Like the rest of the posts on this blog, this is an opinion piece based on my 2+ decades on the industry. Some will agree, others will disagree. Let’s get started. Definition of IT Security When I say “IT security”, I specifically mean that which secures your office place. The PCs, laptops, Macs, and the networking that your employees use…
Category: Server and OS
Using FreeBSD to Stream to YouTube and Twitch
Table Of Content
Introduction In a previous entry I discussed the differences in streaming game play to YouTube vs Twitch, as well as the differences between using hardware versus software h.264 encoding. The conclusion that I came to was that I was going to continue streaming to my YouTube channel until I decide to buy and assemble another PC specifically for Twitch…
Blocking Spammers at the Router: IPFWMTAD
Table Of Content
Assuming you’ve followed my spam-fighting adventures, you’ll know that I have a fairly successful installation of Neal Horman’s spamilter running in a FreeBSD jail, and his ipfwmtad daemon running on the jail’s host. Meaning the ipfw rules being added by ipfwmtad are done on a server different from where spamilter is running. Along with all of that, you’ll recall…
FreeBSD Jails: Filesystems and FIBs
Table Of Content
In my Putting Jails to Work entry, I detailed how I set up the jails on joker. Part of that entry dealt with the null filesystem mounts that I had to do on joker so that the jails would have access to an NFS-mounted filesystem. It turns out that I did a lot more work than was necessary, because the…
Final Linux to FreeBSD Conversion: The Router
Table Of Content
This post will show up in both the FreeBSD section as well as the Network one. It’s sort of a combination of the two. I’ve been detailing my server conversions from Linux to FreeBSD on this blog, but I held off on the final device, and that’s the router. It turned out to be a hell of a challenge…
Spamilter in a Jail
Table Of Content
If you’ve been following my two sub-threads on this blog regarding FreeBSD jails and fighting spam, you know the status: I have a FreeBSD server called joker that has multiple jails on it. One jail is riddler, and it handles all outbound SMTP connections. But not inbound. Further, you know that I have a reasonably complex anti-spam system set…
Spamilter and SpamAssassin Working Together
Table Of Content
In my Killing Spam(mers) entry, I discussed getting both SpamAssassin and Neal Horman’s spamilter installed and working on joker. Doing so made a significant impact on the amount of spam I was seeing. However, they were working independently of one another, and what I really wanted was some sort of feedback loop. Should a message get through spamilter and be…
FreeBSD Jails: Putting Them to Work
Table Of Content
In the last entry, I explained how I decided to remove the Linux hypervisor from my network and replace it with a beefy FreeBSD server named joker. Instead of all of the VMs running on the former KVM server, I instead created a collection of FreeBSD jails. This post will serve to document what I did to get them…
Dropping Linux and KVM in Favor of FreeBSD and Jails
Table Of Content
Before the Overhaul… As mentioned previously, most of the services that I run out of my house have been via virtual machines. For a long while, I was using VMWare’s ESXi, but I got tired of its stupid Windows admin tool, and also tired of its restrictions on what hardware it would run on. I had a Mac Pro…
Killing Spam(mers)
Table Of Content
I’m writing this ex post facto, so me referring to things like, “I did this” actually happened months ago. I’m just now recounting it. Note that the assumption with this document is sendmail. You’re running sendmail as your MTA, right? No? Well go back to the beginning and try again. So.. you’re running sendmail as your MTA, right? No?…