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 improve Apache HTTP performance on FreeBSD
Web credentials stealing
The theft of credentials has been occurring since almost the beginning of time. But of course when the web ‘happened’ and specially when e-commerce exploded stealing passwords also went on the rise. Emptying bank accounts, ordering stuff on behalf (and expenses) of others, spying, even impersonation was and is achieved by stealing credentials. Luckily for […]
Abandon Linux. Move to FreeBSD or Illumos.
If you use GNU/Linux and you are only on opensource, you may be doing it wrong. Here’s why. Is your company based on opensource based software only? Do you have a bunch of developers hitting some kind of server you have installed for them to “do their thing”? Being it for economical reasons (remember to […]
How to install Drupal 8 on FreeBSD
NOTE: Drupal 8 will be soon oudated. A newer article to be released on October 24th on how to install Drupal 9 on FreeBSD can be found here. This is a quick, simple yet effective tutorial on how to install Drupal 8 on FreeBSD. Drupal is a robust, complete well stablished CMS used on many […]
How to configure the IPFW firewall on FreeBSD
Among the three possible firewalls on FreeBSD (choice is always nice) IPFW is the in-house built one. There is a default, easy way, configuration path but if one needs to build a box to act as a dedicated network appliance with packet filtering capacity fine tunning the IPFW firewall configuration is more than desirable. Before […]
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 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 install Webmin on FreeBSD 12
Webmin is a fantastic tool for those willing to administer UNIX or unix-like systems through a GUI interface. While the CLI interface lets any user to interact with these kind of systems to the very core and extract all the juice, there are tasks where the graphical interface makes sense and its visual and quick […]
How to set the locale in FreeBSD
The locale is the character set that will be used. And it is very important to match the keyboard you are using. Mind this also matters if you are transferring data to other systems. Different standards as the ASCII, UTF’s and the ISO’s, to name a few, have been put in place through the years […]
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 […]