AWStats is a very powerful and useful software allowing webmasters count the visits to their managed websites. The tool is basically coded in Perl and it was a very popular choice before Google made it way easy when they launched their Google Analytics tool. However, nowadays not everyone is using Google Analytics services and even […]

How to install AWStats on FreeBSD 13.0

A few useful network commands
Troubleshooting network issues with simple commands is not a very difficult topic once there is a little toolbox to pull from. Needless to say networking topics can be very complicated and any specialist on the field will tell you how cumbersome it can really get. However with a few set of commands one can get […]

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 upgrade FreeBSD from version 11.2 up to 12.0
Although the upgrade process is very well described on the FreeBSD handbook you may be looking for a more detailed hands on how to upgrade FreeBSD from version 11.2 up to 12.0 article. We’re going work here on this process, step by step detailing not only how to upgrade but to do it safely. First […]

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 […]

How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on an HP Proliant server with FreeBSD
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 set the locale in FreeBSD
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 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 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 […]

FreeBSD Jails
The FreeBSD jails is a virtualization technology you may have skipped for too long. It is an operating system level virtualization and is one of the differential characteristics of FreeBSD from Linux. Solaris took it to the main corporate use with Zones and as it couldn’t be any other way the Illumos folks also play […]
