The Story Of a Punk Rock System Administrator

This is the story of a lifelong system administrator who was raised in the free and open source software community, alongside spending his entire life immersed in punk rock music and the punk rock DIY ethos. I'd been listening to my dad's Ramones, New York Dolls and The Velvet Underground CDs for my whole life, since before I knew how to walk, punk rock was just there for me. There's not much to say about it at this point in the story, so we'll talk tech.

The year was 2003, I was 8 years old. I used Microsoft Windows 98 on my parent's PC for playing games and screwing around. One day, I received a copy of Dynebolic Linux on CD in a magazine, I popped it into the computer's CD tray and rebooted, started playing around with it, and I LOVED it. I loved the transparency of the system, the autonomy, the absolute ownership and control of everything built into it. The system was not a black box designed to control and lock-in, it was absolute FREEDOM to compute however I wanted. To understand how it works, to make it work how I wanted it to work.

For a while I just played with it at home, and expanded my horizons to a couple of other live desktop Linux distros such as Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux.

In 2004 I brought my Dynebolic CD to school, popped it into my classroom computer, and booted it up to show my friends this cool new thing I had found. My teacher FLIPPED. In her eyes, Windows was gone, I had just loaded malware onto the classroom computer. She wasn't hearing it when I explained to her that the underlying operating system that was installed on the classroom computer was untouched, how could a bratty snot-nosed 9 year old child possibly know better than her?

I shut down the computer, removed the CD, and turned it back on, loading into a pristine, untouched Windows XP operating system; proving myself right. I had done everything right to show to my teacher that her concerns of the classroom PC being destroyed were unfounded, yet I was still reprimanded. Being proven wrong by a child was simply unacceptable. This was one of many similar incidents where independence and divergence from the status quo were reprimanded. Her catch-phrase towards me was "You're too smart for your own good, Micah. You're going to get yourself into trouble one day." This was my last year attending public school, it was clear that their goal was not to teach, but to mold young minds--to force conformance. I was pulled out of school at the end of that school year and began my journey as a self-taught individual.

I became entrenched in the free and open source community, devouring knowledge from Linux manual pages, blogs, spending hours discussing Linux system administration techniques with some of the brightest minds in the community, such as Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux, and the entirety of the Damn Small Linux development team.

Around 2006 I installed my first desktop Linux distro on my first shared PC with my brothers, we had a 10 gigabyte hard drive, partitioned into 4 equal parts. I installed Slackware Linux on my 2.5GB slice. This was an operating system that gave you a bare bones stripped down base Unix-like system, no handholding, no closed source. Once you installed the base system, it was on you to locate tarballs with precompiled binaries to manually install on your system, there was no package management, everything was manual. If a precompiled binary did not exist, you had to compile it yourself. This forced you to understand everything about how the individual components of the operating system worked together, from the kernel, to the shell utilities, to the X-Windows server, to the window manager/graphical desktop environment, to the graphical applications such as your word processor, text editor, web browser, photo editor, file manager and EVERYTHING. As well as all of the libraries and dependencies that these applications required.

Much like the hard drive itself, time slots for using the desktop computer shared between me and my siblings were divided into 4 equal parts. Every 4 days I was allowed to use the computer all day for whatever I wanted, I spent those days tinkering with my operating system, chatting with experts on Linux forums, as well as Linux IRC channels on Freenode. It was on these public communications platforms where I received interactive feedback on how to master the management of my system, from some of the sharpest minds in the community. One of these individuals, was a skilled systems programmer, and a punk rocker. He began to introduce me to new bands such as Green Day, Nightwish, Billy Talent, Rise Against, The Offspring, Static-X, and more. While not all of these bands are punk, they shared one thing in common: counterculture. Listening to these new bands reinforced my strong, independent, DIY spirit that was already ingrained in me from a very young age. This music taught me that it was OK to be who I was, the bratty, self-reliant child who inherently questioned authority any time that what I was being told didn't make sense to me.

