Lately, I have been reading about port knocking and saw many posts saying that it is not that safe and therefore rather useless since it adds the burden of knocking before you can connect with a tool such as ssh (for which port knocking is most often implemented).

The fact is that isn't true. It is perfectly safe if you use the proper tools to setup the port knocking and execute it. In fact, wikipedia talks about it and clearly tells you that port knocking with just 3 ports generates some 240+ trillion possibilities which pretty much no hacker can hope to ever break.

The snapwebsites ...

In the last few days, I worked with, let's call him John, who read my post on my DNS issues in Aug 15, 2020 (I was spammed pretty bad by an amplification DNS attack). John wanted to run iplock on his system because it's much more flexible than directly using iptables with fail2ban. So I made sure that it would compile on Ubuntu 20.04 and he made it work on his system by also copying the dependencies (i.e. the shared libraries).

Here we present John's log on how to install iplock on a computer from a compiled version, opposed to directly from a package. The problem is that I ...

Today I created a new release, version 1.8. You can find it on github.

This includes a ton of bug fixes that 1.7 was plagued with. It also includes new code (thread pool/thread worker) and especially, a break up of several objects from the libsnapwebsites to their own contrib projects.

This includes:

• snapdev (18 header only functions from the libsnapwebsites)
• addgetopt (snap_config.cpp/.h)
• cppthread (snap_thread.cpp/h)
• snaplogger (log.cpp/h)
• eventdispatcher (snap_communicator.cpp/h)
• snapcatch2 (our own catch project compatible with our projects)
• ...

When I first start of Snap!, I had one project, the snapwebsites folder.

As I started growing the project, I wanted to have some features that required other modules such as the log4cplus library to handle logging.

The fact is that as a result the library (read: common code to all the Snap! Website services) as grown to be a really large one! Difficult to manage and each time a small change is made, we incur a long wait for rebuilding everything.

So we started working on breaking up the library in smaller parts. We already have some functional projects which now encompass some of the low ...