The default version of OpenSSH in FreeBSD 12.2 today, and it’s been this for quite some time, is not the most recent published by the OpenBSD guys, which by the way are the ones developing OpenSSH. Not only is not the latest but it has a few vulnerabilities affecting it, medium risk ones but nevertheless […]

How to patch OpenSSH in FreeBSD 12.2

How to install Ansible on FreeBSD
Ansible is a very useful tool geared to system’s configuration and applications deployment. In this how to install Ansible on FreeBSD I will briefly explain what the tool is, what it does, what it does not and how to install it on FreeBSD. I will also demonstrate very basic use and on a later article […]

Networking Dictionary
This is an attempt to collect all the necessary basic vocabulary to have a very basic basic understanding of networking. Because context is also needed, some concepts or historical references will be also shown. This dictionary is an informal one, for a better, accurate, more correct and in depth understanding look somewhere else, like the […]

How to configure the PF firewall on FreeBSD
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. […]

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 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 set Apache’s MPM Event and PHP-FPM on FreeBSD
As explained in another article the default Apache’s configuration at compile time sets its multi-processing module (MPM for short) to the pre-fork configuration setting. This is not the best performant configuration for Apache. Out of the box Apache comes compiled in its safest form, from the processing mode perspective since the pre-fork setting will open […]

How to install the FAMP stack
You may have heard of the LAMP stack which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP or Perl. This is the same but instead of using the GNU/Linux operating system we’ll use FreeBSD. This is the FAMP stack. There are two ways to install software in FreeBSD, packages and the ports collections. Which in the […]

How to install MariaDB in FreeBSD
MariaDB is a derivative from the world-famous enterprise class MySQL database. The MySQL founder is Michael Widenius, also known as Monty. He created the project, it worked out for some time, it caught Sun’s attention and they bought it. Then Oracle bought Sun and knowing Larry everyone left running without looking what was left behind. […]

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 […]
