If you use EC2 instances for tasks that only need to be performed during work hours, it can be challenging and annoying to manually start up and shutdown instances when you need them. There are services that can handle this for you (Skeddly, Ylastic, etc) but they cost money and are overkill for small companies […]
We use OpenVPN and OSSEC together regularly. Unfortunately, OSSEC doesn’t do any useful interpretation of OpenVPN events out of the box. Instead, you’ll wade through a stream of event id 1002s in your email to see what’s going on with OpenVPN. We recently sat down and drafted a custom decoder and a few custom rules […]
Journald – a contentious subject in the Linux community. On one side, proponents tout advanced features and security. On the other, die-hard *nix users decry yet another move away from the simplicity of text files and more towards the Windows way of obfuscated binary file based systems. After using journald (and systemd) for a couple […]
For bleeding-edge non-production and experimental use, Fedora is a great choice of server distributions. For small non-enterprise deployments, Linode is our host of choice. As much as we’ve come to appreciate Linode, as Fox Mulder says: trust no one. This is especially true when no companies appear to be immune to the intrusions of the […]
Updated: January 2019 with latest suggestions and revised commentary. Updated: May 2016 with new cipher suggestions and revised commentary. We routinely use SSL Labs to verify systems we’ve configured. It’s a great service to verify that an SSL configuration is reasonably secure. It scores a site in four different areas: Certificate, Protocol Support, Key Exchange, […]