this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Hrm, I've been using Linux as my dayjob server os of choice for about 15 years, and for my personal computer for the past 10 - and I haven't found something like what you described. Something I would recommend is looking at a configuration management tool (Ansible is a really solid choice).
Stability issues often come from misconfiguration or just flat out configuration drift (changes over time) - something like Ansible or Chef would help with that.
Other things that touch on some of your concerns may be SELinux (https://wiki.debian.org/SELinux). It's a bit of a pain to get set up, but once you do your system is much more secure. It effectively functions under the principal of least access to lock down your Debian OS, rendering the need for AV/Malware scanning somewhat moot.
I've done a cursory glance or two at Checkmk for monitoring, but it sounds a bit overkill for a single Debian workstation.
I mostly troubleshoot things like VPN instability or crashes by diving into
/var/logorjournalctl -exto see if any googleable errors are visible.Maybe someone else on here has more help to give?
Great advice. Its just that I'm sorta a eager learner when it comes to tech, especially the privacy and security side and I honestly don't always know what I'm doing or I'll read the wrong guide to set things up and I end up getting lost or confused or things just straight up don't work. So I for sure have some wires crossed somewhere and some roadblocks causing issues here and there. I have recently learned more about ansible and chef and I indeed need to research. Those tools seem quite complex but hey, I'll try anyway. And as far as selinux goes, I just thought that was one of those thins that automatically comes installed and configured on every OS? Also there's app armor.... Is that in this realm of things too? Is it deemed "good" or necessary to use? Thanks
Personally, I find Ansible to be much more intuitive than other products in the configuration management space. Start small, think about what you want your system to look like.
Do you want Firefox installed? Use ansible.builtin.package to install it!
Do you want to have ssh server configured to disallow password authentication (and only allow ssh keys)? Use ansible.builtin.blockinfile on your sshd.config file!
Regarding SELinux vs apparmor, they both are designed to lock down a system, but they have different philosophies about how to approach the problem.
SELinux says block all by default and only if it's configured to allow it will it be allowed to happen.
Apparmor on the other hand is permissive by default, and it will only restrict if it is configured to do so.
By the way, both can be managed by Ansible, and SELinux even has a module to do so: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/ansible/posix/selinux_module.html.
Fascinating stuff! A tad confusing lol but definitely learnable. So to me, selinux and app armor sound similar to firewalls... On the surface at least
I suppose you could say it's similar in that there are allow-lists and deny-lists that permit or restrict actions, but the key difference is Apparmor/SELinux are in the OS space - they can permit/restrict the ability to restart services, or prevent sudo from being used in certain ways.
Firewalls are predominantly used to permit/restrict network connectivity either ingress (e.g. traffic from outside the system coming into it) or egress (e.g. traffic that is leaving the system). A good example would be using a firewall to restrict ingress traffic to port 22 - allowing remote management of a system over SSH.
I hope this is helpful!
Thanks!