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. When they realised of this issue, they pulled the code and … [Read more...]
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 start reading, for those unfamiliar with … [Read more...]
How to format an USB drive on FreeBSD
File system support on FreeBSD falls onto UFS (UNIX File System) or originally named the FFS (Fast File System and on ZFS (Zetabyte File System). If you are using your box as a desktop-workstation you will use USB drives to share files with other systems, to carry things on your pocket or safe the day by plugging some drive into a soon to be dead box which is causing some … [Read more...]
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 conditions or even worse as the older CPUs. And … [Read more...]
How to install OpenVAS on FreeBSD
Was ist das? OpenVAS is a vulnerability scanner. If you are unfamiliar to the vulnerability scanning world this can be an overwhelmingly experience but tools like this are what makes the matter more accessible, more manageable, easy to see and easy to fix. Before digging into the matter at hand here, that is how to install OpenVAS on FreeBSD, let’s put some context … [Read more...]