Week 08 - 2026.02.16 => 2026.02.22

Tuesday 17 of February 2026

Today was a fine day for hardening. I concentrated on SSH hardening and also created a separate admin user so that root can be left as a break glass type (last resort in case of system compromise etc.) user. This was fun, working in CLI and SSH-connection. I disabled SSH login for root user, disabled password-based authentication etc. It was fun to find a good use for the knowledge gained on our Hardening course.

Wednesday 18 of February 2026

More hardening and documentation. Removed unnecessary packages and services. The Proxmox install was quite bare bones, so nothing major to remove. Also tried to remove rpcbind because I had no intention of using NFS, at least for the foreseeable future. I found out that it is an integral part of Proxmox VE. After killing the process, I tried to purge (sudo apt purge rpcbind) it completely and thankfully read the warning:

!! WARNING !!

You are attempting to remove the meta-package 'proxmox-ve'!

If you really want to permanently remove 'proxmox-ve' from your system, run the following command

touch '/please-remove-proxmox-ve'

...

No I don't want to permanently remove 'proxmox-ve'!

Updated the internal documentation. I want to be able to rely on my documentation, when in later stages, I start trouble shooting why something is not working as intended. I also updated the public documentation, but I had to be rather vague so that I wouldn't expose security related information.