Logging Monitoring

How to Set Up Varnish Cache as a Reverse Proxy on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Set Up Varnish Cache as a Reverse Proxy on RHEL 9

Varnish Cache is a high-performance HTTP reverse proxy designed specifically for caching. Unlike Nginx FastCGI cache which caches PHP output files on disk, Varnish stores cached objects entirely in RAM and can serve tens of thousands of requests per second from memory. Varnish operates in front of your web server: it listens on port 80 […]

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How to Configure Nginx FastCGI Caching on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure Nginx FastCGI Caching on RHEL 9

Nginx FastCGI caching stores the output of PHP-FPM (or any FastCGI backend) responses as files on disk and serves them directly without hitting PHP for subsequent requests. For a WordPress site or PHP application serving the same page to many users, this can reduce PHP execution from 200ms to under 1ms and cut server load […]

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How to Configure Nginx Rate Limiting and Connection Throttling on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure Nginx Rate Limiting and Connection Throttling on RHEL 9

Rate limiting is a server-side defence that restricts how many requests a client can make within a time window. Without rate limiting, a single IP address or bot can flood your server with thousands of requests per second — crashing your application, exhausting your database connection pool, or triggering denial-of-service conditions. Nginx provides two rate […]

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How to Configure Nginx with ModSecurity WAF on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure Nginx with ModSecurity WAF on RHEL 9

ModSecurity as a dynamic Nginx module extends Nginx with WAF capabilities, blocking SQL injection, XSS, command injection, and hundreds of other attack patterns defined by the OWASP Core Rule Set. Unlike the Apache version which uses the stable mod_security2, the Nginx connector uses the newer libmodsecurity3 C++ library with a ngx_http_modsecurity_module connector. On RHEL 9, […]

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How to Set Up ModSecurity WAF with Apache on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Set Up ModSecurity WAF with Apache on RHEL 9

ModSecurity is the leading open-source Web Application Firewall (WAF), capable of inspecting all HTTP requests and responses against a ruleset and blocking malicious traffic including SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), remote file inclusion, and OWASP Top 10 attack patterns. Combined with the OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS), ModSecurity transforms Apache into a security gateway that […]

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How to Install and Configure Caddy Web Server on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Install and Configure Caddy Web Server on RHEL 9

Caddy is a modern, open-source web server written in Go that stands out for one defining feature: automatic HTTPS. Caddy obtains and renews TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt or ZeroSSL automatically, with zero configuration required beyond specifying a domain name. It also supports HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (QUIC) out of the box, and its declarative Caddyfile […]

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How to Configure Nginx Load Balancing (Round-Robin, Least Conn) on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure Nginx Load Balancing (Round-Robin, Least Conn) on RHEL 9

Load balancing distributes incoming requests across multiple backend servers, preventing any single server from becoming a bottleneck and providing horizontal scalability and fault tolerance. Nginx supports four load balancing methods natively: round-robin (the default), least connections, IP hash (session persistence), and weight-based. The upstream block defines the pool of backend servers and their weights, and […]

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How to Configure Apache mod_proxy as a Reverse Proxy on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure Apache mod_proxy as a Reverse Proxy on RHEL 9

Apache’s mod_proxy module turns Apache into a powerful reverse proxy and gateway, forwarding requests to backend application servers, other web servers, or balancer clusters. Unlike Nginx’s reverse proxy (which is native), Apache’s proxy functionality is modular: mod_proxy handles the core proxying, mod_proxy_http handles HTTP/1.1, mod_proxy_balancer provides load balancing, and mod_proxy_wstunnel handles WebSocket tunnelling. On RHEL […]

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How to Configure Nginx as a Reverse Proxy on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure Nginx as a Reverse Proxy on RHEL 9

A reverse proxy sits in front of one or more backend application servers, forwarding client requests to them and returning their responses to the client. From the client’s perspective, the reverse proxy is the web server. This architecture provides centralized SSL termination, load balancing, caching, rate limiting, and DDoS mitigation without exposing backend application ports […]

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How to Configure Apache Virtual Hosts on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure Apache Virtual Hosts on RHEL 9

Apache virtual hosts are the mechanism by which a single Apache HTTP Server instance serves multiple websites, distinguishing between them using the ServerName directive and the incoming Host HTTP header. Name-based virtual hosting (the most common type) allows hundreds of domains to share a single IP address, with Apache routing each request to the correct […]

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