Puppet is the most powerful configuration management tool in the solar system. It’s the engine that drives your compliance, baseline, drift remediation, and deployment needs. It has always been and always will be open source, with freely downloadable operating system-specific…

MariaDB Server is one of the most popular open source relational databases. It’s made by the original developers of MySQL and guaranteed to stay open source. It is part of most cloud offerings and the default in most Linux distributions.…

Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It…

The purpose of unattended-upgrades is to keep the computer current with the latest security (and other) updates automatically. If you plan to use it, you should have some means to monitor your systems, such as installing the apt-listchanges package and…

A caching proxy. Specialized for package files from Linux distributors, primarily for Debian (and Debian based) distributions but not limited to those.

Fail2ban scans log files and bans IPs that show the malicious signs — too many password failures, seeking for exploits, etc. Generally Fail2Ban is then used to update firewall rules to reject the IP addresses for a specified amount of…

Often or not someone may place a web farm behind a loadbalancer and not get appropriate remote ip address logging information on the Apache log files. Following entry will describe how to configure Apache to log with the X-Forwarder-For HTTP-Header.

ModSecurity was originally designed for Apache web server. It could work with Nginx before version 3.0 but suffered from poor performance. ModSecurity 3.0 (aka libmodsecurity) was released in 2017. It’s a milestone release, particularly for Nginx users, as it’s the…