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 use Fail2ban with WordPress
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 […]
How to manipulate and use USB drives in FreeBSD
If you are coming from the Windows, Mac or GNU/Linux world using USB drives on the desktop is a piece of cake. You plug it and it works. That’s it. Interoperability between the proprietary world and OSS (Open Source Software) has improved but there’s still a very palpable line. Just grab a new USB drive, […]
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 harden Apache HTTP
Disclaimer: This is a long article. I haven’t collected some nice configuration settings here for the sake of it. There are other hardening guides but some fall short on explaining the functionalities to be enabled or disabled. Every step is shortly, and hopefully clearly, explained so any reader can grasp the main idea of every […]
How to compile cloudflared in FreeBSD 13/14
I happen to self-host my websites using Cloudflare’s services (article 1, article 2). Since the FreeBSD port seems to be delaying its releases and Cloudflare’s policy on maintaining versions only considers 1 year old code, in an act of prevention I have learnt, and I am publishing, how to compile cloudflared in FreeBSD. Note: At […]
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 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 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 mirror disks on FreeBSD’s ZFS
This article is not going to be a long, detailed, specialized how to. I just wanted to share the ease and the fantastic quality of ZFS for a dead simple need I had. A spare box with a spare disk doing nothing could be repurposed as a file share box at home. Mirroring the two […]