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 […]

Abandon Linux. Rolling back the entire OS is possible.

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 […]

List of Speculative Execution Vulnerabilities
Vulnerability CVE Exploit name Public vulnerability name Firmware changes Spectre 2017-5753 Variant 1 Bounds Check Bypass (BCB) No Spectre 2017-5715 Variant 2 Branch Target Injection (BTI) Yes Meltdown 2017-5754 Variant 3 Rogue Data Cache Load (RDCL) No Spectre-NG 2018-3640 Variant 3a Rogue System Register Read (RSRE) Yes Spectre-NG 2018-3639 Variant 4 Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) […]

How to install the bash shell on FreeBSD
Believe it or not the Bash shell does not come installed on the system. By default FreeBSD uses the sh shell (after the rewrite under the BSD license on 1989 of the original Bourne Shell found on UNIX, which had inherited the ‘sh’ name from the original’s Thomson shell), the C shell or the tcsh […]

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. […]

Absolute FreeBSD 3rd Edition Book Review
Absolute FreeBSD 3rd Edition from Michael W. Lucas, printed by ‘No Starch Press’, is an absolute (pun intended) must have for every BSD user and I’d go so far as to say to every UNIX and Linux user indeed. If you find the articles in Adminbyaccident.com useful to you, please consider making a donation. Use […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

Symbolic and Hard Links in UNIX and Linux
Symbolic and Hard Links are useful ways to reference to information on a disk, both found in UNIX and Linux systems. While they seem similar in the surface they are quite different in how they work and it what can be achieved when using them. If you find the articles in Adminbyaccident.com useful to you, […]
