DEV Community: Dewayne Cox

Building a Lightweight Honeypot on Fedora: What I Learned Creating BayouCanary

Dewayne Cox — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 04:55:56 +0000

Absolutely. Here's a DEV.to-ready article. I kept it technical rather than sales-heavy and avoided claiming BayouCanary does anything we haven't validated.
Title:

Building a Lightweight Honeypot on Fedora: Why I Created BayouCanary
Tags:
linux security fedora cybersecurity
Article:
If someone is probing your network, how quickly would you know?
That question was part of what led me to build BayouCanary, a lightweight honeypot and security-monitoring project designed to run on Fedora Linux.
The concept isn't to replace a firewall, EDR platform, SIEM, IDS/IPS, or other enterprise security product.
It's much simpler:
Put a tripwire on the network and pay attention when something touches it.

What Is a Honeypot?
A honeypot is a system or service intentionally exposed in a controlled way so that unexpected interaction with it can be observed.
Consider a machine on your internal network that nobody should normally be connecting to.
If another system suddenly begins attempting connections to services on that machine, that's interesting.
It doesn't automatically mean you've discovered an attacker.
But it gives you something worth investigating.
That's the philosophy behind BayouCanary.
Why Fedora?
I wanted BayouCanary to be something that could run on a relatively simple Linux installation without requiring someone to build an entire security operations platform.
Fedora provides a solid environment for experimenting with Linux networking, services, automation, virtualization, and security tooling.
More importantly, you don't necessarily need dedicated hardware.
A BayouCanary system can be deployed in a Fedora virtual machine, which makes it practical for a homelab or testing environment where spinning up another physical server doesn't make sense.
That also makes experimentation much easier:

Create a Fedora VM.
Deploy the monitoring environment.
Place it appropriately on your test network.
Generate controlled test activity.
Observe what BayouCanary reports. For development, being able to destroy and rebuild that VM is extremely useful. A Honeypot Isn't a Security Camera One misconception I wanted to avoid is presenting a honeypot as something that "protects your network." That's not really its job. I think of it more like a tripwire. A firewall asks: Should this traffic be allowed?

A monitoring platform might ask:
What is happening across my infrastructure?

A honeypot asks something slightly different:
Why is someone interacting with this system at all?

That distinction matters.
BayouCanary is intended to provide another source of visibility—not magically make a network secure.
Keeping the Project Small
Security projects have a habit of becoming enormous.
You start with:
"I'd like to monitor some network activity."

Three hours later you're designing a SOC.
I deliberately wanted to avoid that.
BayouCanary isn't intended to compete with enterprise security platforms.
The goal is closer to:
Deploy → Monitor → Observe → Investigate
That makes it potentially useful for:

Linux enthusiasts
Homelab users
Small networks
Security students
System administrators
People learning defensive security
Anyone experimenting with honeypots It also makes the project much easier to understand. Why a Dashboard Matters Collecting information is only half the problem. You also need to make the information understandable. One of the design goals for BayouCanary has therefore been providing a dashboard that makes it easier to see what the monitoring system is observing. I don't want someone to need five terminal windows open just to determine whether something interesting happened. This reflects a larger philosophy I'm using with the tools I build: The underlying technology can remain technical without requiring the interface to be difficult.

That's especially important with security tooling.
Complexity can hide important information.
Virtual Machines Make Great Security Labs
One of my favorite parts of this project is that you can experiment without needing an expensive lab.
A Fedora VM can become a disposable security target.
That means you can generate controlled traffic against it, observe the results, make changes, break things, restore a snapshot, and try again.
For someone learning Linux or defensive security, that's valuable.
You aren't just reading about network activity.
You're generating it and observing what happens.
What BayouCanary Is Not
It's equally important to define what a security tool doesn't do.
BayouCanary is not intended to replace:

Endpoint protection
Firewalls
Network segmentation
Vulnerability management
IDS/IPS platforms
Centralized logging
SIEM platforms
Good patch management It's another signal. And in security, sometimes one additional signal is exactly what starts an investigation. Early Access Means Early Access BayouCanary is currently at version 0.1.3 Early Access. I use that terminology deliberately. This is still an evolving project. I'd rather have Linux administrators, homelab users, and security-minded people experiment with it and tell me what's missing than pretend a young project is already a mature enterprise security product. Some of the questions I'm particularly interested in are:
What information should a lightweight honeypot dashboard surface first?
Which network services would be most useful to monitor?
What alerts would actually be useful rather than noisy?
What reporting would administrators want?
Would you deploy something like this in a VM?
What would make you trust—or distrust—a tool like this? Those answers can influence where the project goes next. Building Tools Around Real Problems BayouCanary is part of a larger project I'm building called BayouFinds. My background is in systems and infrastructure work, so I'm particularly interested in small tools that remove repetitive work or make technical information easier to understand. I'm increasingly convinced that useful software doesn't always need to reinvent the underlying technology. Sometimes the opportunity is simply: Take something powerful, remove unnecessary friction, add sensible guardrails, and make the information easier to use. That's the direction I'm exploring with BayouCanary and the other BayouFinds projects. Want to Try It? BayouCanary 0.1.3 Early Access is available here: BayouCanary 0.1.3 Early Access — Fedora Honeypot Security Monitor https://bayoufinds.com/b/oOg3f If you work with Linux, networking, cybersecurity, homelabs, or system administration, I'm particularly interested in your technical feedback. What would you want a lightweight honeypot to tell you the moment you opened its dashboard?

