Strictly following security best practices is the first step to cybersecurity. Although SSH is the industry standard for both security and efficacy for remote server access, as with any software, SSH is only as secure as configurations applied to the server and client configurations.

In this article, we’ll explore five SSH best practices you should observe to boost the security of your infrastructure.

Personally, I've started to use a VPN between my workstation, laptop, and mobile devices. I could imagine it starting to be useful for hybrid development – running some services locally and others in the cloud. Of course, this whole setup could be leapfrogged once we move to remote development.

Binary disassembly is surprisingly difficult. Many disassembly tasks (e.g., code/data disambiguation and function boundary detection) are undecidable and require meticulous heuristics and algorithms to cover the wide range of real-world binary semantics. An ideal disassembler has two key properties: (1) transparency, meaning that its underlying logic is accessible and interpretable, and (2) mutability, meaning that it permits ad hoc interaction and refinement. Unfortunately, despite the abundance of disassembly tools available today, none have both transparency and mutability. Most off-the-shelf disassemblers (e.g., objdump, Dyninst, McSema, and Angr) perform “run-and-done” disassembly, and while their underlying heuristics and algorithms are indeed open source, even the slightest of changes (e.g., toggling on a heuristic) requires a complete rebuild of the tool and regeneration of the disassembly. In contrast, popular commercial disassemblers like IDA Pro and Binary Ninja provide rich interfaces for user-written plugins, yet these tools are almost entirely proprietary, making it impossible to fully vet where their core heuristics and algorithms fall short. Thus, reverse engineers are left to choose between two classes of disassemblers: those full of ambiguity or those with zero flexibility.

In this blog post, I introduce our vision for a best-of-both-worlds (transparent and mutable) platform for binary disassembly. Our approach was inspired by recent disassembly tools like ddisasm and d3re, which use the Soufflé Datalog engine. Dr. Disassembler uses Trail of Bits’ in-house incremental and differential Datalog engine, Dr. Lojekyll, to specify the disassembly process. Below, I describe how Dr. Disassembler’s relational view of disassembly is a step toward transparent, mutable disassembly—streamlining the integration of new heuristics, algorithms, and retroactive updates—without the need to perform de novo disassembly per every incremental update.

Jira is a popular task management tools used across multiple industries. It is exceptionally popular in IT and is built to be used with the Agile framework but if you know how to use and organize things in Jira, you can use it in almost any field.

In this article, we are going to learn how to install PrestoDB with Podman.

Presto is a high-performance, distributed SQL query engine for big data, its architecture allows users to query a variety of data sources such as Hadoop, AWS S3, Teradata, Cassandra, Kafka, etc. You can even query data from multiple sources within a single query.

Proxmox virtual environment, popularly known as Proxmox VE, is an open-source server virtualization software based on Debian Linux in conjunction with RHEL kernel, which is modified to permit you to generate and set up new virtual machines for private servers and containers with unified storage for improved efficiency.

This software offers two versions of virtualizations. The first is containers with LXC, and full virtualization with KVM comes as the second. Virtualization is the basis of cloud computing as it allows for more proficient usage of physical PC hardware.

Sometimes you may want to install an Ubuntu desktop or server on a virtual machine. However, you may have realized that communication between the host and the VM machine doesn’t exist. Luckily, many distributions now carry the open-source VM tools that can be used for many of the most popular Virtual Machine products such as VMware.

In the following small tutorial, you will learn how to install these tools on either Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish server or desktop environment.

SSH banner warnings are necessary when companies or organizations want to display a stern warning to discourage unauthorized parties from accessing a server.

These warnings appear immediately before the password prompt, informing unauthorised users who are about to log in of the implications of doing so. Typically, these warnings represent legal consequences that unauthorised users may face if they continue to access the server.

Follow this guide to see how you can set a custom warning banner.

Since this post shares cloud strategies with awesome people like you, naturally this post may contain affiliate links for products I use and love. If you click on those links and make a purchase, I'll earn some coffee money which I promise to drink while creating more helpful content like this.

GIMP, better known as GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a free, open-source raster graphics editing software primarily used for image manipulation and image editing, transcoding between various image formats, free-form drawing, and many more specialized tasks. GIMP is released under GPL-3.0-or-later license and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

In the following tutorial, you will learn to install the GIMP application with Linux Mint 20 using three alternative methods.

Glances System Monitor is free, an open-source command-line tool for process monitoring, system resources such as CPU, Disk I/O, File System, Load Average, Memory, Network Interfaces and processes. Glances are built with Python language. Glances support cross-platform monitoring, which can be used with a web-based interface.

One of the excellent features Glances supports is setting thresholds in the program. You can set careful, warning, and critical in the configuration file, which will then relay information in colors that can show alerts to systems resources bottlenecks, system resources issues, and much more. Glances, by default, comes with a pre-set list of colors, but you can modify and add additional configs.

The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install or enable and configure Glances System Monitor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish Desktop or Server.

Fedora Linux is a safe haven for most open-source Linux applications and projects. Most OS users prefer to use this RHEL-based Linux distribution as an ideal candidate for learning and mastering new skillsets through its rich catalogs of educational software.

