Disclaimer: This is a long article. I haven’t collected some nice configuration settings here for the sake of it. There are other hardening guides but some fall short on explaining the functionalities to be enabled or disabled. Every step is shortly, and hopefully clearly, explained so any reader can grasp the main idea of every […]
How to mitigate DoS attacks with mod_evasive on FreeBSD
Denial of Service attacks or the distributed version of them (DDoS) have been growing throughout the years with their ups and downs. In my view the only thing that will happen to them is even bigger growth. With the advent of IoT devices the next decade will see an increase in these kind of attacks. […]
Abandon Linux. Jails for developers.
Reading the title you might think I want to put developers in Jail and although some may be good candidates this is in the far opposite of my intention. I am talking about FreeBSD Jails. For the unfamiliar with the concept those Jails are userland secure contained environments that share a common kernel. Purists and […]
The root account
Users. What the hell you mean by “root”? Are you a Windows user? I bet you have the user account badly configured. By default Windows is installed under the Administrator account. And nobody bothers to change this and add a second account. That second account should be an underprivileged one. If you own the computer […]
How to install WordPress on FreeBSD
You can find information about how to install WordPress on FreeBSD somewhere else since there are many tutorials around explaining it. However I thought mine would be a bit more interesting to you. Read on. As you should be aware (and hopefully you already are) installing WordPress requires a stack of other software. Typically you […]
A brief introduction to Regular Expressions
A regular expression is a set of characters, a string of characters if you will, that specify a pattern. Ever used the grep command? It makes use of them. The ‘grep’ command is very handful when one needs to look for certain things inside a text file, or looking for some specific pattern from another […]
How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on a Lenovo T430s laptop with Ubuntu
As recently announced in a previous article I wanted to write a couple of guides on how to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux and UNIX environments. It is always a good and I hope a standard practice to have your systems patched and if they aren’t for whatever the reason (that legacy thing […]
How to export a MySQL database.
You are your website editor, owner and now administrator. You want control over the whole process and you are migrating from a managed site. Or you are a versed user on unix-like environments and you are just willing to export your database. This is a simple post on how to export a MySQL database. One […]