Among the three possible firewalls on FreeBSD (choice is always nice) IPFW is the in-house built one. There is a default, easy way, configuration path but if one needs to build a box to act as a dedicated network appliance with packet filtering capacity fine tunning the IPFW firewall configuration is more than desirable. Before […]
How to configure the IPFW firewall on FreeBSD
How to configure Apache HTTP as a reverse proxy on FreeBSD
Apache HTTP as a reverse proxy consists on setting an Apache HTTP server as a frontal access for one or multiple backend servers. In the recent years many have started using NGINX as a reverse proxy since this piece of software really shines for serving static content an acting as a cache server. This doesn’t […]
How to install Nextcloud on FreeBSD 12
Nextcloud. Have you heard of it? That’s quite probable if you’re here. But, what is it, what is it? Some say it is a Google Apps replacement, some say it’s just a place to store your documents, some others just rely on it to share documents across the company and edit them just in time […]
How to configure a Virtual Host in Apache
You may have just one website and that is ok. If that is your case you can avoid this entire chapter. But some of you may also have several websites. And quite probably you want to use one single public ip to resolve all the domains you have. The Apache documentation is the main resource […]
A word on Spectre and Meltdown
As professionals and many aficionados know, early this year some widespread vulnerabilities were found on Intel CPU’s as well as on AMD’s. It was a bit later discovered the flaws also affected some RISC architectures such as Power and ARM. Everybody went nuts and the world seemed to be tumbling because of two CPU vulnerabilities […]
How to install Fail2ban on FreeBSD
Fail2ban is a complementary tool to your firewall. It works by scanning log files and bans IPs which present suspicious activity such as failed logins. It is compatible with many UNIX-like systems and is a security tool to have in your arsenal. It can filter not only ssh logins, but other services too, for example […]
How to configure Modsecurity 3 for WordPress on FreeBSD
A few weeks ago I wrote a guide on how to install Modsecurity 3 on Apache HTTP for the FreeBSD operating system. However there’s a catch with that setting and with Modsecurity in general. As good as it is as a WAF you need to at least adjust its configuration to the tool one pretends […]
How to test pfSense on VirtualBox running on FreeBSD
There are other guides on how to do this on Windows, Mac, but not on FreeBSD, so here goes a how to pfSense on Virtualbox running on FreeBSD. Before going to it, let’s address the first question, which is what is pfSense. pfSense is a FreeBSD based distribution made for networking purposes. The company behind […]
How to install Apache in FreeBSD with ports
Or better said, how to install Apache the hard way. As mentioned before and many other times FreeBSD has two ways to install software. The easy one which is provided by the pkgng tool. And the not so easy one, ports. With ports you compile the programs and you can set the options the way […]
Reasonable amount of enabled modules on Apache HTTP
CentOS Ubuntu FreeBSD core_module (static) core_module (static) core_module (static) so_module (static) so_module (static) so_module (static) http_module (static) watchdog_module (static) http_module (static) access_compat_module (shared) http_module (static) mpm_prefork_module (shared) actions_module (shared) log_config_module (static) authn_file_module (shared) alias_module (shared) logio_module (static) authn_core_module (shared) allowmethods_module (shared) version_module (static) authz_host_module (shared) auth_basic_module (shared) unixd_module (static) authz_groupfile_module (shared) auth_digest_module (shared) access_compat_module (shared) […]