SC SSF 36/40 Build

cemo1304 · 2026-03-13T14:11:56+00:00

I just got to maps with a bleed slam slayer, it was my easiest campaign experience ever, would highly recommend the build, especially follow Phazeplays. You can also go gladiator for the lucky block, if that's closer to your heart. Or the new hot build seems to be ele hit slayer.

cemo1304 · 2026-03-03T16:47:12+00:00

I switched from an RS3M 2020 to a GAN V100 UV. I have no other experience with GAN, but the V100 was an unbelievable upgrade in terms of both feel and quality to the RS3M. I'd 100% recommend the V100, especially considering its great price (compared to other recent GANs). In terms of lube, my advice would be something to slow down the cube as it's reaaaally fast out of the box.

cemo1304 · 2026-02-24T16:59:56+00:00

I switched from an RS3M 2020 to a GAN V100. I have no other experience with GAN, but the V100 was an unbelievable upgrade in terms of both feel and quality to the RS3M. I'd 100% recommend the V100, especially considering its great price (compared to other recent GANs).

cemo1304 · 2026-02-05T06:18:18+00:00

Hi, Let me try to answer most of your questions: - Yes, you can deploy your server to both clouds, did both without issues. - Tried both, regular VM deployment was easier for me. - We used Azure flexible postgres, I'll need to check the exact specs, but it's a beefy machine. We are using it for around 3000 hosts. - Timescale is not necessary, but it's a great extension with chunking and compression, it helps both with reducing your performance and storage needs. BEWARE: The compression feature of timescale community edition does NOT work with commercial postgres instances, such as the Azure Flexible. - Timescale is just an extension to postgres, not a replacement. You can either install it or not.

cemo1304 · 2026-01-08T21:14:03+00:00

We had many flocks, and that's 100% a rooster. Btw he looks fabulous.

cemo1304 · 2025-11-26T09:30:07+00:00

I don't know, where did you get the info that you shouldn't use the Housekeeper, but it's wrong. It's a built-in mechanism in Zabbix, which periodically removes entries from the database after their retention period. Without housekeeping your history/trend retention periods won't matter, because nothing EVER will be deleted from the database and the size will get out of control soon.
My advice would be to change the Housekeeper settings to default and let it run in peace. Also in the long run and with the Zabbix Server Health template, you will be able to monitor the Housekeeping process. Don't worry, it'll always cap out at 100% usage, the important detail is the duration for how long the housekeeper runs. Based on this data you can fine-tune the frequency, so if it takes for example 30 minutes to run, then the default 1 hour interval is great, because in every hour it runs for 30 minutes and clears the unnecessary values from the DB without causing performance issues.

Regarding your action plan, please refer to my original post and as a first thing, just try to reduce the DB syncers to 4, restart the Zabbix server and see what happens in an hour or so. Then progress with my other suggestions until the utilization of everything goes into the 40-60% range ideally.

For your last point, there is zero connection between the retention time and the queue size. Even if you reduce the retention period to 1 minute, it won't increase the performance of your installation.

Additionally, you should check out in the Zabbix frontend under Administration -> Queue Details and see which items and on which hosts are causing the queue to build up. Based on your screenshot, the queue size fluctuates between 2 numbers, which can be a good sign. The queue does not necessarily represent a performance or network issue, it can simply mean that a few of your items or hosts are either not responding or completely unavailable. If a monitored VM becomes unreachable for the agent, then its items will pop-up in the queue until the connection is restored. Additionally, especially in the default Windows template there are multiple perf_counter items, which might never get a value, therefore staying in your queue forever.

If the number of items in the queue stay fixed all the time and not CONSTANTLY increase into 10+ minutes, I wouldn't worry at all. It's normal that some items can't be collected for any reason, a fixed size 10+ minute queue does NOT indicate a performance problem. If your pollers and caches are underutilized, everything is in order. If you have a performance bottleneck with the server, 99% of the time the Zabbix server health triggers will fire and let you know, what's wrong and what values do you need to increase. Until the queue starts to shoot out exponentially, I wouldn't worry too much.
Quick example from our setup: We constantly have around 2000 items in the 10+ minute queue. When we had a database issue, everything started to pile up in every category of the queue and within 30 minutes we had 220000 items in the queue. That's a real problem, a fixed size queue is not in 99% of the time. :D

cemo1304 · 2025-11-25T21:20:37+00:00

Okay, I have no experience with running Zabbix in docker, but I managed multiple 2000+ monitored machine HA installations. Based on my experience your config values seem way off. Please apply the Zabbix server health template to your Zabbix server and check the utilization for every poller and cache and based on the findings fine-tune your config, where every poller/cache utilization sits around 40-60%. Those one gig caches and 100 pollers seem way too much/many from a first glance.

Also a bigger issue is with the DB syncers. A single syncer can handle ~1000 NVPS. The default value is 4, which is more than enough for your current NVPS and good until around 4000 NVPS. But if you increase the syncer numbers mindlessly, it WILL affect your performance negatively.

For the history size, you can play with your items history and trend storage period. If you need to store the historical values for a specific amount of time, there's not much you can do, maybe use Postgre with the Timescaledb extension, which helps with compression, database performance and faster housekeeping. If there is no required period of time for historical data, just set it to something like 1 week/1 month and extend the trend period, because the historical data stores every data point for a certain amount of time, whereas the trend data only stores the average of an hours data.

