The locale is the character set that will be used. And it is very important to match the keyboard you are using. Mind this also matters if you are transferring data to other systems. Different standards as the ASCII, UTF’s and the ISO’s, to name a few, have been put in place through the years […]
How to set the locale in FreeBSD
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 […]
A brief introduction to SSL/TLS certificates
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it an old implementation of a crytographic protocol. TLS, or Transport Layer Security, is a new one. They are both used to have privacy in the communications between different parties. They are used to secure email, web browsing, instant messaging, etc These protocols work in a complex way […]
Who am I?
My name is Albert Valbuena. I am a retired ski instructor and after a period of five years in the international department of a logistics company I recently moved in to the IT industry. It hasn’t been overnight and it is still work in progress. A few years ago I started a website called www.skireviewer.com. […]
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 […]
Abandon Linux. Rolling back the entire OS is possible.
When I was writing an article on updating FreeBSD from the 11.2 version to the new major release number 12, I was trying to add something extra for those who may read some of the information I publish. FreeBSD as a UNIX operating system has similar functionality to the old school UNIX ones such as […]
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 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 […]
How to mirror disks on FreeBSD’s ZFS
This article is not going to be a long, detailed, specialized how to. I just wanted to share the ease and the fantastic quality of ZFS for a dead simple need I had. A spare box with a spare disk doing nothing could be repurposed as a file share box at home. Mirroring the two […]
How to install Apache in FreeBSD with ports
Or better said, how to install Apache the hard way. As mentioned before and many other times FreeBSD has two ways to install software. The easy one which is provided by the pkgng tool. And the not so easy one, ports. With ports you compile the programs and you can set the options the way […]