Tuesday, 17. March 2020 Week 12
Friday, 20. December 2019 Week 51

This Page is Designed to Last

This Page is Designed to Last — a manifesto from Jeff Huang for preserving content on the web, where he advocates to keep content on the web available and pledges to keep his site available for the next 10 years.

Having my content in this weblog online since 2002, I can very much relate to this initiative and additionally would like to point to the efforts of archive.org (aka. The Internet Archive).
The wayback machine of archive.org allows to see old versions of websites, even when the website itself is no longer available.

For me personally this became critically useful when the database of my weblog vanished with no current backup and I then used the archived versions from archive.org to restore the missing content.

Thus I would like to encourage everyone to support the efforts of archive.org with a donation.

Saturday, 2. November 2019 Week 44
Saturday, 25. May 2019 Week 21
Sunday, 6. January 2019 Week 1
Tuesday, 1. January 2019 Week 1

New Year - New Vim Trick

Happy 2019! I have learnt a new Vim trick:
When searching for some pattern with / (eg. /mystring), often the next step is to perform a replacement command. Now instead of re-typing the whole string, you can directly enter the substitution command with an emtpy search-pattern (:%s//newstring/), Vim then automatically re-uses the previous search pattern.

(via)

Saturday, 8. December 2018 Week 49
Sunday, 5. August 2018 Week 31

Run QRadar CE on Mac OS X with Vagrant

The Vagrant file provided by IBM for running QRadar Community Edition on Mac OS X currently does not work properly. It fails with the following error:

Failure: repodata/repomd.xml from centos-gluster38: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/storage/x86_64/gluster-3.8/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404

The problem is that gluster3.8 was moved out of this CentOS repository and now the download fails. But the gluster3.8 RPMs are also provided with the QRadar CE installation ISO file.

Based on the workaround described here, I've extended the IBM provided Vagrantfile so that the RPMs are taken from the ISO file instead of the CentOS repository. With the modified Vagrantfile the automatic provisioning script no longer fails.

The instructions for running QRadar CE with Vagrant now look like this:

  1. Download the zipfile with the original Vagrantfile and the accompanying helper files from the IBM website: https://developer.ibm.com/qradar/ce/
  2. Create a folder and extract the zipfile:
    mkdir community_edition
    unzip QRadarCE_Vagrantfile.20171003084145.zip -d community_edition/
  3. Download the modified Vagrantfile and overwrite the original one:
    curl -o community_edition/Vagrantfile https://blog.x-way.org/stuff/Vagrantfile
  4. Make sure you have the requried Vagrant plugins installed:
    vagrant plugin install vagrant-disksize
    vagrant plugin install vagrant-reload
  5. Make sure you have the QRadar CE ISO file (downloaded from the IBM website) in the same folder as the Vagrantfile:
    cp QRadarCE.iso community_edition/
  6. Create the auto_install file to automatically install QRadar:
    touch community_edition/auto_install
  7. Accept the EULA by adding the corresponding setup parameter in the Vagrantfile:
    Edit the Vagrantfile and add the --accept-eula argument to /media/cdrom/setup --no-screen to automatically accept the EULA
  8. Change into the folder and start the QRadar installation (takes about 1 hour):
    cd community_edition
    vagrant up
Thursday, 19. July 2018 Week 29