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 mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on an HP Proliant server with Ubuntu
How to detect a WAF – Web Application Firewall
From a penetration testing perspective to identify if a Web Application Firewall (WAF) is in place is essential. The next question is, does an administrator need to know this? My view is, anyone who is in charge of any system that has implemented some sort of WAF needs to verify this tool is working, at […]
Who am I?
My name is Albert Valbuena. I am a retired ski instructor and after a period of five years in the international department of a logistics company I recently moved in to the IT industry. It hasn’t been overnight and it is still work in progress. A few years ago I started a website called www.skireviewer.com. […]
The firewall
If you don’t know why you need a firewall it’s because you are not very tech savy. Don’t worry. You can discover by yourself why you need one. The router sitting in your house has one installed in it. And please don’t disable that by any mean. You can check why a firewall is important […]
How to enable SSL on Apache on FreeBSD
On this guide you will read about a simple way to enable Apache’s TLS connections on your web server. Aside from useful it secures the connection from the client to the server and prevents unwanted tinkering. Anyone on the need of SSL (nowadays TLS) will benefit from this article but particularly will do those in […]
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 install the Clamav antivirus in FreeBSD
Clamav is an antivirus. But don’t think of Clamav as the antivirus you have sitting in your personal computer at home or in your office. It’s an antivirus that works under user demand. It is not constantly monitoring the system. So you will have to setup some cronjobs in order to check and monitor the […]
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. […]
How to install Ansible on FreeBSD
Ansible is a very useful tool geared to system’s configuration and applications deployment. In this how to install Ansible on FreeBSD I will briefly explain what the tool is, what it does, what it does not and how to install it on FreeBSD. I will also demonstrate very basic use and on a later article […]
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 […]