A few weeks ago I published a how to guide to configure Apache HTTP as a reverse proxy. On that ocasion I was following what the average guide on the internet does on Linux. A front end server with Apache HTTP on calls a backend server where the real site is sitting. Many backend calls […]
How to configure Apache HTTP with a TLS reverse proxy backend on FreeBSD
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 use Cloudflare’s Argo Tunnel service to publish a website on FreeBSD 12/13
What is the Cloudflare Argo Tunnel service? In short, a tunneled connection between a host and Cloudflare’s network. A longer depiction can be read in a blog entry of theirs, but I would put it as a secure way to connect the services you want to publish using their network as a shield. An example […]
How to install AWStats on FreeBSD 13.0
AWStats is a very powerful and useful software allowing webmasters count the visits to their managed websites. The tool is basically coded in Perl and it was a very popular choice before Google made it way easy when they launched their Google Analytics tool. However, nowadays not everyone is using Google Analytics services and even […]
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 […]
A brief introduction to SSL/TLS certificates
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it an old implementation of a crytographic protocol. TLS, or Transport Layer Security, is a new one. They are both used to have privacy in the communications between different parties. They are used to secure email, web browsing, instant messaging, etc These protocols work in a complex way […]
How to synchronize system and network time in FreeBSD
For several applications it is necessary to synchronize your server to the network time. The protocol is called Network Time Protocol (NTP) and is basically giving the correct time to the world nowadays. Reading the Wikipedia entry is very interesting. FreeBSD comes with the ntp client. To set this up you will just add the […]
How to configure the PF firewall on FreeBSD
There are three firewall options on FreeBSD. The in-house built IPFW, the ‘old’ IPF (known as IP Filter) and PF ported from OpenBSD. PF is a very popular piece of software which was originally sparked from an issue on the IPF license that prevented making changes publicly available, which the OpenBSD did all the time. […]
How to update FreeBSD using beadm
Beadm is a tool which provides a wonderful and distinctive functionality on Solaris, OpenIndiana and FreeBSD. It relies on the ZFS filesystem allowing to take a filesystem snapshot. That can be used to manage the so called boot environments which provide a great way to secure updates, even when everything goes down the tubes. Hence […]
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. […]