Monica Rose

In the span of about 3 days, I successfully migrated my blog to use Hugo as my backend. Hugo (no, not the 2011 movie) is a static site generator that allows you to write Markdown files, and then creates HTML files from them. As you might guess from that blurb, Hugo itself is not hosting the content, but rather adapting the content to a web friendly format. Reasons There are a few major reasons for why I jumped to Hugo from my WordPress-based website, which can be summarized to 4 key points: speed, backups, flexibility and freedom, and potential liability....

Imagine this: you’re running a web hosting service and you need to connect in to add another client who has specific needs your setup script doesn’t account for. You try to connect via SSH, but it hangs. After hanging, you escape out of the session and reconnect with the verbose flag set. You notice the wrong IP address, and you realize that you set up Cloudflare proxying. So you SSH in to the server with the public facing IP address, to find out it’s still not connecting....

Admittedly, I’m pretty unfamiliar with VPNs, especially with setting up VPNs on routers. I’ve followed the excellent guide by egc to set up VPNs for my individual clients, such as my desktop or my laptop. However, one of the next logical steps is to learn how to set up a site-to-site VPN with DD-WRT. One of the issues with deploying it right now is that I’m currently an hour away from the other location....

On October 27th at 7 AM CDT, GuidePoint Security opened their 2022 Capture the Flag. This also happens to be the first Capture the Flag that I have ever participated in. As of me writing this blog post, I have yet to start as the CTF hasn’t started. Prior to me starting the event, I opted to get some tools set up in advance: VMWare Workstation 16 Kali Linux Sublime Text & Visual Studio Code Working OpenVPN install ILSpy gobuster & dirbuster nmap nitko Additionally, I have set up the following resources to be easily accessible:...

Programming can be an absolutely time consuming process, especially when you’re doing it when you’re a full time student and working a part time job. So how do I manage that? The Timeline A lot of the projects that I work on are small, relatively simple, and sporadic. Looking at my GitHub, you’ll notice that I’ll commit to a project for a few days, then switch to a different one altogether....

On December 10, 2021, a vulnerability within the Log4j2 library was discovered. Due to how widespread Log4j2 is, I had to mitigate the damage as quickly and efficiently as possible. What is Log4j? Log4j is a library in Java used for logging actions done within a program. These actions can include error messages, user input, responses, and warnings and are often used to refer back to what caused a given issue or determine how to optimize a program....