On a recent post I published about how to install an OSSEC server on Ubuntu I explained how this solution can help secure an infrastructure by deploying agents which report back to a central server. This is the second part of this server-client story. On this guide you will read about setting up agents and […]

How to install OSSEC agents on Windows

Lynis or how to quickly audit your system’s security configuration
A colleague of mine pointed me out to Lynis, a system’s configuration audit tool which checks the hardening of any running UNIX or UNIX-like system, including the BSDs. This tool has a built in check list and a set of sane and safe configurations and compares them to the target system. As output we find […]

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 […]

How to set Apache’s MPM Event and PHP-FPM on FreeBSD
As explained in another article the default Apache’s configuration at compile time sets its multi-processing module (MPM for short) to the pre-fork configuration setting. This is not the best performant configuration for Apache. Out of the box Apache comes compiled in its safest form, from the processing mode perspective since the pre-fork setting will open […]

Donation Time 2020
This 2020 has been a difficult year for everyone. Because of this difficulty and the opportunities I had the chance to take, I’ve been able to contribute back to the open source community, not just with content here in Adminbyaccident.com, advocacy for a few tools such as my favorite OS (FreeBSD) and the usual mouthful […]

A brief introduction to SSL/TLS certificates
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it an old implementation of a crytographic protocol. TLS, or Transport Layer Security, is a new one. They are both used to have privacy in the communications between different parties. They are used to secure email, web browsing, instant messaging, etc These protocols work in a complex way […]

How to install ModSecurity 2 on FreeBSD
WARNING: A newer version of ModSecurity is available. The article to install ModSecurity 3 on FreeBSD can be found here. Will be published on March 1st, 2021. If you find the articles in Adminbyaccident.com useful to you, please consider making a donation. Use this link to get $200 credit at DigitalOcean and support Adminbyaccident.com costs. […]

Symbolic and Hard Links in UNIX and Linux
Symbolic and Hard Links are useful ways to reference to information on a disk, both found in UNIX and Linux systems. While they seem similar in the surface they are quite different in how they work and it what can be achieved when using them. If you find the articles in Adminbyaccident.com useful to you, […]
How to set time and date in FreeBSD
In a FreeBSD system one may need to adjust date and time, specially if one has opened a VPS instance in some hosting provider. The system already provides a list of time zones. Just look around in the /usr/share/zoneinfo folder and subfolders to find the one that fits your needs. Just remember this will have […]

How to configure the PF firewall on FreeBSD
There are three firewall options on FreeBSD. The in-house built IPFW, the ‘old’ IPF (known as IP Filter) and PF ported from OpenBSD. PF is a very popular piece of software which was originally sparked from an issue on the IPF license that prevented making changes publicly available, which the OpenBSD did all the time. […]
