Repository navigation
Project Selection
Small Businesses (and internet hobbyists) are starting to enjoy the benefits of virtualization with platforms like Proxmox, in order to run increasingly complex infrastructure setups with multiple VMs, containers, different operating systems, etc. However, many of them don’t create their infrastructure with easy automation tools like Ansible/Terraform etc, and then because manually updating lots of VMs and containers can be a pain, it might just stop getting done.
We want to build a solution to add to existing infrastructure that will monitor for traditional updates / security fixes via the system package manager, scan for deployed services on the host that might need version updates, check common misconfigurations, and maybe send some kind of centralized logging back to the endpoint manager. The overall goal is to provide enough monitoring that it’s unlikely a small business or homelab would get hacked by having outdated software or configuration blunders, without overwhelming the one-person IT team with infinite alert fatigue, as tools like more traditional SIEMs seem to do.
In terms of achievability within our senior year, we think that we could achieve making an agent that runs commands and reports back to a centralized dashboard which collects information on the systems it’s monitoring, and can bulk dispatch commands to notify the admin for updates, alert if there are urgently concerning log messages or system status, etc. We would probably build the server as an appliance or VM image so that it itself can be auto-updating, and thus not increase the burden on the admin of systems to keep an eye on. We have not yet decided 100% on what features of this platform may be beyond what we could reasonably do within this year.
Matt - speaking for myself, selfishly, I’d like to at least get automatic notifications for VM guests that need apt updates applied, and ideally I’d like the auto-updater to plug into Proxmox and run snapshots on the VMs before applying updates. (My homelab is Proxmox, and 90% of my guests are apt-based) Ideally we’d make the hypervisor integration pluggable, so that our software could be used with any hypervisor, and still retain the ability to roll back if the forced auto-update policy is too aggressive and breaks something.
The stones are capped....