Anyways, there's not much more to say about this time period. It's just more of the same. The entire decade was just a blurred cycle of learn, build, break, fix, all backed by a punk-rock soundtrack. My knowledge of the internal workings of the Linux system and the command line became almost instinctual over these years.

Let's fast-forward to 2018, I was 23 years old, had just gotten a hand-me-down laptop with a blank hard drive from my father. This was when I began delving into the world of cybersecurity and ethical hacking. I installed Kali Linux and an extra 4GB RAM stick on this laptop for a total of 8GB of RAM, then began learning how to hack into self-hosted virtual machines that I had installed on my laptop. I successfully pwned about 15 of these systems before I became bored of red-teaming, my Linux system administration experience without extensive coding experience did not apply super well to the act of trying to hack into machines, so I pivoted to learning how to protect systems from these types of attacks--known as blue teaming.

I wiped Kali Linux from my drive, and I installed Arch Linux, fine tuning every layer to exacting, nit-picky specifications honed through years of practice. I started learning about CISOfy system hardening benchmarks, STIG and NIST standards, and the like. I meticulously hardened every layer of my desktop operating to paranoid standards, eventually achieving a near perfect security grade by the standards of CISOfy's benchmarks, and somehow, in spite of this meticulous hardening, my system was still extremely usable.

I had perfected the art of blue-teaming to the point where the security measures implemented in my system were transparent to the only authorized user, which was myself... but it acted as a brick wall to any malicious attempts to compromise my system. Now comes the question...what did I do with this mastery of Linux systems? What was my endgame? Surely I could land myself a lucrative job as a systems administrator, DevOps engineer, or security consultant in a Fortune 500 company; but no. I never sold out, I always did this work for myself, for the art of systems mastery and self-reliance.

Now, fast-forward another few years, to 2022, I quit my dead-end job working as a pizza delivery man at Pizza Hut in Denton, Texas. I had lived in the North Central Texas area my pretty much my entire life and had never known anything else, and I moved to Makanda, Illinois with my mother. This move was incredibly jarring for me, I didn't know anyone, or anything to do in the area. I became a shut-in, I didn't talk to anyone local, I missed my friends, I didn't go out at all for anything other than to pick up groceries. I quit tinkering on my computer and became addicted to video games, and about 7 months ago I hit rock bottom with my depression and self-isolating tendencies. I had completely lost myself, I didn't go to shows anymore, I didn't do anything productive... If I kept on like this, it's likely that the depression would have consumed me entirely and I would not be here writing this story right now.

I powered on my laptop for the first time in over a year, I went online and I did some googling around to find out what the punk rock scene in the area was like. I did not find much on Google, so I went to ChatGPT, it was ChatGPT that informed me that the longest continuously running punk house was just a 20-minute drive from my new home--The Lost Cross House. I went and followed them on Facebook and Instagram and watched closely for the next show to be announced, and then I went.

I arrived about 15 minutes before just about anyone else. 3 individuals were sitting on the front porch chatting, I nervously walked up to them, wearing the same clothes I had been wearing for an entire week, unwashed, unshaved with messy unkempt hair, and asked "Hey, I heard there was a show here tonight, am I in the right place?" to which they responded "Yep, show starts in an hour." I placed my 5 dollar donation in the collection jar and quietly sat down. I attempted to make small talk but was extremely out of practice in social situations, mostly I just listened to them speak, fascinated by the stories that they told.

Then the show started, I went downstairs to the cramped, dank, basement of this ancient punk house, standing nearly 6'4" and having to hunch over to avoid banging my head into the low-hanging rafters, and I positioned myself at the edge of the mosh pit, too tired and disheveled to mosh anymore; I just stood there, almost completely still, completely quiet, and I listened to the bands, I watched as my fellow show-goers tore up the dance floor with more energy and vigor than I had ever seen at a punk show before. I don't remember exactly what bands played that night, but they were BANGERS. Of course, the show eventually came to an end, I silently left, hopped in my truck, and drove home, pondering whether or not I had found my community.

