Introduction
Welcome to my blog, signifyingmonkeythehacker.com! 🐒
Building this website hasn’t been a straightforward journey. It’s been a series of riddles, dead ends, and unexpected revelations. The goal of this blog is to document my journey into cybersecurity, and what better way to start than by sharing the very struggles I faced just to get this page to load? This is my first act of signifying: detailing the trials, tribulations, and eventual triumphs of building my first self-hosted website.
The First Standoff: The VM That Refused to Talk
Before I even got to the routers, my first duel was with a stubborn VM. My plan was to create an isolated lab network using PfSense, but I couldn’t get my Ubuntu VM to connect to the internet. This was a classic case of my virtual machine thinking it was on the network, but in reality, it was talking to no one.
The “host unreachable” errors were a strong clue. My VM was correctly configured with its IP address and subnet, but its virtual network cable was plugged into the wrong virtual wall jack. In short, my VM couldn’t reach the main network because its virtual adapter was bridged to the wrong physical NIC on the host machine. Once I corrected this simple misconfiguration, my VM could finally see the rest of the jungle, and it could talk to its default gateway, the Cisco router.
The Second Standoff: The Stubborn Gatekeeper and the Silent Protector
With the VM finally on speaking terms with the network, the next hurdle was making it visible to the outside world. This required a delicate dance between my Verizon router and my Cisco router.
- The Unseen Foe: My troubles began with a mysterious cloud hanging over my VM. On reboot, I noticed that AppArmor, a security module, had failed. Like a silent protector that had given up, it seemed to be the source of my woes. I tried to lift the curse by disabling AppArmor entirely, but the problem didn’t go away. This was a crucial lesson: sometimes the failure you see is just a symptom of a deeper, more cunning foe.
Upon the screen, a blank despair,
A stubborn VM, a silent prayer.
I fixed the NIC, a simple plight,
And brought the jungle into light.
But then the router, fierce and grand,
A gatekeeper for the promised land.
It blocked the ports, a cruel decree,
Till a clever NAT set packets free.
The web server, with a 502 sigh,
Said, “My friend PHP, where are you, why?”
I mended the path, the code, the key,
And then a connection, wild and free.
So from the code, to the last great stand,
A journey built with my own hand.
A signifying monkey’s hard-won lore,
And a website open, knocking at the door.