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
Abandon Linux. Move to FreeBSD or Illumos.
If you use GNU/Linux and you are only on opensource, you may be doing it wrong. Here’s why. Is your company based on opensource based software only? Do you have a bunch of developers hitting some kind of server you have installed for them to “do their thing”? Being it for economical reasons (remember to […]
How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on a Lenovo T430s laptop with Ubuntu
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 […]
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 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 install Nessus 10 on FreeBSD 12
Nessus is a professional vulnerability scanner from the reputable cybersecurity company Tenable. I have already written about it in the past but installing it on a GNU/Linux distro. This very article will guide anyone to install Nessus 10 on FreeBSD, since Tenable is releasing binaries for FreeBSD 11 and 12 as of the time of […]
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 […]
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) […]
Why FreeBSD
In the following lines you will find a brief but sort of complete explanation about what is FreeBSD and why FreeBSD might be of your interest. If you are already a Mac or Linux user this could be more relevant for you than you would imagine. Enjoy. FreeBSD is an operating system, a unix-like operating […]
Abandon Linux. Jails for developers.
Reading the title you might think I want to put developers in Jail and although some may be good candidates this is in the far opposite of my intention. I am talking about FreeBSD Jails. For the unfamiliar with the concept those Jails are userland secure contained environments that share a common kernel. Purists and […]