Once I got home I proceeded to play the same video game that I had played obsessively to escape reality in my time as a shut-in. I was beginning to heal, but not yet healed.

A few hours prior to the next show, I actually shaved my beard, cut my hair, took a shower and put on a fresh set of clothes. I continued attending shows, actually bothering to perform basic self-care before attending, but the following shows I rarely went down into the basement. I would just walk up, place my 5 dollar donation in the collection jar, talk for a few minutes, but once people started showing up the crowd would generally become too intense for me, so I would silently sit in a corner and begin playing video games on my phone again.

Eventually I was informed of the sister houses to The Lost Cross House: The Commune and Da Birdhouse, all within a few blocks of each other. I started attending shows there too, the more I went, the more I became comfortable talking with people again, the more friends I made. These 3 houses provided something I had been missing my entire life, a community to participate in, in real life. A community that accepts anyone exactly as they come (As long as you aren't a Nazi fuck. In which case, fuck off). I began to rediscover myself again, I had friends, a community, somewhere I felt that I belonged.

I was still missing one thing, my love for tinkering with my computer, I was still addicted to that silly little video game that I used to cope with my loneliness, but one day, I just shut it down, started up my laptop, re-installed my desktop Linux from scratch, and began tinkering again. I'M FUCKING BACK Y'ALL. I was back on my cycle of learn, build, break, fix. If I wasn't at a show, I was tinkering.

A couple of months ago, I met a fellow computer nerd, he was looking to deploy an app and was planning to launch it from a terminal on Visual Studio Code, I told him this was not the way. I began researching modern best practices for Linux web server deployment, and I helped him to configure a stable, reliable server to deploy his app on. I'm still working with him intermittently on this project.

Just about a month ago, I was thinking, what can I do for myself, and for the community, with these skills that I have amassed over the years? After deep deliberation, and talking with a few of my friends, I decided, I'll create a hub that centralizes information about the local scene, where anyone can reach out to me to join this publishing platform and post content, flyers, whatever they want--or, if they don't want to join themselves, they can still reach out to me and have them publish it on their behalf.

Once I got this idea, I went to work. I started with a fresh installation of Debian Linux Bookworm, and began my systems hardening procedure on it, utilizing Lynis to benchmark its security posture against CISOfy hardening standards, carefully tweaking every layer of the system to my exacting security standards. Once I was satisfied that the server was nearly unhackable (nothing is unhackable, famous last words of any arrogant sysadmin who thinks their system is impenetrable are "MY SYSTEM IS UNHACKABLE!"), I began to deploy the rest of the stack on which this website would reside.

I installed Node.js, nginx, and Ghost CMS. I then meticulously tweaked the settings of all of these new layers to follow the same security posture of the base system. Then I began to work on the appearance of the website, utilizing my (admittedly rather basic) graphical design skills to create a banner, a logo and an icon--and thus, Dirty Dale DIY is born. A platform where the last 3 letters of the name are embodied in every layer of the stack, from the kernel to the front-end design, all done by me, by myself.

Throughout these past several months, I've found community, I've begun taking care of myself again, I've rediscovered my confidence, my passion, my core identity. The Lost Cross is an incredibly fitting name for a place for me to have rediscovered myself, perhaps it's a place for lost souls to go in order to find what they're missing.

Now, I'm just a systems administrator and not much of a writer, so I invite any member of the community to reach out to me and join me in publishing content to be enjoyed by anyone who happens upon this website. This has been my abridged, messy autobiography and the story of how this website came to be. Welcome to Dirty Dale DIY!

P.S. To the Chinese botnet that tried to hack into my server the other night: I see you, I know where you are, I know who your internet service provider is. Your attack failed miserably, and your attempt to exploit my server has been reported to your internet service provider. Not only did your attack fail miserably, it revealed to me a theoretical attack vector that I had not yet hardened against. Your failed attack served as a free penetration test against my server, I've implemented the findings from my observation of your attack into further hardening my defenses. Fuck off. I ain't getting pwned by script kiddies.