It should be no secret that I'm a big fan of the Veeam Hardened Repository. While I never spent much time deploying the VHR from scratch, the VHR ISO in particular has interested me due to the ease of deployment, and with Veeam's dedication to making this a turn-key solution, it's hard to justify using a repository in most cases that doesn't have immutability from the start. As Veeam released VBR v13 a few weeks/month…
I'm happy to report that Veeam has a new KB for any of those that are deploying the Veeam Hardened Repository v.2.0, Veeam Software Appliance or Veeam JeOS appliances from USB thumb-drive. I've notice this particular issue recently reported on Reddit and elsewhere where users are experiencing the error "An unknown error has occurred" when trying to deploy the appliance. I even experienced this exact issue when I was attempting to deploy the VHR v2.0…
While Veeam may be getting a lot of publicity with VBR v13's release of the Veeam Software Appliance (VSA) and the upcoming VBR v13 Windows release, promised by end of year, let's not forget about Object First who builds some of the best immutable repositories specifically for Veeam. While there haven been varying sizes of Object First Ootbi appliances available, they really have been focused on larger businesses and enterprises. Object First's consumption model helped…
Welcome to September - one of my favorite months as my birthday is tomorrow. And as a present, Veeam has decided to roll out the highly anticipated Linux-based Virtual Software Appliance (VSA). This new "early release" v13.0 is now generally available to the public and its fully supported! There are of course several caveats with this initial release with several notes about future plans as it's not everything all at once. Because this is such…
Several months ago I came across an old Barracuda 290 backup appliance from a former client that was no longer in use. These old appliances don't generally have a lot of power, but I like to repurpose things for the lab or for experimentation when I can. For instance, I've previously repurposed a Datta ALTO 3 appliance as a Windows 11 workstation that works great as a jump-box to straddle my production and lab environments…
When you reference the Veeam Hardened Repository ISO, you'll note that the word "hardened" is in there. What makes the VHR "hardened"? I've touched on this before, but Veeam makes use of STIG's to harden the OS to the DISA recommendations. One of those functions used to harden the OS is USBGuard. And what is USBGuard? It's a service used to define a list of authorized USB devices that can connect to a machine. In…
I have this client - they're in the manufacturing vertical and utilize me for projects and maintenance of their SCADA environment. Because this is a secured environment, the network is segmented with no internet access for nearly all machines and very restricted access for those that require it. Running Veeam Backup & Replication segmented from the internet is generally no problem and in many ways is even recommended. And it has worked great for years…
Let's have a quick conversation about a few things you can do -- but probably shouldn't. Eat gas station sushi Leave important tasks for the last minute Believe everything on the internet Date a coworker Get a tattoo of the name of a significant other - at least early in the relationship - especially it it's that coworker Run security-focused VM's like a Veeam Hardened Repository on a NAS Wait, what? Okay, so I've always…
In part one we gave some background of the Veeam VHR history and it's transition from utilizing Ubuntu Linux Server LTS to Rocky Linux, as well as the hardware that we'll be utilizing to support our VHR, and then deployed the VHR ISO to our PowerEdge server. Part two of this series consisted of deploying the VHR ISO to our server. Now in our third and final part, we're going to add the new VHR…
In part one of this three part series, we gave some background of the Veeam VHR history and it's transition from utilizing Ubuntu Linux Server LTS to Rocky Linux, as well as the hardware that we'll be utilizing to support our VHR. And as a reminder, while the VHR does have support, it's currently classified under Veeam's Experimental Support Statement. Downloading and Deploying the VHR ISO The first step of course is to download the…