Technology

AMD Home Server

I thought would share my latest project upgrading my home server. I use it as a web server, Plex server, and file server. The old ones motherboard is going out and I thought I would do an upgrade to something with a little more power than the old one and add the capability that it could handle running a game server for my son or something.

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G Processor
Patriot Signature Line 8GB DDR4 RAM
GIGABYTE GA-A320M-S2H Motherboard
CORSAIR VS400 80+ PSU
APEVIA X-QBER Micro ATX Cube
WD Blue 1 TB Hard drives x3 in RAID5

It makes for a decent system on a budget for the planned use. I already had the hard drives and the rest of the components came to just under $300 before tax.

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1.5M Unpatched WordPress Sites Hacked

My wife’s blog was one of those impacted but I had a backup of the SQL, so I was able to restore the content like it was prior to it being defaced.

Lessons learned: I don’t log on to my wife’s blog enough to see it needs updates. So I just enabled automatic updates for everything on it to mitigate that in the future. The downside of that is, I won’t see if an update will fail until later but I can always restore things like I did in this case.

Positives: My backups work. It was simple and easy to do a restoration. I logged into PHPMyAdmin dropped the table for her blog and then imported my backup and all was well again. After completing the updates it was ready to go.

For us her blog is pretty important. It acts as our family journal that she writes in every Sunday and reflects on our family and children.

I’m now also looking into a plug-in that will remind me to update her site.

Article with more information on this exploit and hack.

 

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Hoax News

Word on keyboardSo the past few years I have actually seen several “fake news” story’s posted in various places. It’s not as huge of a thing as it’s currently being made out to be but I have seen several people fall for them. It’s just a learning experience of to be critical of news sources from everywhere.

In my experience Google+ only had a few satire/fake stories spread, Facebook several more and Voat (a Reddit alternative I frequented for a while) had a ton of them.

The most common hoax/satire websites I’ve seen posted on Google+ and
Facebook are:
CBSnews.com.co (Hoax notice .co domain)
National Report (Hoax/Satire website)
Tribune Herald (Satire)
The Daily Currant (Satire)

The worst of were the fake CBS news site and National Report which sometimes post hoax news stories that were very well setup to be believable. If readers didn’t look further to more ridiculous content, they could be easily fooled. With the Tribune Herald and the Daily Currant some of their satire is based on recent news that sometimes confuses people.

The craziest hoaxes I saw were posted on Voat and the domains appear to now be dead. I think the sites talked about run by teenagers from the Republic of Macedonia might have used that for a testing area. The English that appeared to have been run through Google translate was always a good indicator to me.

At any rate, this is all just a lesson to be critical of your news sources. Before sharing a link, look at the URL to see if it’s copying another site. If it’s too crazy to be true, it just might not be true. If the spelling is atrocious, it might also be a hoax but it might just be a demonstration of editors missing from modern news rooms.

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