cybersecurity #linux #fedora #bayoufinds

Is Your Windows PC Running Slow? Here’s What I Check Before Blaming the Hardware

Dewayne Cox — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 04:42:18 +0000

BayouFinds One Screen Dashboard
I built a small Windows diagnostic dashboard for people who want a quicker starting point when investigating system performance and problems.
It's available for $5 here:
https://bayoufinds.com/b/IPR5u
BayouFinds.com
Built for people who would rather troubleshoot the problem than guess at it.

Building BayouOps Suite Pro — Lightweight Operational Readiness & Visibility for IT Teams

Dewayne Cox — Sun, 31 May 2026 04:43:45 +0000

What I Built

Over the last few weeks I’ve been building BayouOps Suite Pro, a lightweight operational readiness and deployment visibility platform focused on helping smaller IT teams manage enterprise-style operational realities.

The project came from real operational pain points I experienced supporting large endpoint and server environments over many years. I got tired of switching between spreadsheets, patch tools, inventory systems, reporting dashboards, and manually piecing together operational data just to answer basic readiness questions.

Instead of building another bloated RMM or remote control platform, I focused on operational visibility and readiness workflows:

Software / Agent Visibility
Patch & KB Visibility
Endpoint Risk Correlation
Unsupported OS Detection
Version Drift Analysis
Pending Reboot Tracking
Executive Export Workflows
Operational Readiness Scoring

The goal is simple:

Provide lightweight operational awareness without massive platform overhead.

Demo

Project Site:

https://bayouops-suite-platform.netlify.app/

GitHub Repository:

https://github.com/dewaynecox123456-lang/bayouops-suite-pro

Current workflows include:

JSON/CSV import pipelines
Real Windows inventory collectors
Endpoint correlation logic
Operational scoring
Executive reporting workflows
Local-first visibility dashboards

The project currently includes:

software inventory collectors
patch inventory collectors
operational readiness dashboards
endpoint risk scoring
executive export workflows
operational screenshot galleries
embedded demo walkthroughs

The Comeback Story

This project originally started as a rough operational dashboard concept with scattered reporting ideas and unfinished workflows.

The biggest turnaround came when I stopped trying to build “everything” and focused specifically on operational visibility and readiness.

During this challenge I completed:

software visibility workflows
patch & KB visibility workflows
endpoint risk correlation
readiness scoring
import/export pipelines
operational validation logic
Netlify deployment
GitHub documentation cleanup
customer-facing operational demos
responsive dashboard presentation

The platform evolved from disconnected concepts into a much more complete operational workflow system.

My Experience with GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot helped accelerate development significantly, especially while iterating quickly across multiple operational workflows.

It was especially useful for:

rapid UI iteration
JSON/CSV parsing workflows
PowerShell collector scaffolding
validation logic
dashboard rendering
operational correlation logic
documentation cleanup

The biggest benefit was being able to move faster on operational ideas without constantly breaking workflow momentum.

I still directed the architecture, workflow logic, operational requirements, scoring models, and overall product direction manually based on real-world systems engineering experience.

This project has been one of the most practical and rewarding systems engineering builds I’ve worked on in a long time.

devchallenge

githubchallenge

SysAdmin

DevOps

CyberSecurity

WindowsServer

Linux

ITOperations

PatchManagement

OperationalReadiness

BayouOps

Why I Built My Own Offline Troubleshooting Runbook Instead of Using OneNote

Dewayne Cox — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:21:35 +0000

Over the years my troubleshooting notes ended up everywhere.

OneNote

ticket comments

random markdown files

screenshots

old documentation

During incidents that made finding the right fix slower than it should be.

So I decided to build a small tool for myself.

Bayou FieldOps is a local troubleshooting runbook that lets me quickly search real-world fixes I’ve encountered over time.

The goal was simple: fast access to solutions when something is broken.

Features:
• searchable runbook entries

• works fully offline

• Linux AppImage build

• Windows portable version

• quick navigation between incidents and fixes

Many of the runbooks come from real issues I've run into such as:

Active Directory trust relationship errors
account lockouts
BigFix exit codes
sync failures
common Linux service issues

Originally this was just a personal tool to replace scattered notes, but I packaged it so others might find it useful too.

I'm curious how other sysadmins organize troubleshooting knowledge.

Do you keep runbooks, or rely mostly on docs and ticket history?