No sooner do I finish up on my Windows server…now I’m using an older 400Mhz box to start standing up an Ubuntu server to start using stuff there. While I like stability for the things I use daily, I really want to learn more, so rather than languish my stuff on Windows for a few years, I’m moving on already.

The first thing I want to move over are the things I use cygwin/Windows for, namely my SSH server. My SSH server gets quite a few hits, strangely Amsterdam is outpacing Asia in SSH auth attempts. If you let that page load, you can see all the attempted login names. Since I am running SSH on cygwin, I don’t even use “root” or “admin.” I’m surprised that “Administrator” is not used more, since that is what cygwin pulls in (it mirrors the Windows accounts). If someone can do that small battery of attempts, it is trivial to add “administrator” to that initial slam.

Anyway, yes, my next project is to start standing up and getting more familiar with running certain apps on Linux. SSH is not going to be an issue, and I’d like to leverage Linux to analyze my Apache log files and other neat things on my network. On a more advanced note, I want to throw sendmail or another nix mail server up as well. I like my current mail server, but the image spam is just not terribly fun and spam solutions on Windows are not as impressive to me as nix solutions. Besides, I want to be exposed to more. I spent years in my comfort zone and it’s paying off to try out new things. This box also now had a 200GB HD and has always had 2 NICs which plays right into my hands to get Snort on a nix box and familiarize myself with some more monitoring tools.

That’s how my spring is shaping up, and what has been stealing my time lately.