Obtaining the installer The FreeBSD 11.0 installers can be found on the official FreeBSD site. Under the heading ‘FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE’, select the architecture of the machine FreeBSD will be installed on. This will typically be ‘amd64’ or ‘i386’ which correspond to the 64-bit and 32-bit versions, respectively. The amd64 version can be installed on Intel…

By default FreeBSD is very secure. Security vulnerabilities in the core OS pop up relatively infrequently. That being said it can still be a good idea to harden FreeBSD and follow best practices to make a FreeBSD install more resilient to malicious activity, especially if it’s a publicly facing server. Patching Like any other OS,…

The upgrade from FreeBSD 10.x to 11.0 is relatively minor. Check this post for highlights. The latest branch of 10.x is 10.3 and is expected to reach end-of-life on April 30, 2018. That means that you need to upgrade to 11 before then in order to continue to receive software patches. Before you upgrade, be…

There are two ways to install software packages from the official FreeBSD repositories – pkg and ports. pkg pkg lets you install software as pre-compiled binaries. It’s similar to the yum and apt package managers used in mainstream Linux distros. pkg is the easiest system to use if you don’t need the very latest version…

FreeBSD has two separate components that can be updated: the core OS with freebsd-update and third party software with pkg and portmaster. Security updates for the core and most popular packages are listed here as they come out. Updating the core with freebsd-update The first step is to check for updates. With elevated privileges, run:…