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 […]
How to configure the IPFW firewall on FreeBSD
How to mitigate/solve the MDS vulnerabilities of Intel processors in FreeBSD
It had to happen again. Anyone betting on new hardware vulnerabilities on Intel processors would have won. This time these are called the MDS vulnerabilities, which stands for Microarchitectural Data Sampling. The trouble is the ones who would have really made big money would have been those stating the new CPUs were on the same […]
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 […]
The Original Sin
Disclaimer: What you are about to read may contain inaccuracies. Feel free to discuss them somewhere else. This is also my opinion and as such it may change through time, maybe tomorrow, next month, next year, next decade or never. I do also make very few reviews (if any) of what I write here so […]
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 install the Clamav antivirus on CentOS 8
Clamav is a free antivirus nowadays owned by Cisco and developed under the umbrella of the Talos-Intelligence group. Don’t be fooled by the word free, this is serious business. It supports a wide variety of operating systems from Windows to Linux-based ones as well as FreeBSD. Many companies are using other types of antivirus software […]
How to harden Apache HTTP
Disclaimer: This is a long article. I haven’t collected some nice configuration settings here for the sake of it. There are other hardening guides but some fall short on explaining the functionalities to be enabled or disabled. Every step is shortly, and hopefully clearly, explained so any reader can grasp the main idea of every […]
How to replace a disk on a ZFS mirror pool
It’s happened to me, it’s happened to you, it’s happened more than one million times and it will still happen in the future. You run out of disk space or a disk fails. Nowadays you are using ZFS, and instead of having a fancy RAIDZ, because you still don’t need it, you are using a […]
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 […]
A few useful network commands
Troubleshooting network issues with simple commands is not a very difficult topic once there is a little toolbox to pull from. Needless to say networking topics can be very complicated and any specialist on the field will tell you how cumbersome it can really get. However with a few set of commands one can get […]