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 configure Modsecurity 3 for WordPress on FreeBSD
A few weeks ago I wrote a guide on how to install Modsecurity 3 on Apache HTTP for the FreeBSD operating system. However there’s a catch with that setting and with Modsecurity in general. As good as it is as a WAF you need to at least adjust its configuration to the tool one pretends […]

A brief introduction to Regular Expressions
A regular expression is a set of characters, a string of characters if you will, that specify a pattern. Ever used the grep command? It makes use of them. The ‘grep’ command is very handful when one needs to look for certain things inside a text file, or looking for some specific pattern from another […]

The root account
Users. What the hell you mean by “root”? Are you a Windows user? I bet you have the user account badly configured. By default Windows is installed under the Administrator account. And nobody bothers to change this and add a second account. That second account should be an underprivileged one. If you own the computer […]

How to install ModSecurity 2 on FreeBSD
WARNING: A newer version of ModSecurity is available. The article to install ModSecurity 3 on FreeBSD can be found here. Will be published on March 1st, 2021. If you find the articles in Adminbyaccident.com useful to you, please consider making a donation. Use this link to get $200 credit at DigitalOcean and support Adminbyaccident.com costs. […]

How to install Suricata on FreeBSD
Suricata is a free, open source, Intrusion Detection System software, or IDS for short. But it can also act as an Intrusion Prevention System, or IPS. It works by finding patterns using heuristics typically from network traffic. When configured to just warn about suspicious activity it is called an IDS, however when it blocks the […]

How to import iocage jails to Bastille on FreeBSD 13
Being a fan and heavy user of FreeBSD jails, I’ve been using iocage for years now. However, iocage is not the only tool capable of making abstractions on top of the jail infrastructure in FreeBSD to make it easier to manage in a not just easier way, but quicker, centralized manner. Bastille is the other […]

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 patch Spectre and Meltdown the ROM way
In a previous article I briefly, sort of, talked about the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. I have also written two guides to patch them from the OS side using a UNIX flavour from the BSD camp and a GNU/Linux distribution. Both actions resulted successful but there is a third way to patch this vulnerabilities. Regular […]

How to install Nagios on FreeBSD
As explained in an introduction article, Nagios is a monitoring software very well established and used in production on many environments. Results are displayed in a web page so it uses a web server to publish them to the user and needs some php code to do so. It is configured through files which happen […]
