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 enable log rotation on FreeBSD
This is a very short simple entry but it may help you. As many others you may be running a web server, or any other service that creates some logging information. Enable log rotation on FreeBSD will keep those log files in a manageable size (at least more readable) and they won’t grow and expand […]

How to install the bash shell on FreeBSD
Believe it or not the Bash shell does not come installed on the system. By default FreeBSD uses the sh shell (after the rewrite under the BSD license on 1989 of the original Bourne Shell found on UNIX, which had inherited the ‘sh’ name from the original’s Thomson shell), the C shell or the tcsh […]

ARP spoofing attacks
ARP spoofing attacks are quite harming and they can easily constitute a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. They consist on the attacker sending ARP packets into the network the victim is located, typically redirecting traffic to the attacker’s machine. Once this is achieved the attacker can sniff all the traffic sent by the victim’s device and obtain […]

List of Speculative Execution Vulnerabilities
Vulnerability CVE Exploit name Public vulnerability name Firmware changes Spectre 2017-5753 Variant 1 Bounds Check Bypass (BCB) No Spectre 2017-5715 Variant 2 Branch Target Injection (BTI) Yes Meltdown 2017-5754 Variant 3 Rogue Data Cache Load (RDCL) No Spectre-NG 2018-3640 Variant 3a Rogue System Register Read (RSRE) Yes Spectre-NG 2018-3639 Variant 4 Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) […]

How to install WPScan on FreeBSD
Vulnerability scanners are useful tools to find issues on systems, networks and the like. WPScan is dedicated to find vulnerabilities on WordPress installations. A short tutorial as an introduction to the tool has been published here. So if you are interested on the tool and on FreeBSD, let’s dig on this how to install WPScan […]

What is UNIX?
UNIX is an operating system. And your known equivalent is Windows or the Mac. You may even know about Linux. The purpose of an OS is to accommodate programs in order to get some work done. Editing pictures, browsing the web or serving data from a database. It is the thing that lets you operate […]

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 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 […]
Who am I?
My name is Albert Valbuena. I am a retired ski instructor and after a period of five years in the international department of a logistics company I recently moved in to the IT industry. It hasn’t been overnight and it is still work in progress. A few years ago I started a website called www.skireviewer.com. […]
