As professionals and many aficionados know, early this year some widespread vulnerabilities were found on Intel CPU’s as well as on AMD’s. It was a bit later discovered the flaws also affected some RISC architectures such as Power and ARM. Everybody went nuts and the world seemed to be tumbling because of two CPU vulnerabilities […]
A word on Spectre and Meltdown
Networking Dictionary
This is an attempt to collect all the necessary basic vocabulary to have a very basic basic understanding of networking. Because context is also needed, some concepts or historical references will be also shown. This dictionary is an informal one, for a better, accurate, more correct and in depth understanding look somewhere else, like the […]
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 work with Nessus scan results
Working with Nessus scan results is easy. How do I know that? Because I’ve worked with this tool for some time and although I do not know every corner of the things I’ve been doing some scans and solving quite a few deffects on systems that were labeled as ‘production ready’ when they clearly weren’t. […]
How to install MariaDB in FreeBSD
MariaDB is a derivative from the world-famous enterprise class MySQL database. The MySQL founder is Michael Widenius, also known as Monty. He created the project, it worked out for some time, it caught Sun’s attention and they bought it. Then Oracle bought Sun and knowing Larry everyone left running without looking what was left behind. […]
How to patch OpenSSH in FreeBSD 12.2
The default version of OpenSSH in FreeBSD 12.2 today, and it’s been this for quite some time, is not the most recent published by the OpenBSD guys, which by the way are the ones developing OpenSSH. Not only is not the latest but it has a few vulnerabilities affecting it, medium risk ones but nevertheless […]
What is Expect?
Expect is a handy scripting tool for task automation. You may have never heard of it. I heard about many scripting things before. But one day I needed something simple but didn’t know how to proceed, what would be a good tool for my purpose. The task was simple. Exporting a website content from a […]
How to improve Apache HTTP performance on FreeBSD
There are some nice articles on the internet telling you how to improve your Apache HTTP server’s performance. I did my bit on FreeBSD land. While turning on a different MPM than the prefork default one increases Apache HTTP performance by a lot, it is not the only thing one may do. For example if […]
How to manage site visitors based on IP Geolocation
Whenever someone publishes a website on the internet, most of the times, their intention is that site to be seen around the globe. However, as a site administrator you may want to divert users from one country to visit some specific version of that site, maybe because of the visitor’s language. Other times, less often […]
How to install Fail2ban on FreeBSD
Fail2ban is a complementary tool to your firewall. It works by scanning log files and bans IPs which present suspicious activity such as failed logins. It is compatible with many UNIX-like systems and is a security tool to have in your arsenal. It can filter not only ssh logins, but other services too, for example […]