you can use and benefits and drawbacks of each

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With the next meeting fast approaching I have some ideas but I wanted to put it out to the community to see if there was anything wanted to bring to the table?

Has anyone done some tinkering with OPNsense?

I have my Arch bespoke hipster artisanal router in production and have been running it for a month with only 20 minutes of downtime thanks to a library conflict / kernel panic that had everything to do with having way too much stuff running on it. Fixed with a oneliner and a reboot no issues since.

Hope everyone has been surviving the weird weather.

[Jason]

I could talk about 2-Factor-Authentication if there is interest. What it is, how to use it and so on. Could add password management to that to fill it out a little more.

[fox]

I would like a presentation on 2-factor, and that would give Brian a break from presenting. But I would like to hear what ideas you have.

Something else that might make a good future presentation would be a comparison of desktop environments. We had a recent thread on that, but it was all based on Harry's notion of three functions a DE must have to interest him. I'm thinking that members can write in functions that are important to them and we can look at how these functions are implemented (or not) by the various DE's. Those could be Gnome, Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, LXDE, and Mate, and we could add LXQT, Deepin, Pantheon, and Budgie. We could even run this with one person coordinating and members familiar with the particular desktop pitching in.

[Jason]

I would like a presentation on 2-factor, and that would give Brian a break from presenting. But I would like to hear what ideas you have.

What ideas I have other than 2FA?

Regarding the idea of a comparison of DEs, I think that would be an interesting idea, too, for a future presentation as you suggested.

[fox]

I meant what other ideas Brian has, as he mentioned in the first posting that he had others.

[cod3poet]

I have had some great success with KVM for virtualization and even got remote console working from a windows machine to a linux hypervisor. That means I can have a headless server hosting virtual machines so I can pack in more without having a desktop environment on the server. I have also been doing stuff with Docker containers, and am going to be venturing into Kubernetes clusters this week for grins. Always something brewing. However Two Factor Authentication is important, and soon to be bloody everywhere so it's a prime topic for discussion. I use it daily myself.

[fox]

I would like to hear about KVM sometime, as it would be something I would potentially use. In particular, I'd like to know how it compares to Virtualbox. Regarding containers, there is certainly a lot of press about them, but I don't know if they're potentially useful to an individual (as opposed to an organization or business).

[Jason]

I'd like to see a future presentation on containers or KVM. I think either is probably a topic in itself.

[cod3poet]

VM's are for distro hoppers, Containers are for people who want to dabble in web apps / network applications or development of some kind (does NOT have to be web) as you can run services in a container like Database or different versions of scripting languages.

They are simmilar to Snaps or Flatpaks except they have isolated networking and can communicate differently. E.g.  3 different versions of python, 2 Mariadb databases (one with data and one for testing against), and an Nginx / Apache container for web stuff. All on one box, without having to spool up a whole virtual machine to run them, and if one of the versions of python goes sideways because you fat finger something or install the wrong library you destroy the broken instance re-initialize and boom 20-30 seconds later you are back to where you are without having to snapshot / backup and restore a full VM. Or having it break because you apt update && apt upgrade your system.

Yes probably two different conversations.

[cod3poet]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot

Dark, vulgar but as said the greatest contemporary look into the hacking world that is the most true to live representation you can currently find.

Attached is the screencap showing the sheer amount of attempts made against a standard port server, and how often a successful login works. If there was another spike on there I would be worried.

Let me know if there was any other questions, feel free to post them here or we can split off another thread.

P.s. Thanks to everyone for giving my cards back

[fox]

Scary!

[Jason]

Sorry that I wasn't able to make it guys but it sounds like Brian filled in with an interesting talk judging by the graphic above Thanks, Brian!