new to Lemmy and still figuring things out. didn't see any ask Linux type communities, so I have a question, seeking guidance

moobythegoldensock, 10 months ago

Ask communities = !linux4noobs, !linuxquestions.

GadgeteerZA, 10 months ago

Just make sure when you search under communities that you choose All, as it often only defaults to Local. All should return any communities that match your search term, across all Lemmy instances.

gratux, 10 months ago

At least from all instances known to the home instance. If you want to search something from an unknown instance, you have to do so by direct link

InFerNo, 10 months ago

Perhaps webmin could be what you’re looking for. I haven’t used it in 10 years though.

Stapling9851, 10 months ago

Never even heard of it, gonna do some research. Thank you

RelativeArea0, 10 months ago

Opensuse has GUI frontend that controls almost all the system settings called YaST, why dont you give it a try

InFerNo, 10 months ago

Do you mean give yast a try or OpenSUSE?

Stapling9851, 10 months ago

Yes! I tried tumbleweed before but it seemed quite fragile or maybe over secure? Idk if I’m explaining it correctly, but it seemed like everything I tried to do on the OS ended up breaking the system so I has to keep starting over and try reconfiguring things. Probably just learning curve issues

RelativeArea0, 10 months ago

Yep, too overly specific or weird on some stuff, like for example on installing packages via terminal, I just went with suggesting it because I haven’t fully red and understood your query, my bad :)

As for auditing tools, I can’t think of any because there is a lot of ways how to check logs and it is messy ngl. If I’ll be honest with you how I kinda survived linux is by automating backup of important files through nas and if I f*cked up my system, instead of fiddling the logs to find what went wrong, I’ll just nuke it.

Stapling9851, 10 months ago

Not a bad approach actually lol. I’ve pretty much done the same with virtually no backup. I never have much to save on my computers.

pezhore, 10 months ago

Hrm, I’ve been using Linux as my dayjob server os of choice for about 15 years, and for my personal computer for the past 10 - and I haven’t found something like what you described. Something I would recommend is looking at a configuration management tool (Ansible is a really solid choice).

Stability issues often come from misconfiguration or just flat out configuration drift (changes over time) - something like Ansible or Chef would help with that.

Other things that touch on some of your concerns may be SELinux (wiki.debian.org/SELinux). It’s a bit of a pain to get set up, but once you do your system is much more secure. It effectively functions under the principal of least access to lock down your Debian OS, rendering the need for AV/Malware scanning somewhat moot.

I’ve done a cursory glance or two at Checkmk for monitoring, but it sounds a bit overkill for a single Debian workstation.

I mostly troubleshoot things like VPN instability or crashes by diving into /var/log or journalctl -ex to see if any googleable errors are visible.

Maybe someone else on here has more help to give?

Stapling9851, 10 months ago

Great advice. Its just that I’m sorta a eager learner when it comes to tech, especially the privacy and security side and I honestly don’t always know what I’m doing or I’ll read the wrong guide to set things up and I end up getting lost or confused or things just straight up don’t work. So I for sure have some wires crossed somewhere and some roadblocks causing issues here and there. I have recently learned more about ansible and chef and I indeed need to research. Those tools seem quite complex but hey, I’ll try anyway. And as far as selinux goes, I just thought that was one of those thins that automatically comes installed and configured on every OS? Also there’s app armor… Is that in this realm of things too? Is it deemed “good” or necessary to use? Thanks

pezhore, 10 months ago

Personally, I find Ansible to be much more intuitive than other products in the configuration management space. Start small, think about what you want your system to look like.

Do you want Firefox installed? Use ansible.builtin.package to install it!

Do you want to have ssh server configured to disallow password authentication (and only allow ssh keys)? Use ansible.builtin.blockinfile on your sshd.config file!

Regarding SELinux vs apparmor, they both are designed to lock down a system, but they have different philosophies about how to approach the problem.

SELinux says block all by default and only if it’s configured to allow it will it be allowed to happen.

Apparmor on the other hand is permissive by default, and it will only restrict if it is configured to do so.

By the way, both can be managed by Ansible, and SELinux even has a module to do so: docs.ansible.com/ansible/…/selinux_module.html.

Stapling9851, 10 months ago

Fascinating stuff! A tad confusing lol but definitely learnable. So to me, selinux and app armor sound similar to firewalls… On the surface at least

pezhore, 10 months ago

I suppose you could say it’s similar in that there are allow-lists and deny-lists that permit or restrict actions, but the key difference is Apparmor/SELinux are in the OS space - they can permit/restrict the ability to restart services, or prevent sudo from being used in certain ways.

Firewalls are predominantly used to permit/restrict network connectivity either ingress (e.g. traffic from outside the system coming into it) or egress (e.g. traffic that is leaving the system). A good example would be using a firewall to restrict ingress traffic to port 22 - allowing remote management of a system over SSH.

I hope this is helpful!

Stapling9851, 10 months ago

Thanks!