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The STIGLord Blog!

"STIG worms, you know I hate 'em." - Stigglejuice

  • 6 min read

RHEL 9 V2R5 Changes

It's that time again! These are my notes from examining a diff between V2R4 and V2R5. I always write one of these summaries when I get my hands on the new release of the STIG so I know where to spend my time when updating automation content like Ansible Playbooks, Anaconda kickstart files, etc. Unfortunately, there is more fluff than there is substance in this release, and it is riddled with errors. I get the feeling that people rotate in and out of whatever office actually writes the content, and things like consulting the man pages for various features is something that happens as an afterthought, if at all.

  • 5 min read

Remediating RHEL-09-431016

I get a lot of questions about how to remediate RHEL-09-431016. People report issues like sudo or SSH no longer working afterwards. I was discussing this with my partner in crime, and we ultimately came to the conclusion that unless you really know the RHEL product or you were intimately familiar with the RHEL 7 STIG you would never know that there are a couple of missing links in the process for making RHEL-09-431016 work properly. We had to learn these things the hard way by watching test systems brick over the years, so keep in mind these are lessons we learned back with RHEL 7 and carried forward because not only would we have consistent baselines between generations, but we genuinely believed that the STIG would eventually catch up because these controls are necessary in the context of RHEL-09-431016. You'll see some of that reflected in the Ansible task naming included in this post where we carried forward two critical controls that enable RHEL-09-431016 to function without bricking the system.

  • 2 min read

Where did the time go?

I have been a busy bee. I started this little project in 2023, got busy, and then forgot about it. I originally started this blog on a hosted Wordpress site. I am not impressed with my former host. I am not particularly amused with the antics going around with Wordpress, nevermind that it's a nightmare to manage and maintain.

I finally got around to shutting down the old blog, turning off anything resembling an automatic renewal, and harvesting the content for re-publishing.

  • 5 min read

STIGLord Begins

I would have loved to kick things off with a technical deep dive, but I'm waiting on some things to simmer in the background. Instead, I'm going to give you some of the history that drives my thought processes. When I joined my current team back in 2017 I felt like I had finally arrived, even though I was frantically teaching myself all of the ins and outs of the technology, policies, and processes present at my new workplace. The position was pitched to me as becoming the "virtualization guy" on the core infrastructure team. I had been a "network guy" for an ISP for about 7 years (and loved what I did). Then, I spent the next 7 in the world of Government acquisitions. (Business and regulatory hell, how lovely!) Still, I was excited to be somewhere new. Besides, how much could there possibly be to learn?

  • 2 min read

Hello? Is this thing on?

I was starting to think I would never get to this point! Welcome to my pet project, The STIGLord Blog! If you know what STIGs are, you probably know where I'm eventually going with all of this. Like some of you, I'm hurting for affordable CEPs, so I'm milking one of the options available to us: blogging and technical papers. (There is no way I am cranking out a book.)

  • 1 min read

Hello STIG World!

Got the STIG blues? Have you been Googling until your eyes bleed but still can't figure out why XYZ won't work the way it's supposed to? I know how you feel.