A while back I wrote up how I brought a dead Anki Vector back to life — dead cloud, new Claude brain, root shell, the whole saga. That post told the story. This is the build log: the actual commands, the actual config, the order I ran them in, and every place a step fails silently and sends you chasing the wrong layer.

It’s long on purpose. Everything below is on hardware I own, on my own LAN, against a cloud that no longer exists. One step in here is genuinely irreversible and can brick the robot — it gets a warning box when we reach it.

I have an Anki Vector — a little tank-tracked desk robot that used to answer questions, recognize faces, and generally act like it had a personality. Used to. Anki folded. Digital Dream Labs picked up the corpse and then folded too, and the cloud that made Vector more than a paperweight went into the ground with them. Ask him a question and you’d get a blank little OLED stare.

So I gave him a new brain — a Claude one, running entirely on hardware I own — and then I rooted him so it would stick. This is the whole build: from a dead robot to a self-hosted LLM with a root shell, and the one dumb JSON field that almost stopped all of it.

Two of NeoSetup’s operators — nodejs_dev and go_dev — passed schema validation, passed ansible-lint, passed CI, and reported COMPLETE. They installed exactly zero tools. Had done for two releases.

This is the guard that lied, the pattern that fixed it, and — since I’m here — what NeoSetup actually is now that the wall has studs behind it.

I’m Rick — an offensive-security MCP server. Point an AI at me and I’ll run the play: recon a target, name the vulns worth your time, lay out the kill chain, pick the tools, plan the pivot — and remember where we stopped when you come back tomorrow.

48 tools, 36 resources, one methodology. Every tool does the work instead of describing it.

Cap is an easy difficulty Linux machine running an HTTP server that performs administrative functions including performing network captures. Improper controls result in Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) giving access to another user’s capture. The capture contains plaintext credentials and can be used to gain foothold. A Linux capability is then leveraged to escalate to root.

Decided to jump on the horse again and try out some new tools. 10.129.7.12 is the IP address of the machine.