The Logwyrm's hoard of blog entries

Suddenly, I'm in vulnerability management

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:50:55 +0200

My greatest recent professional achievement is probably the fact that my manager now confidently sends me on rescue missions to clients who, for whatever reason, aren’t entirely happy with my company’s work anymore — believing that I can turn things around. Writing it down like that makes it sound a bit like a suicide mission leading straight to burnout, but it’s actually harmless. I’m good at dealing with people and communicating, and that’s what these missions are all about.

The Monster Named Platformization

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 15:26:55 +0200

When I started specializing in SIEM systems as a consultant less than ten years ago, there were a few authoritative SIEM products on the market, operated on their own servers by the large organizations that used them:

Splunk Enterprise (or Enterprise Security)
ArcSight
IBM QRadar

Other solutions existed, among others, Elastic’s full-fledged SIEM solution (as an add-on module on the Elastic or ELK stack) was emerging at that time.

Since then, an astonishing amount has happened in this market. In my perception, the three most important products are now the following:

New paint and expensive mistakes

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 10:26:59 +0200

I’ve actually had the old VW bus for almost a year now. High time for an update here, what else do I have this blog for!

The short version: I repainted the cargo area floor and learned a lot about painting in the process – conveniently on a component that would be covered up again anyway. I broke a spark plug, which was a truly avoidable and very expensive mistake. And: The bus now has a bed, so my wife, dog, and I could spend the night in it for the first time. I also initiated a T3 regulars’ table in Mainz.

Wasps in a car

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 19:00:00 +0100

Remember that vanagon I bought recently? How I wrote about something probably being stuck in the ventilator in the roof? Today, I unscrewed the inside lid used to open and close it so that I could look inside. And promptly found several little wasps’ nests.

I bought my dream car

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 18:00:00 +0100

Yesterday, I bought a VW Bus as old as I am. Yes, I’m old enough to be considered a “classic car” by German law. That’s definitely food for thought.

Why a VW bus of all things? On the one hand, because it was one of the first cars I rode in as a child. Back then, my parents drove a sky-blue T3 (called the “vanagon” in English). It was converted into a camping bus and had a high roof. It was an earlier model than my current one, with even less power. According to my father, in combination with the heavy camping gear, this meant that you were sometimes overtaken by 40-ton vehicles on the highway, especially uphill. Another story about the bus at the time is that of a rear-end collision. A mid-range car crashed into the rear of my parents’ bus. The result: the car that hit the bus was scrap, the bus only had a few scratches. The bumpers on the T3 are legendary for their robustness.

Self-Hosting: First experiences

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 18:06:28 +0200

“Self-hosting” seems to be a real topic among IT-savvy people at the moment. Well, to some extent it has certainly been that way for a long time, but I’ve been hearing a lot about it recently. It means setting up and using server hardware at home - from a Raspberry Pi to a full-blown home server with a powerful Intel processor and double-digit gigabytes of RAM. I’ve been getting more and more into this topic recently and have learned a few interesting things, especially about hardware, that I want to share here.

Sandboxing

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 12:43:43 +0200

If you load a new app onto a smartphone with Android or iOS, this app is very restricted in its permissions. For example, to access the device’s memory outside the app, the user must first explicitly allow the app to do so. This opens a dialog that contains a message such as “[app name] is trying to access the memory” and two buttons with the options “allow” or “deny”. Such mechanisms are known as portals, as they form a gateway out of the app’s sandbox. A sandbox is a firmly defined area that is assigned to the app and which it is not allowed to cross without further ado. A security feature that can, for example, make it more difficult for malicious apps to access the data in the banking app installed next to it or the user’s private photos.

Nextcloud, properly

Sun, 17 May 2020 22:05:06 +0200

I’ve been running a Nextcloud instance privately for years. I set it up back then because I personally don’t get on with paper calendars and notebooks. I find it more useful to have a device that is able to remind me of appointments, tasks and the like. And because it is practical to have such digital notes available across devices, a server platform in the background is a good idea.