Suricata is a free, open source, Intrusion Detection System software, or IDS for short. But it can also act as an Intrusion Prevention System, or IPS. It works by finding patterns using heuristics typically from network traffic. When configured to just warn about suspicious activity it is called an IDS, however when it blocks the […]

How to install Suricata on FreeBSD

Monitoring Systems (One)
Monitoring systems or how to get lost in fierce madness. There are many solutions to monitor systems and most of them have some kind of web interface to operate. Choosing the right tool for any job is a tedious task and for a newbie like me it is a bit harder, specially for a sensitive […]

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. Rolling back the entire OS is possible.
When I was writing an article on updating FreeBSD from the 11.2 version to the new major release number 12, I was trying to add something extra for those who may read some of the information I publish. FreeBSD as a UNIX operating system has similar functionality to the old school UNIX ones such as […]

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 […]

How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on an HP Proliant server 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 install WordPress on Debian 9 (LAMP stack)
In this guide we’ll see how to install a simple, clean, new WordPress site. In order to run this site we’ll have to have a LAMP (or FAMP if you prefer FreeBSD over Linux) stack in place. Read the correspondent guides in order to get the necessary software layers all together, rightly configured. If you […]

How to install Docker on Ubuntu 18.04
Operating System level virtualization is hitting hard now, as much as VM’s did just a few years ago. Docker is the popular framework for this matter, the new kid on the block so to speak. This is the hot spot now and if anyone wants to appear knowledgeable about system administration knowing this technology is […]

VMWare ESXi (One)
The VMWare ESXi is a hypervisor developed by the VMWare company and it is widely known and used in many environments and enterprises of all sorts. Nowadays it is the main component of a sort of a software suite. It is a type one hypervisor which means it runs directly on to the hardware controlling […]
