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 […]
How to install the bash shell on FreeBSD
What is GNU/Linux?
To answer this question one must split it. Plus make other questions like: «What is a, so called, Linux distro?». It seems complex and it is in a way. But let´s explain GNU/Linux in simple terms. GNU stands for GNU is Not UNIX. So it´s clear is not UNIX but it´s related to it in […]
How to manipulate and use USB drives in FreeBSD
If you are coming from the Windows, Mac or GNU/Linux world using USB drives on the desktop is a piece of cake. You plug it and it works. That’s it. Interoperability between the proprietary world and OSS (Open Source Software) has improved but there’s still a very palpable line. Just grab a new USB drive, […]
How to configure a Virtual Host in Apache
You may have just one website and that is ok. If that is your case you can avoid this entire chapter. But some of you may also have several websites. And quite probably you want to use one single public ip to resolve all the domains you have. The Apache documentation is the main resource […]
How to work with Nessus scan results
Working with Nessus scan results is easy. How do I know that? Because I’ve worked with this tool for some time and although I do not know every corner of the things I’ve been doing some scans and solving quite a few deffects on systems that were labeled as ‘production ready’ when they clearly weren’t. […]
Nmap cheatsheet
Nmap is a discovery tool used in security circles but very useful for network administrators or sysadmins. One can get information about operating systems, open ports, running apps with quite good accuracy. It can even be used in substitution to vulnerability scanners such as Nessus or OpenVAS for not very large environments, or quick audits. […]
How to enable TLS traffic from the origin server on Cloudflare Argo Tunnel
As it can be read in the last post, setting up a Cloudflare Argo Tunnel to serve web content from home or corporate network without poking holes to it, is quite easy to achieve. In this article I’ll show you how to enable TLS traffic from the origin server on Cloudflare Argo Tunnel. Obviously, you […]
How to update FreeBSD with freebsd-update
Anytime you set a clean fresh FreeBSD install or just any other operating system you must update it. This should be the first thing. If you are a bit security aware (read paranoid) you can first set up the firewall rules and then update the system to the latest release where you have all the […]
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 install AWStats on FreeBSD 13.0
AWStats is a very powerful and useful software allowing webmasters count the visits to their managed websites. The tool is basically coded in Perl and it was a very popular choice before Google made it way easy when they launched their Google Analytics tool. However, nowadays not everyone is using Google Analytics services and even […]