Playing with new (virtual) toys

 Over the last weekend, I spun up a few virtual servers and installed some toys.

First, there is osTicket.  It's a helpdesk ticketing system to replace my old one.  The old one was RT by Best Practical.  It was running on Ubuntu 14.04, and I could not get the OS to upgrade without breaking anything, so I left it alone for quite a long time, as it worked.  

Well, osTicket has replaced it.  It's got a more friendly UI, and still does everything I require from a ticket tracking system for the family.  It's running on Ubuntu 20.04, and should not be a problem to migrate to a newer OS if the in-place upgrade should fail like it did with RT.

Second, I installed Zabbix.  It's nice to have real-time data on my server and network infrastructure.  Initially, I only really wanted it to track the availability of my Minecraft servers, but the thing is so insanely useful that I have started putting other servers in it.  I've got 20 put in, which puts me near the half-way mark.  I like that it reports on more than just service availability.  I've already seen alerts for high CPU use, high memory use, and it's even reported that one of my DNS servers is running low on drive space - which I still need to correct.

Third, I've build an Ansible system.  With all the servers I have to manage, going from one to the next to install patches and updates was getting too time consuming.  With Ansible, I should be able to write playbooks to update everything with a single command from me - and so much more.

Last, I set up on OpenVAS box.  I'll use it to to vulnerability scans on the network, and hopefully be able to be a bit more proactive about keeping things secure.  I've used OpenVAS in the past, and am quite familiar with vulnerability scanners as part of my career, so this isn't really that exciting.

So, that's how I have spent this last weekend.  Now, I get to go to YouTube university and find how to make the most of my new toys.  

Wish me luck!