Often times, in your Squid proxy, you may have a redirector configured – such as SquidGuard:

redirect_program /usr/local/bin/squidGuard -c /usr/local/etc/squid/squidGuard.conf

I ran into a problem tonight with my Roku box where SquidGuard was seeing Roku’s NetFlix access as a security threat.  So, to make Squid bypass the redirector, add an ACL and a redirector-access rule:

acl netflix dstdomain .netflix.com
redirector_access deny netflix

There you have it – any requests to *.netflix.com will skip the redirector.

By default, Squid sends HTTP headers on every request that can give away information about your internal network. Here’s an example of these headers:

HTTP_VIA:1.1 proxyserver.local (squid/3.1.16)
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR:192.168.0.123

That’s three pieces of information you may not want to give away: The host name of your proxy server, the version of Squid it’s running, and the IP address of the system that’s making the request via the proxy.

Fortunately, it’s simple (and does not apparently violate any standards) to make these headers more anonymous – just use these configuration directives in your squid.conf:

# Be more anonymous
forwarded_for off
visible_hostname proxy.local
httpd_suppress_version_string on

That will change the headers to look more like this:

HTTP_VIA:1.1 proxy.local (squid)
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR:unknown

Most of us don’t have native IPv6 Internet connections at home.  Fortunately, it’s easy (and free) to get connected to the IPv6 Internet.  Here’s how to get your FreeBSD box connected.

Read the rest of FreeBSD – IPv6 Tunnel and Gateway Configuration (523 words)

I spent some time thinking about backup strategy, and I decided for my purposes, I’d like to handle the staging process (getting all the files put together), and I’d like the backup solution itself to simply upload the files – but since I want to do nightly backups, I’d like the backup solution to have incremental capabilities.

I narrowed it down to two possible solutions – Tarsnap and Duplicity.  Both support incremental backups, both are command-line capable.  I decided to use Duplicity because it uploads directly to whichever back-end service you use – be it Amazon S3 or an SFTP server .  Tarsnap uses S3, but that’s your only option, and they do some processing for you, and because of that, it costs more.

Now, on to the details.

Read the rest of FreeBSD Backup Using dump and duplicity (1,786 words)

For those of you who don’t know, JungleDisk is a utility that allows you to back up data to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).  Soon, it will also allow you to use Mosso’s Cloud Files service, which is similar to S3 but hosted by RackSpace. I recently won a free subscription to JungleDisk, thanks to Mosso.

I’ve got JungleDisk set up on my Windows machine and it’s working really well. I was looking around the JungleDisk website, and I noticed that you’re allowed to install the desktop edition on as many computers as you want.  I’ve got two machines here at home – my laptop with Windows, and my file server running FreeBSD.  JungleDisk doesn’t have a native FreeBSD version, but they do offer a Linux version.  Seeing as FreeBSD does have a Linux compatibility layer, I figured I’d at least try to get it to work.  So far, I’ve been moderately successful.

Read the rest of JungleDisk on FreeBSD (790 words)

Over the past few years, a major paradigm shift has occurred in how (and where) our data is stored.  We’ve had data online for quite a while – ever since the first “guestbook” applications appeared on peoples’ GeoCities home pages (usually right next to the animated “Under Construction” GIF).

I’m not going to discuss identity theft here – there are already enough posts about that topic. I’d like to discuss the social and professional aspects of our personal data that’s stored online, and the risks involved.

Read the rest of Do You Trust Your Data Online? (546 words)

I am a strong believer that most non-IT people don’t take seriously the need to have a reliable method of backup for their important data.  Just ask yourself: What happens when you can no longer access the data on your computer? It doesn’t matter what happens – you could or lose your laptop or have it stolen, or the hard drive in your computer could fail.  Any way you look at it, your data is toast.  What, then, would you do to recover it?  It’s always a good time to think about backups, and to help, I’ll show you what I do.

I actually use two backup strategies: Image-based backups (on-site), and online backups (off-site) – and everything is completely automated.

Read the rest of A Simple Backup Strategy (593 words)