GoAccess Shell Plugin Revamped

I made a bunch of big changes to the GoAccess shell plugin including improved argument handling, greater agnosticism, and greater configurability with time filtering. I converted the plugin from sourced script to regular bash script. This meant the script components had to be ordered into a sequential configuration, but this also makes the script more portable and easier to fire up. The script options now support short and long call values, courtesy of Stack Overflow....

2013-09-08 · 2 min · 298 words · Nathaniel Hoag

Home-Grown VPN

I just checked off another item on the TODO list - set up VPN. This was so simple and quick, I wish I’d done it earlier. I basically just ran through the instructions at the following 3 links: Initial Server Setup with Ubuntu 12.04 How To Set Up SSH Keys How to Install OpenVPN Access Server on Ubuntu 12.04 Mostly the same instructions apply for Ubuntu 12.10 and OpenVPN 1.8.5.

2013-09-05 · 1 min · 70 words · Nathaniel Hoag

GASP: GoAccess Shell Plugin

I made some good progress on the GoAccess plugin over the past few days. Many of the kinks have been ironed out and making access.log reports has never been so easy :) It’s a pretty simple plugin, but it does the job well. My favorite parts of the script are a fun bit of regex that’s just aesthetically pleasing, the awk date filter, and the overall flow of execution. yes='^1$|^([y|Y]([e|E][s|S])?)$' cmDATE=`date -u -v-"$goINTVAL"H +\[%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S` # OSX date command format (-v)....

2013-09-03 · 1 min · 97 words · Nathaniel Hoag

GoAccess for Log Analysis

An excellent log analysis tool that I picked up recently from a blog post by my colleague, Amin Astaneh, is the GoAccess interactive web log analyzer. Out of the box, you can unleash GoAccess on raw or piped log data to reveal an array of interesting traffic patterns that might otherwise take some serious piping skills to crack - I covered some of these in a recent blog post.

2013-08-31 · 1 min · 69 words · Nathaniel Hoag

Puppet Power Up

I’ve dabbled with, attended presentations for, and read about configuration management systems for quite a while. For at least the past year, every time I start up a new project I can’t help but think about all of the benefits that would ensue from wrapping my work in a managed server configuration. I decided recently to bite the bullet and dive into Puppet head. In getting started, and to keep things simple, I decided to utilize a Vagrant box running 64-bit Ubuntu 12....

2013-08-29 · 2 min · 255 words · Nathaniel Hoag