This is a very simple and easy to follow guide on securely administer your FreeBSD server. That said I am not a security expert although I’ve gained some knowledge as time goes by. Not pretending to be the definitive guide this article is an introduction on how to secure FreeBSD in which I will tackle […]

How to secure FreeBSD (server minimal edition)

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 […]

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 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 […]

100 articles mark at Adminbyaccident.com
This is the 100th post here at Adminbyaccident. Little I knew when I starting posting that I would reach the ‘impossible’ mark of the 100 articles. Sure, some of them are not very interesting, nor instructive. Three years ago I wasn’t the same and I hope in three years time I’m still here and kicking. […]

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 analyze suspicious email
Millions of emails are sent and received every day. Most of them are just junk. And many among those are potentially harmful. Phishing still is one of the most effective ways for malicious actors to penetrate into well secured networks. The weakest link, too often, is the human factor. Training can help mitigate this 24×7 […]
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 […]

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 […]

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 […]