One such educational software is PostgreSQL, which is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) used by analytics, geospatial, mobile, web, and other enterprising applications as a primary data warehouse or data store.

PostgreSQL is favored by such applications and projects footprints because of its luring attributes. They include its diversified extension functions, support for flexible full-text search, diverse indexing techniques, and its growing community support.

Among this attribute list, the most important element is community support. It helps new and intermediate users understand the interpretation of PostgreSQL software functions and their implementation.

SQLite is a free, lightweight relational database management system (RDBMS) in a C library. SQLite is not a client-server database engine. Instead, it is embedded into the end program. Primarily all programming languages support SQLite, which how languages embed the program is with a file with .sqlite3/.sqlite/.DB extension. The software is a popular choice for local/client storage such as web browsers, Android devices, and much more. The list is quite extensive.

In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install SQLite 3 along with Debian 11 Bullseye.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TeamViewer on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, TeamViewer is a powerful remote desktop and file-sharing application that works with most operating systems (Microsoft Windows, macOS) and mobile devices. With TeamViewer, you control another computer over the Internet or have someone else control your own computer. For example, solve problems on customers’ PCs or give you access to a PC that is not currently nearby. In order to commercialize the use of TeamViewer, you have to purchase a license. You can use it free for personal use only.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the TeamViewer remote desktop application on a Fedora 35.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install XanMod Kernel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, XanMod is a custom-built kernel for Debian and Ubuntu operating systems that comes with a couple of tweaks for optimizing the performance. The real-time version is recommended for critical runtime applications such as Linux gaming eSports, streaming, live productions, and ultra-low latency enthusiasts.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the XanMod Linux Kernel on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

The screen command is a terminal command that can play the role of the multiplexer. In other words, you can run screen commands on your terminal shell to keep applications live in the background, run packages as a daemon, and keep a session (SSH) live for a long time even if you’re disconnected. The screen command is helpful and handy for all system administrators and Linux power users. This multiplexer type tool is powerful to run shell commands between a server, console, and other machines.

Do you want to host your own discussion forum software? Then here is the tutorial to install and configure Flarum on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal or Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

Flarum is the combined successor of esoTalk and FluxBB forums. It is a newbie in the forums world but still one of the best forum interfaces along with a sleek and modern look. The user interface is simple, fast, and free from clutter and bloats. Flarum is built with PHP so it’s quick and easy to deploy.

The interface is powered by Mithril, a performant JavaScript framework with a tiny footprint. Right now to installation this forum you need SSH access to the hosting server and install the composer. This forum is still in the beta stage so before using it for production you need to give it some time. But still, for your own experience, you can install and use it. After stable release, it can be proved the best alternative to the Discourse forum.

This tutorial will be useful for beginners to install qBittorrent 4.4.0 on Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, and Linux Mint 20.3, and Fedora 35

qBittorrent is one of the best open-source torrent clients with more features and lightweight and it is written on QT6.

It is using the libtorrent-raster library, which means it will support all operating systems Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD.

Follow through this tutorial to learn how to install Zeek on Debian 11. Zeek, formerly Bro IDS, is the world’s leading passive open source network security monitoring tool. Zeek is not an active security device, like a firewall or intrusion prevention system. Rather, Zeek sits on a “sensor”, a hardware, software, virtual, or cloud platform that quietly and unobtrusively observes network traffic. Zeek interprets what it sees and creates compact, high-fidelity transaction logs, file content, and fully customized output, suitable for manual review on disk or in a more analyst-friendly tool like a security and information event management (SIEM) system.

MongoDB is a NoSQL database server with a command-line shell interface, however, to manage with GUI, we can install MongoDB Compass on Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux 8 using the terminal. It is a good alternative to the MongoDB shell for querying, aggregating, and analyzing databases.

Unlike MySQL, MariaDB, and other SQL; MongoDB is a NoSQL document-oriented database. Relational database technologies use rows, columns, and tables to store data. This makes them rigid quickly, slowly, and nearly impossible to manage; just imagine Microsoft Excel. Compared to database systems like MySQL, the structure of the data is not determined per table, but per entry, which gives me greater flexibility. Its name comes from humongous. MongoDB is also one of the most popular databases among developers.

This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install LibreOffice 7.2.5 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, LinuxMint 20.2, and Fedora 35.

LibreOffice released the newer and 5th version in the 7 series as 7.2.5 and it comes with new features and bug fixes and program enhancements and all users are requested to update to this version as soon as possible.

So, today in this tutorial we will learn to install the MailCow server with Debian11. MailCow is an open-source mailing script developed on top of Dovecot, Postfix, SoGo, and other open-source applications. In addition, it has a modern web-based user interface for administering users as well as the server. Refer to this link for other email service articles.

So, this tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on recovering/reset lost or forgotten RHEL 8 / CentOS 8 Linux root administrative passwords. To first boot to the set GRUB password and usernames required. So that non-authorized users cannot modify the grub entry at the boot loader stage. Also, check setting up grub for Ubuntu.