As we all know a best practice recommendation that has been made forever, and forever many are just skipping, is running up to date software and it is one of the core fundamentals of IT. If you happen to use MariaDB on FreeBSD, the official guide on their website may not be that all helpful […]
How to upgrade MariaDB on FreeBSD
How to install sudo in FreeBSD
Sudo is a very useful application. It allows a regular user to perform tasks only reserved to the root account. There is lots of documentation about sudo and there is even a book about it called “Sudo Mastery”. If you need to investigate deep on this, buy it. Why do you need this? Well… Everyone […]
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 […]
VMWare ESXi (One)
The VMWare ESXi is a hypervisor developed by the VMWare company and it is widely known and used in many environments and enterprises of all sorts. Nowadays it is the main component of a sort of a software suite. It is a type one hypervisor which means it runs directly on to the hardware controlling […]
The firewall
If you don’t know why you need a firewall it’s because you are not very tech savy. Don’t worry. You can discover by yourself why you need one. The router sitting in your house has one installed in it. And please don’t disable that by any mean. You can check why a firewall is important […]
How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on a Lenovo T430s laptop with Ubuntu
As recently announced in a previous article I wanted to write a couple of guides on how to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux and UNIX environments. It is always a good and I hope a standard practice to have your systems patched and if they aren’t for whatever the reason (that legacy thing […]
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. […]
How to install the Clamav antivirus in FreeBSD
Clamav is an antivirus. But don’t think of Clamav as the antivirus you have sitting in your personal computer at home or in your office. It’s an antivirus that works under user demand. It is not constantly monitoring the system. So you will have to setup some cronjobs in order to check and monitor the […]
How to mitigate DoS attacks with mod_evasive on FreeBSD
Denial of Service attacks or the distributed version of them (DDoS) have been growing throughout the years with their ups and downs. In my view the only thing that will happen to them is even bigger growth. With the advent of IoT devices the next decade will see an increase in these kind of attacks. […]
Lynis or how to quickly audit your system’s security configuration
A colleague of mine pointed me out to Lynis, a system’s configuration audit tool which checks the hardening of any running UNIX or UNIX-like system, including the BSDs. This tool has a built in check list and a set of sane and safe configurations and compares them to the target system. As output we find […]