Tag: Linux

Technology

Updating The Raspberry Pi Cluster

Posted on by Shane

Hullo MicroK8s!

Awhile back the Raspberry Pi cluster was born. At the time, the best thing to run seemed to be Rancher Labs K3s. But soon after I installed K3s, Rancher released a new version and with this new version a lot of things changed, and what I had installed was deprecated. I could no longer update packages. Argh!

So …. I recently reinstalled the entire cluster using MicroK8s. I really like this version of K8s and I am having a lot of fun playing around with it. Currently trying to get an ELK stack to work, which has been challenging and frustrating. I am getting a huge kick out of the dashboard. How cool is this?

32 CPU’s, almost 600 GB of RAM from 8 nodes. Here are the nodes in the cluster and the portainer.io dashboard, which was really easy to install, it was a simple command to enable it as a plugin.

I’ll try and post an update when I get ELK configured. Stay tuned!

CybersecurityTechnology

Fun with VMs

Posted on by Shane

The need for a VM

This week I am taking the Active Defense & Cyber Deception class with John Strand and in preparation for the class I followed this guide.

Mac

One of the steps is to install VMWare. So I try this on my Macbook. It’s an M1, and I forgot when I was downloading to make sure to grab the right download. That failed because I have the M1 chip. I grabbed the right one, but it won’t run the VM because the VM wants X86 Arch. Of course.

Windows

So I scramble and borrow a Windows laptop (Dell Inspiron 17) that my mother in law is not using. We got it for her last Christmas, but she never uses it because it’s slow. Well, she was not kidding. It’s super slow, and that’s because HDD utilization under Task Manager is always at 100%. Like, always. I really don’t like Windows. I loved Windows 98, and XP was probably my favorite. That’s about the time I made the switch to Mac. So I spent almost a day doing all the things I could find and think of to solve the issue, but no go. Even reinstalled windows, updated all drivers, etc. I think the HDD and/or cable is bad or RAM is not working right and causing constant swapping. Whatever it is, I can’t use this laptop. I ordered an SSD and some new RAM so I can play with it later.

Linux

Next was to try and make this work on My Kali Linux. I was sure that it was not going to work, but someone in Discord who is also in the class mentioned that it should. I gave it a shot, and sure enough, I am good to go! I figured Kali would not work as well as Ubuntu, or RHEL, but it’s smooth.

So lesson learned … try Linux first. Always.

Technology

Adafruit Clue Projects

Posted on by Shane

One of my team mates at work started a project group for within my team to experiment with a Clue. This thing is so cool! The idea is to try project together as a group. So far there are 5 of us and I imagine it will grow even larger as word spreads.

My Clue arrived today, along with a Wio Terminal which I plan to try several projects with as well. I’ll post updates as they come, including the projects we tackle. Stay Tuned!

Technology

Wio Terminal Network Analyzer

Posted on by Shane

What better way to get acquainted with the Wio Terminal than a project! I saw the Dual Band WiFi Analyzer with Wio Terminal example and decided to follow it. It was a pretty smooth and fun process.

You start by setting up the Wio Terminal software, then you update the Wireless Core RTL8720 firmware and install all related libraries.

python3 ambd_flash_tool.py erase

python3 ambd_flash_tool.py flash

Then you install the Arduino_GFX Library. But that’s not as easy as the tutorial says. I kept getting a failure and missing files messages. I figured it was just some missing libraries, it’s like trying to install RPMs 10 years ago and solving dependencies. 🙂 This was a life saver. All the libraries you need to make it work. Make sure you Arduino IDE "Sketch" Menu -> "Include Library" -> "Add.ZIP Library" -> select downloaded ZIP file for each library.

For reference that’s these repos:

Seeed_Arduino_rpcWiFi 26 – master branch
Seeed_Arduino_rpcUnified 16 – master branch
Seeed_Arduino_mbedtls 31 – dev branch
Seeed_Arduino_FS 14 – master branch
Seeed_Arduino_SFUD 12 – master branch

After those are installed, upload and it’s done!