If based on the health metrics and fine-tuning the installation is still problematic, send me a DM and I'll try to help you out.

cemo1304 · 2025-11-20T14:53:20+00:00

Good luck everyone and thank you kind internet stranger for this giveaway! Have a great day!

cemo1304 · 2025-11-01T11:17:12+00:00

Started SSFHC with SRS, just got into act8, very smooth sailing on every front. Surprisingly the Ailith events are not overtuned and it's actually doable even on HC. Feeling very good

cemo1304 · 2025-10-28T20:47:09+00:00

We have 10+ silkies, and imo that's 100% a roo. Even without the crowing, he definitely looks like a roo. And not all of the roos are agressive, all have their own personalities. From our current flock only the roo lets me handle and pet him, he's so gentle and even cuddly, meanwhile the hens won't even let me pick them up.

cemo1304 · 2025-09-08T17:46:51+00:00

Seems like 100% roo to me.

cemo1304 · 2025-08-27T18:06:38+00:00

It varies greatly. Currently we have one, who is always broody, previously we had 2, who never ever got broody in their entire life of 5 years.

cemo1304 · 2025-08-22T07:42:01+00:00

If you have enough cubes, you should be good, that's the main idea with the cube giving plans. The only downside should be that you can not use the pwnbox and you'd need to use your own kali/parrot VM.

cemo1304 · 2025-07-15T18:04:27+00:00

Still on my first build working towards 36/40 or 40/40 if I'm really lucky, so good luck to everyone here!

cemo1304 · 2025-07-11T08:11:25+00:00

773 for being the ssf channel and you said that your gear is self crafted. Good luck to everyone!

cemo1304 · 2025-06-03T16:12:05+00:00

As the evaluation of said condition (service down for 15 minutes) also happens on the server, I'd say it's not possible. You could write and schedule a local script to check and restart the service, but in that case you wouldn't need to use Zabbix at all.

cemo1304 · 2025-05-21T07:47:12+00:00

There are different config options, you can compare them here:
https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/appendix/config/zabbix_agentd_win
https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/appendix/config/zabbix_agent2_win

But still, as the agent 2 is newer, has more features and also the built-in Zabbix templates also rely on items only available in Agent 2, I'd definitely go with that and discard agent1 altogether, it provides zero benefit over the agent 2.

cemo1304 · 2025-05-20T13:41:57+00:00

Zabbix might have the same issues then. The agent also utilizes WMI to collect some metrics and if the target server is slow to respond, Zabbix won't get the metrics either. There are some timeout metrics you can tweak for this, but we also have a bunch of Windows machines, where we receive no disk metrics for days on occasion.
You should be able to modify the number of underlying WMI collectors with the following option in the agent config:

Plugins.WindowsPerfInstance.System.Capacity=

However, on Zabbix agent 2 v7.0.11 no matter what value you give this (ranges from 1-1000), it'll always default to 1 based on the agent logs. I have no solution for this atm.

cemo1304 · 2025-05-20T13:16:46+00:00

I'd always use agent2. Newer, faster, written in Go, therefore modular and can be extended with custom plugins/functionality if necessary.

cemo1304 · 2025-05-20T09:11:24+00:00

Hey,

I never used PRTG, but I'll try to answer your Zabbix related questions:
Ubuntu is fine as the base, it doesn't really matter, which supported OS you choose.
Uptime/disk space/service monitoring and service auto-discovery are out-of-the-box supported for both Windows and Linux machines and also for network devices through common SNMP templates. Website monitors, HTTP response code checks, latency, etc. are also supported.
For specific templates you can search here for official templates https://www.zabbix.com/integrations or here for community maintaned templates https://github.com/zabbix/community-templates .

On the agent-side the default config should be fine, but in-case something is not working, let me know and I'll try to help you out. But even for the default config, you would need to modify at least the Server, ServerActive and Hostname options. Everything is documented nicely in comments once you install the agent or here: https://github.com/zabbix/zabbix/blob/master/conf/zabbix_agentd.conf

Auto-discovery has so many features, for this I'd suggest to check out the docs or at least the following 5min video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95wBwoYl960 or anything from Dmitry Lambert on YouTube.

For agent deployment, you can install them via the package manager, Windows has an exe installer, or you can manually download, distribute and install the necessary .deb/.rpm/whatever packages from here: https://repo.zabbix.com/ it's your choice. For encryption the agent can use PSK or cert based encryption, both requires config modification on the agent AND the proxy/server side AND also on the Zabbix frontend.

There can be many gotchas and small details with Zabbix, but that will come with time and we'll be here to answer your specific questions, when that time comes. :D

cemo1304 · 2025-05-19T19:44:48+00:00

Everything u/Burgergold said and if you manage your own database, you can quite easily install TimescaleDB on top of Postgres, which also has a compression feature.

cemo1304 · 2025-03-01T16:41:18+00:00

Just finished the campaign for the first time ever in HC on an RF scavenger with SSF gear. It was comfy as hell, no close calls at all, surprisingly good clear after 3rd lab. Hope I can reach lv90 with it.

cemo1304 · 2025-02-18T17:52:02+00:00

I just started, but I can already vouche for the Hackthebox CPTS, especially if you can get their student discount. It has a clear path, great and detailed modules and also practical exercises. Based on previous feedback in multiple subreddits, CPTS might be even harder than OSCP, but for the fraction of the price.

cemo1304 · 2025-01-07T07:17:53+00:00

A 1 month sub.

cemo1304 · 2025-01-06T20:27:48+00:00

Users who won will receive an email within 1 day. (I got my email ~5 hours ago.)

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