Greenbone/OpenVAS just hangs when starting or resuming a scan

I'm a very big fan in the open source tools Greenbone Vulnerability Manager and OpenVAS (Open Vulnerability Assessment Scanner). Greenbone is basically the web portal GUI front-end to OpenVAS. Combined, they are excellent tools for discovering vulnerabilities in your network. When it works, it works great! When it doesn't... It's frustrating as hell!

Anyway, the other day I kicked off a quarterly scan of my network, and most of the scans finished, but after a while the server was accidentally rebooted by one of my systems administrators and a number of scans got stuck in a stopped state. When I tried to resume the scan, Greenbone would just spin and nothing would happen! Annoying right?

Well, the issue turns our to be a Redis cache issue. It apparently needs to be flushed when stuff like that happens. To flush that cache run the following from the terminal:

sudo redis-cli -s /var/run/redis/redis.sock FLUSHALL

After running that, I was able to kick my scans off again!

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I appeared on the D Squared 101!! podcast

 As some of you know, I have been focusing on my new venture a lot lately with my podcast about the Corey Wayne book How To Be a 3% Man. My podcast for those who aren't in the loop is called Come On Man - A 3% Man Podcast. I launched it back in August.

Well since that time I started dating a very ambitious woman who was also interested in starting her own podcast. Much like my podcast, hers is about positivity and self help. Since I have some experience in this field I offered her some help getting it launched and we decided to record some synergistic podcasts together. So her first episode is a conversation with me about Corey Wayne's 3% Man book. Check it out!

She also recorded an episode of Come On Man with me, in fact she is the first female guest I've had on that show! That episode will drop on 1/25/2021!

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EKSA E1000 Gaming Headset Review

What's up folks!? I know I haven't written too much lately. I've been swamped with work and my other big project which is my Come On Man - How To Be A 3% Man podcast! 

One of the things I've done for that project is purchase a new headset with microphone for better audio recording on my Windows 10 laptop. I decided to go with a red EKSA E1000 USB gaming headset and it works pretty damned good!

Here I am rocking out with it. I have to say that it is super comfortable, and I really dig the rope cabling! One thing too is that it doesn't pick up the sound of the cable rubbing on my shirt if I turn my head which is a problem my old headset with a microphone would do and you could hear that in the podcast.

The noise cancelation seems to be working very well too, which is a huge plus when making podcasts. You really want to block out those white noise background sounds, and with this headset you can do it without having to spend money on sound proofing your recording space!

I went ahead and made a quick audio test below that you can check out to hear how these sound in case you are thinking of getting a pair of these for podcasting as well.

So what do you think? Not bad right? Especially not bad when they cost less than $40!

Anyway, all in all not bad! I highly recommend these if you are a hobby podcaster like me!

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I Appeared On The Uncle Mike Podcast

 I posted a few weeks ago about how I started a new dating and success podcast called "Come On Man - A 3% Man Podcast." If you go back and read that article, I talk about my journey to not just be a better selector of women in my life, but also a better man in general. A part of that is being a part of a very exclusive Facebook men's group called 3% Man.

One of my fellow 3% brothers in that group also has his own podcast called "My Podcast Journey & Random Life Lessons" by Uncle Mike, aka Kwok Chan. Well, he invited me on his show to ask me about my 3% journey and I wanted to share it with you here. You can play it below:

Shortly after recording that episode with Kwok, he stuck around and we recorded an episode of "Come On Man" where we discussed all sorts of things from his 3% journey to football and how his parents immigrated from Communist China. That episode will drop on 11/2!

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A New Project I've Started - A Dating and Success Podcast

 A couple of months ago I wrote an article about my quest to be a better man. In that post I wrote out my top ten life changing books. My list of books has increased since then, and I've been busy devouring them, as well as listening to others multiple times to really internalize the information.

One of those books is How To Be a 3% Man by Corey Wayne. That book, along with Dating Essentials For Men and Atomic Attraction have inspired me to start a new podcast for other men who are on what I call the 3% Path! That path is not just being better with women, but also learning to be better in life!

Introducing Come On Man - A 3% Man Podcast!

