Welcome to the wonderful world of SSH keys! If you don’t yet share my enthusiasm you soon will! SSH keys are a perfect way for you to control access to your machine, whether that be a very secure way for only you to have access, locking down other authorized users and preventing their passwords from getting distributed or stolen, or even allowing access to scripts for very specific purposes. SSH keys accomplish all of it [...]
So you need to setup an FTP server? Are you sure? The reason I ask is that FTP isn’t really a great option in many cases due to its inherent lack of security “consciousness” as I like to call it. This can best be summed up from the File Transfer Protocol’s wikipedia page, excerpt here: FTP was not designed to be a secure protocol—especially by today’s standards—and has many security weaknesses. In May 1999, the [...]
Looks like the 4k sector drives are really starting to hit mainstream. This year marks the first time I’ve received a new laptop that came with a 4k Advanced Format hard drive. The laptop was from Dell and we get in new Dell laptops all the time. The funny thing is that until I tried installing Windows XP on it (came with Windows 7), I would have never even known it was a 4k sector [...]
Application Armor. I’m sure you can imagine what this little utility does but allow me to elaborate a bit and explain why configuring and using AppArmor has become Part III of our little series. First let’s quickly look at what we have so far if you’ve gone through Quick Secure Setup Part I and Quick Secure Setup Part II. From the security standpoint your server has every non-essential port turned off. Only applications you explicitly [...]
It wasn’t too many years ago that you could calculate the number of wireless clients you’d have to support simply by counting heads. Oh I have 100 people to support here? Okay, roughly 100 wireless clients then, max. Well that nice, simple equation is about as true as 1 + 1 = 1 nowadays. Think of all the things you might possess that have a Wi-Fi chip in them. In my workplace alone we have: [...]
Welcome to Part II of the Quick Secure Setup Series. Be sure to check out Quick, Secure Setup Part I first, although this can be taken on its own if you’d just like to configure UFW with Fail2ban correctly. At the end of Part I we quickly setup a basic iptables config just to get the firewall up and doing its job. The problem with iptables, isn’t actually a problem with iptables itself, but rather [...]
Ever play or even hear of Indie games? Many have not but a little piece of humble pie and some marketing genius has brought them into the limelight. Indie games aren’t a type of game but rather a classification of any game that is developed and distributed without a large video game publisher behind it. At first glance you think, Big deal, if someone has a good enough game it will sell regardless. Alas, it [...]
Welcome to the first part of my Quick Secure Setup series. This series serves to accomplish a primary goal. To help one quickly and efficiently configure their ubuntu server in such a way that it is very secure, WHILE still providing great usability and maintainability. A lot of people have great intentions to secure their server, SELinux, detailed ip-tables configurations, log audits, etcetera. I’ve found that after a short while because of the maintenance involved [...]
During my transition from Windows to Ubuntu linux there were very few applications that I couldn’t find a suitable Linux alternative for based on what I was accustomed to on the Windows side. In fact I did a quick scan of the application landscape before my transition and made sure that for any road blocks I could come up with some solution. For example I knew Microsoft Outlook would be a problem. Outlook was and [...]
I’ve been using APC battery backup products for decades now. Anytime I had ever looked at another brand they always fell short in two primary areas for me, reliability and features. I can’t remember the last time I did some research on home office or personal UPS devices but it’s clear APC doesn’t own this market anymore. Tripp Lite and what I’ll call the newcomer, CyberPower seem to be hitting the sweet spot better [...]
