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 update FreeBSD using beadm
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 […]
How to use Fail2ban with WordPress
In a previous article we did an install of Fail2ban on a FreeBSD server. This tool can help us to protect our WordPress install, independatly from if we are using the FAMP stack or the LAMP stack. As I mentioned on that article Fail2ban is a complementary tool to our firewall. It works by scanning […]
How to set the locale in FreeBSD
The locale is the character set that will be used. And it is very important to match the keyboard you are using. Mind this also matters if you are transferring data to other systems. Different standards as the ASCII, UTF’s and the ISO’s, to name a few, have been put in place through the years […]
Abandon Linux. Move to FreeBSD or Illumos.
If you use GNU/Linux and you are only on opensource, you may be doing it wrong. Here’s why. Is your company based on opensource based software only? Do you have a bunch of developers hitting some kind of server you have installed for them to “do their thing”? Being it for economical reasons (remember to […]
How to install Nessus 10 on FreeBSD 12
Nessus is a professional vulnerability scanner from the reputable cybersecurity company Tenable. I have already written about it in the past but installing it on a GNU/Linux distro. This very article will guide anyone to install Nessus 10 on FreeBSD, since Tenable is releasing binaries for FreeBSD 11 and 12 as of the time of […]
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 use Cloudflare’s Argo Tunnel service to publish a website on FreeBSD 12/13
What is the Cloudflare Argo Tunnel service? In short, a tunneled connection between a host and Cloudflare’s network. A longer depiction can be read in a blog entry of theirs, but I would put it as a secure way to connect the services you want to publish using their network as a shield. An example […]
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) […]
How to synchronize system and network time in FreeBSD
For several applications it is necessary to synchronize your server to the network time. The protocol is called Network Time Protocol (NTP) and is basically giving the correct time to the world nowadays. Reading the Wikipedia entry is very interesting. FreeBSD comes with the ntp client. To set this up you will just add the […]