As we all know a best practice recommendation that has been made forever, and forever many are just skipping, is running up to date software and it is one of the core fundamentals of IT. If you happen to use MariaDB on FreeBSD, the official guide on their website may not be that all helpful […]

How to upgrade MariaDB on FreeBSD

How to use find in GNU/Linux and FreeBSD
How to use find is a very basic, but important, UNIX lesson. Find is a very useful command which can help us not just finding a particular file, but for examples files or directories matching certain criteria such as: size, permissions, type. The basic mode of operation for find is the following: find path criteria […]

How to update FreeBSD using beadm
Beadm is a tool which provides a wonderful and distinctive functionality on Solaris, OpenIndiana and FreeBSD. It relies on the ZFS filesystem allowing to take a filesystem snapshot. That can be used to manage the so called boot environments which provide a great way to secure updates, even when everything goes down the tubes. Hence […]

How to secure the ELK stack on CentOS 8
This is a follow up of the ‘how to install the ELK stack on CentOS 8’. That is a basic setup with no security at all. There is no encryption, no username and password setup, nothing. Not even firewall rules to filter ports. And as it’s known security can’t only rely on one factor but […]

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. […]

How to install ModSecurity 3 on FreeBSD
A couple of years ago I wrote a guide on how to install Modsecurity on FreeBSD. Now the program is on its third iteration so a new article is needed. Or so I think. In this article I’ll be covering Modsecurity 3 applied to protect Apache HTTP. If you find the articles in Adminbyaccident.com useful […]

How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on a Lenovo T430s with FreeBSD
As recently announced in a previous article I wanted to write a couple of guides on how to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux and UNIX environments. It is always a good and I hope a standard practice to have your systems patched and if they aren’t for whatever the reason (that legacy thing […]

Linux VS open source UNIX
Linux is the mainstream UNIX-like platform of choice in the modern world. There are valid open source code base alternatives from which many businesses have benefited from. This is a different approach on both.

How to configure Apache HTTP with a TLS reverse proxy backend on FreeBSD
A few weeks ago I published a how to guide to configure Apache HTTP as a reverse proxy. On that ocasion I was following what the average guide on the internet does on Linux. A front end server with Apache HTTP on calls a backend server where the real site is sitting. Many backend calls […]

How to install MariaDB in FreeBSD
MariaDB is a derivative from the world-famous enterprise class MySQL database. The MySQL founder is Michael Widenius, also known as Monty. He created the project, it worked out for some time, it caught Sun’s attention and they bought it. Then Oracle bought Sun and knowing Larry everyone left running without looking what was left behind. […]