Natural Born Coder

  • Fail2Ban is a service that scans log files for event such as failed login attempts and then updates firewall rules to ban connections from that address. This doesn’t solve problems with weak authentication but it does greatly slow down the…

  • Introduction Firewalling in Linux is, by necessity, a complex topic. There’s just no easy way around the problem, the firewall has a lot of moving parts and requires a lot of configuration options. To complicate matters further the Linux ecosystem…

  • Sudo is almost perfectly configured out of the box but the one thing I find a little irritating is the short default timeout for the session. I’m not against having a timeout but I’m the only person that has physical…

  • Just a very quick note to show how you can monitor what is happening with the sudo command by running: If you run this command without the sudo prefix you will only get a list of your own sudo commands.…

  • I recently got a new server and I realized I don’t have a comprehansive guide for setting a machine up from scratch. This guide is particularly useful for setting up something like a VPS where you only have SSH access,…

  • In an earlier article on setting up KDE Neon I mentioned that I was going to use KIO-Gdrive to access my Google Drive though Dolphin. That was a total failure due to a bug with the way KIO-Gdrive handles the…

  • In an ideal world all the software I use would be installed from the Debian repositories and it’d be a single click to keep it all up to date. In reality it’s not that simple. The built in package manager…

  • This is just a random collection of notes about Latex covering hurdles I hit early on. Including SVG images Long story short, don’t bother, it’s not worth the hassle. In theory you can \usepackage{svg} but adding just that gave me…

  • I’m formatting a thesis at the moment and I’ve decided to use Classic Thesis as a starting point. From what I’ve read this is a choice that will divide the room. Some people seem to love the look and others…

  • A short while ago I decided it was time to learn a little Latex as I want to produce some good looking documents. After many dead-ends I settled on using TexStudio to work with Latex. There’s no reason you can’t…

  • Despite spending more years at universities than I probably should have I’ve never had the need to use Latex. It came up once when I was collaborating on a paper while studying computer science but my partner was doing most…

  • I have a ZFS RAIDZ2 array in my main server and recently it suffered a drive failure. Naturally I was woefully under prepared for this occurrence so I rushed out and bought a replacement drive and got cracking with learning…