This project has been created as part of the 42 curriculum by jmaxwell.

Born2beRoot

description

this is a project in which we will set up and configure a basic linux environment, where the main concepts will revolve mostly around sysadmin, a touch cybersecurity, and in which we will familiarise ourselves with "the wonderful of virtualization".

subject project repository

motivation

i chose Debian (13 trixie, latest) for its setup ease in comparison to the only other choice granted of rocky, the fact that i am already somewhat familiar with its default tools and because if i am given a choice between an actually foss project and a wannabe but actually corporate one, i will not consider the latter as an option.

i therefore had to go with AppArmor, since that is the default on Debian ; ditto for ufw.

this was run on VirtualBox, partly because i had already tinkered with it, and because it came preinstalled on my workstation.

instructions

config

hostname : jmaxwell42 user : jmaxwell

passwords

root : admin user : guest disk : DEADBEEF

script

location : /usr/local/bin/ name : monitoring.sh

resources

peers

mabergan

lbolea

jzmirou

online

partitioning

42paris discord confirmation that a separate home partition was not mandatory

password quality

man 8 pam_pwquality

stackoverflow fellow confused soul out there on the interwebs from 4 years ago, turns out the subject makes it sound like different rules are needed to exclude the difok requirement when actually that would be ignored anyway

askubuntu ended up not relying on pwquality.conf in the end, but this did lead me to look up libcrack

man 8 pam_cracklib initially confused as this looked like a duplicate of pw_quality but it turns out that additional relevant arguments are listed here like reject_username

password expiration

man 5 login.defs man 1 chage led me to this

sudo

archwiki needs no introduction

man 5 sudoers rtfm pays off

ssh

nixCraft

script

cpu cores [man 1 lscpu]

[man 1 wall]

[man 1 free]

[man 1 df]

stackoverflow logged users count

[man 1 uname] -vrsnmo because -a includes duplicate information

ai

no ai was willingly made use of during the realisation of this project. if any of the mentioned resources have done so in some capacity, this would have been without my knowledge.

prior

having already delved into the rabbit hole that is linux ricing, as well as a smidge of homelabbing, this was familiar territory except maybe for the sysadmin exclusive bits, the configuration of which remained mostly opaque and anything security related like lvm which i would avoid like the plague.