The pkgng is the package management system in FreeBSD. It is used to install applications, and specific modules, libraries, etc. Nowadays you can select in between more than 25.000 thousand. Yes, twenty five thousand. The syntax to use is very intuitive and simple. As you may be already aware software comes in two forms. Source […]
How to install software in FreeBSD with pkgng
How to manage site visitors based on IP Geolocation
Whenever someone publishes a website on the internet, most of the times, their intention is that site to be seen around the globe. However, as a site administrator you may want to divert users from one country to visit some specific version of that site, maybe because of the visitor’s language. Other times, less often […]
How to harden Apache HTTP
Disclaimer: This is a long article. I haven’t collected some nice configuration settings here for the sake of it. There are other hardening guides but some fall short on explaining the functionalities to be enabled or disabled. Every step is shortly, and hopefully clearly, explained so any reader can grasp the main idea of every […]
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 […]
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 patch OpenSSH in FreeBSD 12.2
The default version of OpenSSH in FreeBSD 12.2 today, and it’s been this for quite some time, is not the most recent published by the OpenBSD guys, which by the way are the ones developing OpenSSH. Not only is not the latest but it has a few vulnerabilities affecting it, medium risk ones but nevertheless […]
How to install WPScan on FreeBSD
Vulnerability scanners are useful tools to find issues on systems, networks and the like. WPScan is dedicated to find vulnerabilities on WordPress installations. A short tutorial as an introduction to the tool has been published here. So if you are interested on the tool and on FreeBSD, let’s dig on this how to install WPScan […]
How to install Webmin on FreeBSD 12
Webmin is a fantastic tool for those willing to administer UNIX or unix-like systems through a GUI interface. While the CLI interface lets any user to interact with these kind of systems to the very core and extract all the juice, there are tasks where the graphical interface makes sense and its visual and quick […]
How to enable log rotation on FreeBSD
This is a very short simple entry but it may help you. As many others you may be running a web server, or any other service that creates some logging information. Enable log rotation on FreeBSD will keep those log files in a manageable size (at least more readable) and they won’t grow and expand […]
What is UNIX?
UNIX is an operating system. And your known equivalent is Windows or the Mac. You may even know about Linux. The purpose of an OS is to accommodate programs in order to get some work done. Editing pictures, browsing the web or serving data from a database. It is the thing that lets you operate […]