Networking

How to Install Redis 7 on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Install Redis 7 on RHEL 9

Redis (Remote Dictionary Server) is an in-memory data structure store used as a cache, session store, real-time leaderboard, pub/sub message broker, and rate-limiting backend. Redis stores all data in RAM with optional disk persistence, making it orders of magnitude faster than relational databases for lookups: sub-millisecond response times at millions of operations per second. Common […]

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How to Monitor Nginx with Prometheus nginx-exporter on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Monitor Nginx with Prometheus nginx-exporter on RHEL 9

Prometheus is a time-series metrics collection and alerting system widely used for monitoring cloud infrastructure and web servers. The nginx-prometheus-exporter (nginx-exporter) is a lightweight Go binary that reads Nginx’s built-in stub_status page and exposes the metrics in Prometheus format — active connections, total requests, connection states (reading, writing, waiting), and request rate. Combined with Grafana […]

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How to Harden Nginx: Security Headers, TLS 1.3, OCSP Stapling on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Harden Nginx: Security Headers, TLS 1.3, OCSP Stapling on RHEL 9

A default Nginx installation serves content, but many security hardening steps are not enabled by default. Hardening Nginx means configuring HTTP security headers to prevent XSS, clickjacking, and MIME sniffing attacks; enforcing TLS 1.3 and strong cipher suites to eliminate outdated protocol vulnerabilities; enabling OCSP Stapling so clients can verify certificate validity without a round-trip […]

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How to Configure SSL/TLS with OpenSSL and Self-Signed Certificates on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure SSL/TLS with OpenSSL and Self-Signed Certificates on RHEL 9

Even when free trusted certificates from Let’s Encrypt are available for public domains, self-signed certificates serve important roles: development environments, internal network services, IoT devices, automated testing pipelines, and machine-to-machine communication within a private network. Unlike Let’s Encrypt certificates, self-signed certificates require no domain ownership verification or outbound internet access — they can be generated […]

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How to Set Up a LAMP Stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Set Up a LAMP Stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on RHEL 9

A LAMP stack — Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL (or MariaDB), and PHP — is the original and most widely deployed open-source web hosting stack. It has powered millions of websites since the early 2000s and remains the default for hosting control panels (cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin) and many shared hosting environments. Apache’s .htaccess support, mod_rewrite, […]

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How to Configure HAProxy for HTTP and TCP Load Balancing on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure HAProxy for HTTP and TCP Load Balancing on RHEL 9

HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a battle-hardened open-source load balancer and proxy for TCP and HTTP workloads. Where Nginx load balancing is sufficient for simple round-robin HTTP distribution, HAProxy provides a richer feature set: advanced health checks with multiple failure thresholds, ACL-based routing, Layer 4 TCP load balancing for non-HTTP protocols (MySQL, Redis, SMTP), detailed […]

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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 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 Enable HTTP/2 with Nginx on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Enable HTTP/2 with Nginx on RHEL 9

HTTP/2 is the second major version of the HTTP protocol, standardised in 2015, and offers significant performance improvements over HTTP/1.1: header compression (HPACK), multiplexing (multiple requests over a single connection), server push, and binary framing. On a typical webpage with dozens of assets (CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts), HTTP/2 multiplexing eliminates the head-of-line blocking that forces […]

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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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