PcTek9
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 85
- Location
- Mobile, AL
I recently looked at many devices for providing client security on their networks such as rattrap, firewalla, cujo, dojo and others to name a few. Then I discovered a small company called friendlyelec.com in china that sells tiny quad core computers 1.2 ghz 512mb of ram at $12.95. So I bought one to begin a home linux security project.
Here's the kit I bought, for $42.00 however you can just get the board for $12.95 and use it by itself, I liked the idea of the 1.5" case, it's very similiar to firewalla isn't it, but it has an lcd display.
Well the next thing I did was to try their operating systems they offer for it... including friendlyos, android, etc, but they crashed on me. I was so disappointed. So I moved on and downloaded armbian and it crashed on this device as well. Then I found dietpi and it has been rock solid super stable. I installed dietpi on the sd card, and then booted up. Yay I had a complete tiny linux system with 4 cores that used less power than a night light.
Now what?
Well, I decided to run a pi-hole on it to block all ads on all devices at my house. Yay it works great. Pihole is free open source software and totally amazing, please donate to them if you can because they are worthwhile. I then began to think, since it was usin very very little system resources, what else might i do with it?
I added:
arpon - a linux utility which stops man in the middle attacks, and many other things like arp cache poisoning.
arpwatch - sends an email to my iphone IF a new ip, or new mac, or old ip with the wrong mac shows up, i.e. i have an intruder.
labrea - if people try to hack me from the outside, labrea ties up their scanner all the way over in india or china or whever they are, it opens a bunch of useless connections and then talks very slowly to the hackers pc, causing it to eventually bluescreen and crash off line.
fail2ban - a tiny linux program that blocks people who try to get into my ssh server on my tiny device by their ip address. hehehe
mutt - a local host text mail reader
ssmtp - a mail sending solution that sends email using my gmail account.
------ and much much more.
Dietpi has a menu of optimized software that is out of this world. Tiny fast linux programs that can do everything you might imagine. One click and you can install stuff, lots of stuff. For a wide variety of purposes. I'm even running a website, and a remote linux administration website control on it. LOL. If nothing else it's tons of fun and lots of easy and cheap learning.
If you worry about your wifi connections you can install freeradius, a radius server that does the authentication of your access points radius logins to have enterprise wifi security at your home or your clients homes. This box and the dietpi distro are so amazing, it's like a network ninja in your pocket. I highly recommend it.
Here's the kit I bought, for $42.00 however you can just get the board for $12.95 and use it by itself, I liked the idea of the 1.5" case, it's very similiar to firewalla isn't it, but it has an lcd display.
Well the next thing I did was to try their operating systems they offer for it... including friendlyos, android, etc, but they crashed on me. I was so disappointed. So I moved on and downloaded armbian and it crashed on this device as well. Then I found dietpi and it has been rock solid super stable. I installed dietpi on the sd card, and then booted up. Yay I had a complete tiny linux system with 4 cores that used less power than a night light.
Now what?
Well, I decided to run a pi-hole on it to block all ads on all devices at my house. Yay it works great. Pihole is free open source software and totally amazing, please donate to them if you can because they are worthwhile. I then began to think, since it was usin very very little system resources, what else might i do with it?
I added:
arpon - a linux utility which stops man in the middle attacks, and many other things like arp cache poisoning.
arpwatch - sends an email to my iphone IF a new ip, or new mac, or old ip with the wrong mac shows up, i.e. i have an intruder.
labrea - if people try to hack me from the outside, labrea ties up their scanner all the way over in india or china or whever they are, it opens a bunch of useless connections and then talks very slowly to the hackers pc, causing it to eventually bluescreen and crash off line.
fail2ban - a tiny linux program that blocks people who try to get into my ssh server on my tiny device by their ip address. hehehe
mutt - a local host text mail reader
ssmtp - a mail sending solution that sends email using my gmail account.
------ and much much more.
Dietpi has a menu of optimized software that is out of this world. Tiny fast linux programs that can do everything you might imagine. One click and you can install stuff, lots of stuff. For a wide variety of purposes. I'm even running a website, and a remote linux administration website control on it. LOL. If nothing else it's tons of fun and lots of easy and cheap learning.
If you worry about your wifi connections you can install freeradius, a radius server that does the authentication of your access points radius logins to have enterprise wifi security at your home or your clients homes. This box and the dietpi distro are so amazing, it's like a network ninja in your pocket. I highly recommend it.
