Whenever someone publishes a website on the internet, most of the times, their intention is that site to be seen around the globe. However, as a site administrator you may want to divert users from one country to visit some specific version of that site, maybe because of the visitor’s language. Other times, less often […]
How to manage site visitors based on IP Geolocation
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 […]
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 […]
Lynis or how to quickly audit your system’s security configuration
A colleague of mine pointed me out to Lynis, a system’s configuration audit tool which checks the hardening of any running UNIX or UNIX-like system, including the BSDs. This tool has a built in check list and a set of sane and safe configurations and compares them to the target system. As output we find […]
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 […]
Abandon Linux. How to install iocage to manage FreeBSD Jails
The iocage program is a python 3 piece created to manage FreeBSD Jails leveraging the underpinning ZFS file system on FreeBSD. As already explained on previous articles the FreeBSD operating system offers an OS-level virtualization system called Jails. And as described on past articles it can benefit administrators and developers alike. This is a simple […]
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 configure the PF firewall on FreeBSD
There are three firewall options on FreeBSD. The in-house built IPFW, the ‘old’ IPF (known as IP Filter) and PF ported from OpenBSD. PF is a very popular piece of software which was originally sparked from an issue on the IPF license that prevented making changes publicly available, which the OpenBSD did all the time. […]
How to enable Geolocation in AWStats on FreeBSD 13.0
A few weeks ago, a guide explaining how to install AWStats on FreeBSD was released here in adminbyaccident.com. On that piece a basic install of AWStats is shown, however, a nice and important functionality of AWStats is missing. Knowing the location of visitors is a matter of interest, for the sake of it or because […]
How to configure TLS 1.2 on UNIX or GNU/Linux
This is an article willing to help and point out a few useful resources for those using Apache HTTP or NGINX web servers that are still using the deprecated SSLv3, TLS 1.0 and/or TLS 1.1 verions. If you find the articles in Adminbyaccident.com useful to you, please consider making a donation. Use this link to […]