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

Abandon Linux. How to install iocage to manage FreeBSD Jails
The iocage program is a python 3 piece created to manage FreeBSD Jails leveraging the underpinning ZFS file system on FreeBSD. As already explained on previous articles the FreeBSD operating system offers an OS-level virtualization system called Jails. And as described on past articles it can benefit administrators and developers alike. This is a simple […]

How to install software in FreeBSD with pkgng
The pkgng is the package management system in FreeBSD. It is used to install applications, and specific modules, libraries, etc. Nowadays you can select in between more than 25.000 thousand. Yes, twenty five thousand. The syntax to use is very intuitive and simple. As you may be already aware software comes in two forms. Source […]

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 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 […]
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I am a busy guy. Answering comments takes precious time from my daily life so don’t get mad if I don’t reply you back quickly or if I just don’t do. Plus, think twice before posting. If you really have something interesting to say, just go ahead. If that is something you really think I’d […]

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 Drupal 8 on FreeBSD
NOTE: Drupal 8 will be soon oudated. A newer article to be released on October 24th on how to install Drupal 9 on FreeBSD can be found here. This is a quick, simple yet effective tutorial on how to install Drupal 8 on FreeBSD. Drupal is a robust, complete well stablished CMS used on many […]

How to upload a FreeBSD custom image on DigitalOcean
Due to DigitalOcean not releasing ready to use images for FreeBSD 13 at this time, and since I opened a ticket a couple of months ago without a strong positive message from DigitalOcean supporting FreeBSD 13, I’ve decided to make use of their custom image upload service and give it a go. I must say […]

How to configure the IPFW firewall on FreeBSD
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 […]
