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 detect a WAF – Web Application Firewall
From a penetration testing perspective to identify if a Web Application Firewall (WAF) is in place is essential. The next question is, does an administrator need to know this? My view is, anyone who is in charge of any system that has implemented some sort of WAF needs to verify this tool is working, at […]
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 […]
How to load and unload kernel modules in Linux
Kernel modules permit enabling hardware features on a given system. For example, if we need to read from a particular filesystem from a hard drive, we need to load a particular kernel module. Or use a specific network card, a sound card or sound device, a video display, etc. This is mostly done automatically in […]
How to compile cloudflared in FreeBSD 13/14
I happen to self-host my websites using Cloudflare’s services (article 1, article 2). Since the FreeBSD port seems to be delaying its releases and Cloudflare’s policy on maintaining versions only considers 1 year old code, in an act of prevention I have learnt, and I am publishing, how to compile cloudflared in FreeBSD. Note: At […]
A word on Spectre and Meltdown
As professionals and many aficionados know, early this year some widespread vulnerabilities were found on Intel CPU’s as well as on AMD’s. It was a bit later discovered the flaws also affected some RISC architectures such as Power and ARM. Everybody went nuts and the world seemed to be tumbling because of two CPU vulnerabilities […]
The firewall
If you don’t know why you need a firewall it’s because you are not very tech savy. Don’t worry. You can discover by yourself why you need one. The router sitting in your house has one installed in it. And please don’t disable that by any mean. You can check why a firewall is important […]
How to secure FreeBSD (server minimal edition)
This is a very simple and easy to follow guide on securely administer your FreeBSD server. That said I am not a security expert although I’ve gained some knowledge as time goes by. Not pretending to be the definitive guide this article is an introduction on how to secure FreeBSD in which I will tackle […]
How to use Fail2ban with WordPress
In a previous article we did an install of Fail2ban on a FreeBSD server. This tool can help us to protect our WordPress install, independatly from if we are using the FAMP stack or the LAMP stack. As I mentioned on that article Fail2ban is a complementary tool to our firewall. It works by scanning […]
How to install Nextcloud on FreeBSD 12
Nextcloud. Have you heard of it? That’s quite probable if you’re here. But, what is it, what is it? Some say it is a Google Apps replacement, some say it’s just a place to store your documents, some others just rely on it to share documents across the company and edit them just in time […]