FreeBSD, OpenSSL and Heartbleed

With the recent exposure due to the heartbleed bug many have been panicking or so lazy they’ve ignored it completely. I suggest you land somewhere in between. Change your passwords and consider using a password manager so you can have random passwords for each site – personally I’ve gone with LastPass. But what about your […]

Moving from pkg_* to pkgng

If you have been updating your FreeBSD servers recently I (which I hope you have) you have run into a warning that the old package system will be shut down by the end of summer this year (2014). Some ignore this and some get confused – what now, does FreeBSD handle this automatically? Well as […]

FreeBSD system and ports update script

I thought I would share the script I use to keep track of port updates across all my FreeBSD servers. As usual know your basic FreeBSD (I assume that you have already use screen, portsnap and portmaster) to use this guide. Put this script in /usr/local/sbin/daily.sh (and change the email). Add the script to root’s […]

Bandwidth limiting on FreeBSD using pf+ALTQ

I recently had to shape the connection of a FreeBSD firewall due to massive packet loss when the 2Mbit line reached full capacity in either direction. As usual know your basic FreeBSD (incl. how to compile a kernel) to use this guide. A lot of this guide can be found in the FreeBSD Handbook. In […]

SuperPutty – the PCM replacement

Since development has stopped on PuTTY Connection Manager (PCM) as I wrote about last year, I had to find a replacement for my new laptop. After evaluating different options I selected SuperPutty – it is still a little rough around the edges but improves upon alot of the flaws in PCM – I can highly […]

ZFSinstall via FreeBSD fixit/usb memstick

Due to a recent situation where I had to install FreeBSD on a IBM X3250 without the remote control upgrade to the IMM (to mount images virtually) and with no CD/DVD drive available an alternative solution had to be cooked up. These files will enable you to use the zfsinstaller from mfsBSD SE in the […]

Zabbix on FreeBSD

With Christmas, new year and my wedding over I figured it was time to add another tutorial. One of the things many would like is a decent monitoring solution for their server and after trying and using many of the available free packages around (some are ntop, Munin, Cacti, Monit, Zabbix, Zenoss and Nagios) I […]

PPTP VPN server on FreeBSD

Clarification (31st of October 2010): This guide will give you a PPTP based 4 user VPN server on FreeBSD, using pf for NAT. Clients can use the built in VPN client in Windows/Ubuntu/Mac etc so no need for 3rd party applications like OpenVPN etc. This post will be short and to the point, as I […]

Apache + nginx + vhost scripts

Just a quick update, I thought I might as well share the scripts I use to create vhosts, so if you are using the setup I described in the other blog posts, this will make life easier for you, else just modify it to suit your needs. vhost.sh (interactive script) – Screenshot autovhost.sh Apache template […]

FreeBSD + Apache + nginx proxy/cache + vhosts

Luckily I have not been the victim of a slowloris attack but that is no reason not to take action. So when I was setting up a webserver solution based on Apache, MySQL and PHP5 I might as well add a caching frontend for Apache. This howto guide assumes you have basic knowledge of FreeBSD […]