James Timberlake

just my own personal notes that i don't want to forget

Tag: xenserver

Security Onion virtual machine in Xenserver

October 14, 2016 / / 0 Comments

“Security Onion is a Linux distro for intrusion detection, network security monitoring, and log management. It’s based on Ubuntu and contains Snort, Suricata, Bro, OSSEC, Sguil, Squert, ELSA, Xplico, NetworkMiner, and many other security tools. The easy-to-use Setup wizard allows you to build an army of distributed sensors for your enterprise in minutes!”

I virtualized this under my Xenserver all-in-one host.  This host has the resources to host a vm like this.  It also contains my virtual pfSense firewall performing inter-VLAN routing and numerous virtual machines, so the Open vSwitch bridge is seeing nearly all the packets bouncing around my home network.

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Xenserver, Open vSwitch, and port mirroring

October 12, 2016 / / 0 Comments

One of my interests, as well as my day job, is cyber security. I have dabbled with running an IDS at home for 10+ years now, but as my hardware aged or died, I just didn’t have the tech at home to do it anymore. With the arrival of my new server, time to virtualize an IDS.

In the physical world, this is “easy”. In the old days, I would plug my 10Mbps hub inline between my cable modem and router/firewall. Off the hub I would connect my monitoring server running Snort. Well things have come a LONG way since then. Now with 100Mbps WAN connections becoming the norm, and gigabit networks in the LAN, a hub isn’t going to cut it. On a managed switch I just configure a port mirror (RSPAN) source and destination. Plug monitoring server into the destination and watch the packets!

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Xen Orchestra

September 23, 2016 / / 0 Comments

One of my biggest gripes with Xenserver is the management utility, XenCenter, from Citrix is Windows only. My laptop runs Fedora, with a Windows VM, but I’d prefer a web GUI.  Don’t get me wrong, XenCenter is well done and for certain things I still find myself using it.

Then I stumbled upon Xen Orchestra.  Initially I tried the appliance, XOA, and watched it mature over a number of months.  However, some of the features I wanted to try were limited to the “Premium” version.  Then I discovered that the developers want to support little guys like me and provide the full features if you compile from sources. Sweet!

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Xenserver 7 config

September 14, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Why Xenserver? I’ve used Esxi, Proxmox, oVirt, and rolled my own hypervisors in the past. Xenserver provides the right blend of features, price (free), and command-line API.  It has its quirks (they all do), but they are easily solved.

Having used 6.2 and 6.5 previously, this was my first look at 7.0.  The install is the same familiar Redhat-based text mode. During install, I set the management network to NIC0 with static IP. Once installed and rebooted, I installed the latest XenCenter GUI in a Windows 10 VirtualBox VM I keep around for stuff like this and got to setting it up.

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Virtualization host All-In-One

September 13, 2016 / / 0 Comments

After over a decade of limping along with the same ancient Pentium 3 and 4 “servers”, I decided to finally throw some money at the problem. Some of these servers were actually laptops, and the best/most recent machine was a box I built for Mythtv…in 2004. 32-bit, PATA, oh my.

I picked up a Dell Poweredge R710 barebones (dual 870W power supplies, dual heatsinks, PERC 6/i, iDRAC enterprise, no RAM, no CPU) on Ebay then configured it to my liking with other Ebay or Amazon purchases: dual L5640’s, 48GB (6 x 8GB) RAM, H200 RAID card. I started with the LFF model, which supports 6 3.5″ drives in the front hotswap sleds. Since this will be a hyperconverged (computer and storage) host, these will house multi-terabyte HDD’s. More on that later. I can expand the RAM up to 12 (full speed) or 18 sticks if I need to.

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