Security

On the Hardware This post is originally wrote earlier this year, back then I bought an used HP EliteDesk 705 G4 Mini as a cheap NUC alternative. For its price and availability, I choose this model over Intel NUC but it turned out NUC may be the better option. It comes with a 4 core 8 thread CPU, Ryzen 5 2400GE with 35W TDP. If set it up as a Proxmox server with enough RAM, it can run about 2-3 VMs to run some light services. But now, my plan is to configure it as a remote portal with RustDesk client. ...

Background with Kicksecure Last year, I set up my Monero Wallet with Kicksecure and happy about it. This distro is really lightweight and easy to use. However, it failed completely after a recent upgrade, which was a major version leap from Debian 12 to 13. It lost drivers, desktop environment stopped working and probably much more which I couldn’t discover because I stacked at a login screen loop. After troubleshooting for a couple of hours, it turns out all lightdm related DEs are unusable and Gnome and KDE are working. ...

Background Last month, Cisco researchers detected over 1,000 Ollama instances within the first 10 minutes using Shodan scanning on 11434 port. Other services such as vLLM/llama.cpp/LangChain on 8000, LM Studio on 1234, GPT4All on 4891, are also identified. Later, Censys found 10.6K Ollama instances publicly available online, and 1.5K of these instances respond to prompts. That poses not only a great security risk of RCE, injection and poisoning, but also possible to expose private chat memory via unauthorized prompting. ...

It has been a while since my WiFi is getting more and more unstable, and I finally decided to retire my NETGEAR R6300v2 which has served me well since in 2017. It was in used condition when I bought it, so this is a good time to get a “new” router. Because the ISPs in my area are very bad, I still have to stick with the low speed Internet for probably quite some time. So I decided to buy a used Linksys MR7350. ...

During the prime day, my friend grabbed a GL.iNet Flint 2 (GL-MT6000) for a fair price, thanks to the slickdeals community. The specs of this model feels like a beast to me, because I don’t have enough high-end devices and Internet plan to utilize that much of performance. But what I can do is to boost its security and stability for my friend. Note: For operational security, all initial settings should be done without physical Internet/WAN connection. ...