This week's mac techmail was Enhance security on your Mac with Hands Off! which is a neat security tool for OS X. I've been using Little Snitch for years, and Hands Off! is quite similar except that it provides more features and functionality, including the ability to protect files and …

Last week's techmail was Use APF to manage your firewall which takes a look at using the APF (Advanced Policy Firewall) set of scripts to configure an iptables-based firewall on Linux. I was always a big Shorewall user; used it on my servers whether they ran Mandriva or Annvix. Recently …

This week's techmail was Use Fail2ban to blacklist IP addresses and alert you to attacks which takes a look at the fail2ban tool. Fail2ban is a program that will watch log files and if it notices failed login attempts on any configured services (ssh, smtp, etc.) it will ban that …

This week's techmail was Firewall configuration with system-config-firewall which discusses the niceties of using Fedora's system-config-firewall to configure iptables. I'm not much of a GUI guy, but the interface for the firewall configuration is really slick. Will it replace my use of editing iptables rules in /etc/sysconfig/iptables? Probably …

Last week's mac techmail was Protect your privacy with Little Snitch for Mac which talks about Little Snitch, one of my absolute favourite and essential mac software tools. Little Snitch is an outbound firewall, so it will alert you if any applications try to make outbound connections (anything from a …

This week's TechMail was DIY pfSense firewall system beats others for features, reliability, and security which takes a look at pfSense which is, in my opinion, one of the best open source firewall systems around. I've used quite a few, and for a long time when I was developing Annvix …

This week's TechMail is Using Corkscrew to tunnel SSH over HTTP which talks about creating an SSH tunnel using HTTP and the Corkscrew tool. Very cool and interesting stuff. Fortunately I've never been in such a restrictive environment where I've needed to use it, but it's good to know in …

This week's TechMail is Secure remote firewall administration via SSH which talks about using ssh to create a secure tunnel to a remote network/system to use with configuring a remote firewall. I use this quite a bit with remotely-deployed pfSense boxen to configure it using the web interface and …