reyjrar

I'm driving a 2017 Jeep Wrangler (JK) with a manual transmission. I don't drive much (less than 4k miles/yr).

I can't drive automatic transmissions without losing my mind. My guess is if you can find a car with a standard transmission, you can get it without "smart" features. If you can't drive stick, that's fine. I couldn't drive stick when I bought my first manual transmission. If I can learn, you can learn.

Put this write-up together over the course of the last 3 months when everyone started talking about getting VPN's. I know there's a lot of folks here building the "next best thing" on the Internet. Would be good if we started thinking about the privacy implications of our map-reduced, low-latency, high availability, machine learning algorithms.

Cheers!

+1 - Kind of the reason I started this blog post.. Besides reporting (which I know my setup lacks), from a techie perspective, what would this setup lack that Splunk provides.

Follow-up, is it _honestly_ worth the licensing to get those features?

We have a lot of in house expertise in ElasticSearch and choose it for a few reasons: 1) It's easier than Lucence/Sphinx to setup. 2) It's clustering support works out of the box and is so easy to configure it's not funny.

ES is basically a usability wrapper around Lucene. I've heard that Sphinx is better for a single node configuration, it's faster and uses less resources, but clustering with Sphinx is apparently tricky.

The other competitor, which I have no experience with is Solr, but this write-up http://karussell.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/elasticsearch-vs-s... gives an overview of the ES advantages over Solr.

I'm not a Full-Text Search expert, but a number of really smart people at my company evaluated a number of them for one of the most critical pieces of our production site and they chose ElasticSearch.

One of the follow-up posts to this is going to be on using OSSEC-HIDS which will give you logfile chained checksums. It's not perfect, but again it's about achieving the most value for the least amount of effort.