September has been a big month. Here is what is new: Reef Standard is available now, the PortIgniter LMS is scheduled for December, and the Linux Basics course is live.
Reef Standard Version Released
There’s a New Reef in Town!
You know how “enterprise” security monitoring goes. There’s a five-figure quote, a multi-week rollout, and a consultant on speed dial. Then you get a dashboard so complicated it needs its own dashboard. If you run a small business, that pitch probably made you laugh, then cry, then go back to hoping your servers are fine. I built Reef for you.
What is Reef?
Reef is host security monitoring for Linux that fits between a full-blown SIEM and a pile of shell scripts. It’s a self-hosted stack of a few Docker containers that runs proven, trusted scanners and turns their raw output into one clean dashboard of ranked, deduplicated findings.
You get the kind of visibility you’d expect from Splunk or ELK, without the licensing bill. You also skip the weeks of duct-taping open-source tools together, where you’d build collectors, parsers, schedulers, and a UI before seeing a single result.
Six scanners, zero assembly required
- File integrity: know when files change, vanish, or get their permissions quietly altered.
- Audit framework: AuditD monitoring that flags account changes, sudo commands, and brute-force attempts.
- System hardening: a full Lynis audit, with every warning explained in plain language, including how to fix it.
- Malware scanning: ClamAV plus YARA rules, sweeping the risky directories.
- Compliance: OpenSCAP against CIS, STIG, and PCI-DSS profiles, with one-click export to a STIG Viewer checklist.
- Vulnerabilities: an SBOM of your host matched against known CVEs, with anything on CISA’s actively-exploited list pinned to the top.
- Optional AI Integration baked in: add your favorite Ollama or bring your own endpoint and get a button to quickly interpret scan and finding results.
Those last few points matter more than they sound. A list of 400 CVEs is just noise. A list that says “these three are being exploited right now” is a to-do list.
Why small businesses will love the price tag
Here’s the whole pricing model:
- Standard Edition: $100/year. Available today.
- Pro Edition: $250/year. Coming November 1, 2026, with high availability and a Helm chart for Kubernetes.
Both editions include unlimited agents, unlimited users, and every scanner. There are no per-seat fees, no per-host fees, and no “contact sales for a quote” button. Reef is also MIT-licensed. If you decide not to renew someday, you can keep running the software you have. Your license pays for the monthly updates, which bring fresh threat-intel snapshots, new and improved scanners, and dashboard upgrades.
Set up in an afternoon, not a quarter
cp .env.example .env
docker login registry.portigniter.com
docker compose up --build
Set three secrets and open the dashboard. Your host agent checks in within about 15 seconds. Nightly file integrity, hourly audit, and daily malware and CVE scans are scheduled out of the box, and critical findings hit your inbox so you don’t have to stare at a screen.
Built for the paranoid (that’s a compliment)
Reef makes no outbound calls for threat intelligence at scan time. The CISA KEV catalog, NVD data, and compliance content are baked in at build time, so it works on air-gapped and locked-down networks. The scanner that touches your host has no database access and no application code. Even the optional AI-powered finding explanations run on your own Ollama instance, so your scan data never goes to a third party.
Come take a look around the Reef
If you’ve been priced out of real security visibility, or you’ve been putting it off because it all seemed too big to tackle, this one’s for you.
PortIgniter LMS Scheduled for a December Release
Somewhere out there, a team is on week three of installing an LMS. There are 400 plugins, a permissions matrix that looks like a subway map, and a PHP config file with opinions. Meanwhile, the course they wanted to teach still doesn’t exist. I built PortIgniter LMS for the opposite experience. It runs on CodeIgniter 4, ships as one Docker image, and starts with a single .env file.
Why it’s different
Simple where the big open-source platforms are sprawling. Moodle and Chamilo are capable projects with years of history behind them. They’re also large monoliths, with big plugin ecosystems, heavy admin UIs and a lot of surface area to learn, upgrade and secure. PortIgniter takes the opposite bet.
It’s a small, readable codebase with a clear hierarchy (Course > Module > Item) and no plugin maze. You can hold the whole concept in your head without frustration.
Enterprise-grade features without the enterprise price tag. Commercial enterprise platforms can carry a six-figure license tag before you’ve enrolled a single learner. PortIgniter is yours to run and modify. You pay for hosting, not for the privilege of existing. An LMS license will cost $100 USD per year, which includes monthly updates and access to new features. Just like Reef, you can choose not to renew and still use the software indefinitely!
What you get out of the box
- A drag-and-drop course builder. Lessons are block lists with text (Markdown), video, audio, images, code, callouts, downloads and embeds. It autosaves and has a manual publish gate.
- Courses as code. Every course is plain JSON files. You can export and import a course as a zip, keep it in version control, or hand the authoring spec to an AI agent and get a valid course back.
php spark courses:checktells you whether it will import or not. - A real quiz engine. It has 10 question types, question banks, random pulls, partial credit, timers, attempt limits and cooldowns. The server owns the clock, so auto-submit works even if the learner closes the tab. Essays go to a manual review queue.
- Flexible progression. Courses can be free-form or sequential. You can gate items behind a completed lesson, a finished module or a quiz score.
- Selling courses. Stripe Checkout handles one-time purchases, and memberships cover all courses, chosen tracks or hand-picked courses. It supports promo codes, refunds and disputes. Buyers don’t need an account first, and an activation email creates it for them.
- Certificates. PDFs with QR codes and a public verify page, plus a designer for templates, colors, wording and logos.
- Sales dashboard. Revenue, refunds, discounts, subscribers and MRR, with a CSV download.
- Your brand. Light and dark themes, a custom logo, hero image, footer, CSS and head snippets. Nothing is hardcoded.
- Sensible roles. Learners learn, instructors get every course and quiz tool, and admins add settings and user management.
Deploying it
Copy .env.example to .env, fill in a few values, and run docker compose up -d. The image is immutable, all persistent data lives in one volume, and migrations and the first admin account happen on startup. There are no CDNs, all assets are vendored, and CSRF protection is on globally.
Closing
Learning platforms are often heavy because they’ve accumulated features for every possible customer. PortIgniter starts from the other end, with what a course creator actually needs to build, teach, assess and get paid. It stays small enough that you can understand it and change it yourself.
New Courses Available
In preparation for the PortIgniter LMS launch, I’ve spent about a year building a comprehensive Linux Basics course, and it is now available! The workbook alone is around 450 pages, and the course and quizzes have all been developed on my upcoming LMS application, which I intend to share with you. I have close to 15 years in this industry and training others is one of my favorite things to do. If you’re tired of Udemy hell and you want to get personalized instruction while supporting what I do here, then head over to the new LMS site and enroll in Linux Basics today!