The ELK stack stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana. These three pieces of software are very useful since each brings a powerful capability that in combination is just great to use. Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine. Logstash can process data from multiple sources. Kibana allows to visualize data in a graphic manner. These […]

How to install the ELK stack on CentOS 8

How to mitigate/solve the MDS vulnerabilities of Intel processors in FreeBSD
It had to happen again. Anyone betting on new hardware vulnerabilities on Intel processors would have won. This time these are called the MDS vulnerabilities, which stands for Microarchitectural Data Sampling. The trouble is the ones who would have really made big money would have been those stating the new CPUs were on the same […]

The root account
Users. What the hell you mean by “root”? Are you a Windows user? I bet you have the user account badly configured. By default Windows is installed under the Administrator account. And nobody bothers to change this and add a second account. That second account should be an underprivileged one. If you own the computer […]

How to patch OpenSSH in FreeBSD 12.2
The default version of OpenSSH in FreeBSD 12.2 today, and it’s been this for quite some time, is not the most recent published by the OpenBSD guys, which by the way are the ones developing OpenSSH. Not only is not the latest but it has a few vulnerabilities affecting it, medium risk ones but nevertheless […]

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 update FreeBSD with freebsd-update
Anytime you set a clean fresh FreeBSD install or just any other operating system you must update it. This should be the first thing. If you are a bit security aware (read paranoid) you can first set up the firewall rules and then update the system to the latest release where you have all the […]

How to set CentOS 7 repositories
CentOS is the free open source replica of the well known Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). With a very good reputation because of its stability and performance RHEL is nowadays the dominating GNU/Linux distribution in the enterprise environment. As a gift, in a similar fashion to Microsoft’s Windows trial versions (without limits to the use), […]

How to install sudo in FreeBSD
Sudo is a very useful application. It allows a regular user to perform tasks only reserved to the root account. There is lots of documentation about sudo and there is even a book about it called “Sudo Mastery”. If you need to investigate deep on this, buy it. Why do you need this? Well… Everyone […]

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 […]

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 […]