You can listen to my first episode here:

Here is the description of the podcast:

A podcast for fellow students of Corey Wayne's book, "How To Be a 3% Man" and for men who just want to be better in general. We take teachings not just from Coach Wayne, but from great teachers like Dr. Robert Glover, Chris Canwell, Napoleon Hill, Bob Proctor, Dave Ramsey and many others who have not only mastered relationships or gaining wealth, but who have harnessed the law of attraction to get everything they want out of life!

The back story to all of this is that after breaking up with a long-term girlfriend last year I had been on the dating circuit for a while, but it clicked with me that what I was doing wasn't working. It also dawned on me that I needed to figure out why my past relationships didn't work out and all of that self reflection brought me to Corey Wayne's YouTube channel and subsequently his book!

Corey Wayne suggests reading his book, or listening to it on audio at least 10-15 times. Well, I've listened to it six times so far, and have read the paperback once. I've also listened to and read Dating Essentials For Men and Atomic Attraction about 6 times as well. I plan to listen to all three of these books well over the 15 time mark, because I get something new out of all three every time I listen or read them!

I also plan to listen to a few other really great books over and over again because as Corey says, repetition is the mother of skill!

Am I a dating expert now? Nope! Am I a dating coach now like Corey? Nope! If you want a dating coach, I suggest going to the man himself on his website understandingrelationships.com and hire him!

I'm no expert, however I have learned quite a bit from these books and having put their knowledge to practice! I am finally starting to see lots of success not just in my dating life, but in my professional life as well! I feel so good about all of it, that I decided to share it with the world!

So, if you are a guy who is struggling with women and relationships, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Corey Wayne's book then tune into my new podcast every Monday and study along with me!

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Wait... Is Microsoft Azure Using VMWare?

My company made the move to Microsoft Azure a couple of years ago. For the most part, we really like it. We've had the occasional hiccup, and their support is trash, but at least their platform is easy to learn and is relatively stable.

Well, an interesting thing happened today. I was in the process of upgrading some Ubuntu servers to 18.04, and during the upgrade process I noticed this:

It appears that their Linux VMs have VMWare Tools installed. Which begs the question, is Azure using VMWare on the back end? One would think they were using Hyper-V.

Anyway, I thought that was interesting and should share it with you guys. If you know more about it, let me know in the comments!

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Get Ready For An Epic SSL Certificate Maintenance Shitstorm

According to ZDNet, Apple made the executive decision back in February of this year to limit the default lifespan of SSL/TLS certificates to 398 days.

A decision that Apple unilaterally took in February 2020 has reverberated across the browser landscape and has effectively strong-armed the Certificate Authority industry into bitterly accepting a new default lifespan of 398 days for TLS certificates.

Google has opted in to join Apple as well according to The SSL Store:

It’s no secret, Google has been championing shorter certificate validity within the CA/Browser Forum (CA/B Forum) for years. At the end of last week, a well-known voice within the forum posted on Twitter that the tech giant will be making the switch to a one year validity period of 398 days for SSL/TLS certificates starting Sept. 1. This might sound like a big move, but it doesn’t actually change anything because it was already happening.

Mozilla will be jumping on the bandwagon on August 31st according to a Git Hub post.

What will this mean? Well, for one, if you host a website that has a two year SSL certificate, all major browser are going to start displaying an error warning users that your certificate is valid for too long.

I actually agree, this will probably make things more secure. The more frequently you swap your encryption keys, the better the security. I'm already doing it with LetsEncrypt on my personal email server because LetsEncrypt makes you renew every 3 months! LetsEncrypt makes renewal easy at least with the help of automation scripts.

Swapping out certificates every year in other places can be a pain if you are using other 3rd party CA's, and manually renew your certificates. It's even more of a pain when you have clients that use Java applications and manually trust their 3rd party keys for additional stringent security. That means we have to swap our keys out probably every 200 days now at my day job so we can send the keys to clients ahead of time for testing and validation...

Basically an SSL Certificate Maintenance Shitstorm!

Do you manage SSL certificates in your environment? How are you handling it? Let us know in the comments!

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