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 […]
How to install Fail2ban on FreeBSD
Live monitoring with Netdata
Netdata is a real time monitoring software that allows administrators, developers and architects have a visual representation of a system’s performance live. In short, porn for system’s tuners and other masochists but also a great tool to check system’s behaviour under load giving all members of a team to look at their part while the […]
How to configure a Virtual Host in Apache
You may have just one website and that is ok. If that is your case you can avoid this entire chapter. But some of you may also have several websites. And quite probably you want to use one single public ip to resolve all the domains you have. The Apache documentation is the main resource […]
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 test pfSense on VirtualBox running on FreeBSD
There are other guides on how to do this on Windows, Mac, but not on FreeBSD, so here goes a how to pfSense on Virtualbox running on FreeBSD. Before going to it, let’s address the first question, which is what is pfSense. pfSense is a FreeBSD based distribution made for networking purposes. The company behind […]
How to use Fail2ban with WordPress
In a previous article we did an install of Fail2ban on a FreeBSD server. This tool can help us to protect our WordPress install, independatly from if we are using the FAMP stack or the LAMP stack. As I mentioned on that article Fail2ban is a complementary tool to our firewall. It works by scanning […]
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 […]
How to format an USB drive on FreeBSD
File system support on FreeBSD falls onto UFS (UNIX File System) or originally named the FFS (Fast File System and on ZFS (Zetabyte File System). If you are using your box as a desktop-workstation you will use USB drives to share files with other systems, to carry things on your pocket or safe the day […]
How to install WordPress on FreeBSD
You can find information about how to install WordPress on FreeBSD somewhere else since there are many tutorials around explaining it. However I thought mine would be a bit more interesting to you. Read on. As you should be aware (and hopefully you already are) installing WordPress requires a stack of other software. Typically you […]
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 […]