For several applications it is necessary to synchronize your server to the network time. The protocol is called Network Time Protocol (NTP) and is basically giving the correct time to the world nowadays. Reading the Wikipedia entry is very interesting. FreeBSD comes with the ntp client. To set this up you will just add the […]
How to synchronize system and network time in FreeBSD

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 update FreeBSD with freebsd-update
Anytime you set a clean fresh FreeBSD install or just any other operating system you must update it. This should be the first thing. If you are a bit security aware (read paranoid) you can first set up the firewall rules and then update the system to the latest release where you have all the […]

How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on a Lenovo T430s 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 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 analyze suspicious email
Millions of emails are sent and received every day. Most of them are just junk. And many among those are potentially harmful. Phishing still is one of the most effective ways for malicious actors to penetrate into well secured networks. The weakest link, too often, is the human factor. Training can help mitigate this 24×7 […]

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 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 test pfSense on VirtualBox running on FreeBSD
There are other guides on how to do this on Windows, Mac, but not on FreeBSD, so here goes a how to pfSense on Virtualbox running on FreeBSD. Before going to it, let’s address the first question, which is what is pfSense. pfSense is a FreeBSD based distribution made for networking purposes. The company behind […]

Donation Time 2020
This 2020 has been a difficult year for everyone. Because of this difficulty and the opportunities I had the chance to take, I’ve been able to contribute back to the open source community, not just with content here in Adminbyaccident.com, advocacy for a few tools such as my favorite OS (FreeBSD) and the usual mouthful […]
