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 […]
A brief introduction to Regular Expressions
How to replace a disk on a ZFS mirror pool
It’s happened to me, it’s happened to you, it’s happened more than one million times and it will still happen in the future. You run out of disk space or a disk fails. Nowadays you are using ZFS, and instead of having a fancy RAIDZ, because you still don’t need it, you are using a […]
How to configure Modsecurity 3 for WordPress on FreeBSD
A few weeks ago I wrote a guide on how to install Modsecurity 3 on Apache HTTP for the FreeBSD operating system. However there’s a catch with that setting and with Modsecurity in general. As good as it is as a WAF you need to at least adjust its configuration to the tool one pretends […]
How to install MariaDB in FreeBSD
MariaDB is a derivative from the world-famous enterprise class MySQL database. The MySQL founder is Michael Widenius, also known as Monty. He created the project, it worked out for some time, it caught Sun’s attention and they bought it. Then Oracle bought Sun and knowing Larry everyone left running without looking what was left behind. […]
How to install the ELK stack on CentOS 8
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 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, […]
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 […]
How to install the FAMP stack
You may have heard of the LAMP stack which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP or Perl. This is the same but instead of using the GNU/Linux operating system we’ll use FreeBSD. This is the FAMP stack. There are two ways to install software in FreeBSD, packages and the ports collections. Which in 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 improve Apache HTTP performance on FreeBSD
There are some nice articles on the internet telling you how to improve your Apache HTTP server’s performance. I did my bit on FreeBSD land. While turning on a different MPM than the prefork default one increases Apache HTTP performance by a lot, it is not the only thing one may do. For example if […]