The post written about rdist(1) on sparked News Roundup rdist(1) – when Ansible is too much One part of my defenses has been tarpits in various forms. I’ve maintained such a server for nearly six years now, and more than 99% of my incoming traffic has ill intent. The Internet is a very hostile place, and anyone who’s ever stood up an Internet-facing IPv4 host has witnessed the immediate and continuous attacks against their server. When done well, a tarpit imposes more cost on the attacker than the defender. This arrests the speed at which a bad actor can attack or probe the host system, and it ties up some of the attacker’s resources that might otherwise be spent attacking another host.
I’m a big fan of tarpits: a network service that intentionally inserts delays in its protocol, slowing down clients by forcing them to wait. In this post, we take a quick look at the Plan 9 O/S and some of the notable features, before moving on to the construction of a self-contained 4-node Raspberry Pi cluster that will provide a compact platform for experimentation.
Just like UNIX, Plan 9 was developed as a research O/S - a vehicle for trying out new concepts - with it building on key UNIX principles and taking the idea of devices are just files even further. Plan 9 from Bell Labs comes from the same stable as the UNIX operating system, which of course Linux was designed after, and Apple’s OS X runs on top of a certified UNIX operating system. A PI-powered Plan 9 cluster, an SSH tarpit, rdist for when Ansible is too much, falling in love with OpenBSD again, how I created my first FreeBSD port, the Tilde Institute of OpenBSD education and more.
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