Building a Real SIEM Lab on a Mac Mini Fleet — What Actually Broke, and What I Learned Fixing It
Most "I built a home SOC" posts show you the pretty dashboard and stop there. This one is about what happened after the dashboard loaded — because that's where the real learning was. 🖥️ The setup Three Mac Minis, one control machine, all Ubuntu. Mac Mini 1 runs the Wazuh manager, indexer, and dashboard — the security monitoring core. Mac Mini 2 handles AWS IAM permission scanning (Cloudsplaining, ScoutSuite). Mac Mini 3 is a documentation hub plus a custom vulnerability-intelligence pipeline pulling from the NVD API and NIST's CPRT compliance framework data. A fourth machine, my daily driver, orchestrates all three over SSH. Today's goal: get every machine reporting into Wazuh, so I'd have real, fleet-wide visibility — not just a single monitored box. 🐛 Bug #1: the silent feed stall After installing the Wazuh agent on Mac Mini 3, vulnerability scanning just... sat there. The log showed Initiating update feed process and then nothing. No error, no timeout, no progress. I ruled things out methodically: DNS resolved fine, curl could reach Wazuh's CTI feed endpoint and complete a full TLS handshake, disk space was nowhere close to full, and there were no stale lock files sitting around. Every individual piece of the pipeline worked in isolation — but the feed download itself never completed. The actual fix: upgrade Wazuh from 4.14.5 to 4.14.6. A newer point release fixed whatever was silently stalling the content-updater module. Once upgraded, the feed downloaded, decompressed, and the scanner came alive within minutes. Lesson: when every individual network/system check passes but a specific module still won't progress, check for a version-specific bug before going deeper down the debugging rabbit hole. 🔒 Bug #2: locking myself out with fail2ban Mid-troubleshooting, my control machine's SSH connection to Mac Mini 3 started getting flatly refused — no prompt, no error, just Connection refused. Ping worked fine. Every other port responded. Just port 22, silently dead. fai