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Using a Yubikey for 2-factor authentication

For those of you who have not yet encountered a Yubikey, it is a physically small security key which empowers passwordless or 2-factor authentication in a number of different scenarios. They now support a huge number of protocols including One Time Passwords, NFC, FIDO2, U2F, Smart card, and OpenPGP.

Mine has been living on my keyring for several years now, and has proved invaluable for me accessing both my physical and electronic world.

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Configuring fail2ban on Debian – Part 1

If you are administering a Linux server on a publicly accessible IP address then you have no-doubt already noticed your log files filling up with repeated failed login attempts against all common protocols. While it may be possible to protected services to some extent with firewalls, nothing is going to protect you from weak password policies and software vulnerabilities.

There is, however, a great Open Source product that can do away with some of the noise and frustrate the spammers; fail2ban.

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