Home Server icon   Home Server (9) – Upgrade HP Microserver Gen8 CPU



Im using my Microserver Gen8 a lot and, sometimes the poor performance of the CPU is noted (when showing galleries with many images for example). So I decided to replace it by another better one.

CPU model to choose

I chose the cpu model based on this resource

Those are compatible CPU with different performances prices and all of them … Read more

Checkpoint   Checkpoint – Custom application signature ACST



This time I show you the Checkpoint “Application Control Signature Tool”. This tool allows you to create your own Apps and URL filtering signatures.
For example, I’m using it to block Torrent clients based on the User-Agent, but it is very versatile and you can use it in many ways.

Downloading the tool

Visit the following SK103051 and download it. … Read more

Checkpoint   Checkpoint – Useful SNMP OIDs to monitor (VSX)



It is very important to keep your Checkpoint environment monitored. Given that it offers a wide variety of SNMP data, I have collected some of the (in my opinion) most useful OIDs MIBs. Altough I use Icinga and Grafana (as you can see the related outputs in this post), almost any monitoring system can be used to get … Read more

Security   Security – List available cipher suite using nmap



If you are in process of securing your web server or site, there are some tools and online resources that can help us a lot (in one of the following posts will show you some of them).

But simply using the command the fantastic nmap tool, another interesting feature is listing the available cipher suite certain site offers using the … Read more

Checkpoint   Checkpoint – Unexpected high cpu usage and SecureXL



Last monday I realized that the cpu was very high on one of my Checkpoint VSX nodes.
Looking at my Icinga graphs it seemed it started on friday at 3 o’clock:

Running a top directly on the VSX, I delimited the high to one of the virtual systems that runs on that VSX. In this image the fwk2 threads that … Read more

Security   Security – View HTTP headers using tcpdump



If you need to trace the HTTP request and response headers by capturing the related packets, you can use tcpdump in this way:

 tcpdump -i ens192 -A -s 10240 'tcp port 80' | grep -v IP | egrep --line-buffered "..(GET |\.HTTP\/|POST |HEAD )|^[A-Za-z0-9-]+: " |sed -r 's/..(GET |HTTP\/|POST |HEAD )/\n\n\1/g'

For example, filtering tcp port 80 and 192.168.10.100 IP address:… Read more

Sysadmin tools   Sysadmin – Best wiki software / documentation tool



Some time ago I was researching to find a good tool to create and manage IT documentation at work. These are the features that were essential for me:

  • Editor Wysiwyg (not directly in markup language)
  • Paste images directly (instead of first uploading it to insert it in the document).
  • Team work: Full role and permission system. In case with LDAP
Read more

Home Server icon   Home Server (7) – Install Linux Debian virtual machine in ESX



In this 7th post of the Home Server series, after having configured a SSD drive, a working ESX environment and the RAID disks, let’s create our first virtual machine based on Debian Linux.

For the goal we want to achieve (hosting a web server, our personal files, personal streaming server, …) we do not even need the graphic … Read more