BSD Adventures

How to Upgrade to FreeBSD 11.2

Andrew Volpe — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 22:09:55 +0000

On July 27th, 2018, FreeBSD 11.2 was released. This is the second point release for the 11.x branch. If your system is running 11.0 or 11.1 it is important to upgrade in the near future. 11.0 stopped receiving patches on November 30th, 2017 and 11.1 will stop receiving patches on September 30th, 2018. The legacy...

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How to Create a Super Secure SSH Server Tunnel With FreeBSD

Andrew Volpe — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 22:24:08 +0000

Secure SHell, abbreviated SSH, is a versatile and secure tool. The most popular implementation, OpenSSH, was created by the OpenSSH project which is a cousin of FreeBSD. This guide uses FreeBSD as an OS because it’s a bit more user friendly. Although FreeBSD isn’t known to be as secure as OpenBSD, it’s still a very...

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How to Upgrade to FreeBSD 11.1

Andrew Volpe — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 21:30:00 +0000

FreeBSD 11.1 was officially released on July 26th, 2017. It’s highly recommended to update to the new version when you can. FreeBSD 11.0 is expected to hit its end-of-life (EoL) on October 26th, 2017. FreeBSD 10.3 is expected to hit its EoL on April 30th, 2018. When a release hits EoL that means no more...

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FreeBSD 11.1 Coming This Summer!

Andrew Volpe — Fri, 09 Jun 2017 22:33:31 +0000

FreeBSD 11.1 is the first minor update to the FreeBSD 11.x branch. According to the FreeBSD Foundation’s schedule the final release should occur around July 21st, 2017. Because this is a minor release there won’t be any new major features. Bug fixes, updated packages, and minor features make up the bulk of the release. The...

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Python iocage With FreeBSD

Andrew Volpe — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 20:49:46 +0000

Overview iocage is one of the most popular jail managers for FreeBSD. Jails are very useful but also difficult to manage. Check out FreeBSD’s documentation for a short primer on jails. In January 2017 iocage was rewritten in Python and released as a beta. It is in very active development and is shaping up to...

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ZFS for Busy Sysadmins

Andrew Volpe — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 22:53:27 +0000

ZFS is a filesystem and volume manager combined. This means that you don’t necessarily need to add mountpoints to /etc/fstab if you don’t want to. You don’t even need to create partitions with gpart or makepart if you’re using the whole disk for ZFS. Because swap partitions can’t live in ZFS, a boot disk typically...

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How to Install FreeBSD 11.0

Andrew Volpe — Sun, 27 Nov 2016 20:08:38 +0000

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...

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How to Harden FreeBSD

Andrew Volpe — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 21:30:12 +0000

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,...

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What’s the Difference Between the BSDs?

Andrew Volpe — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 21:03:57 +0000

Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) was created in the late 70’s as a derivative of UNIX. In the early 90’s it split into three main forks, or flavors: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. Each of the forks are open source and free for use. BSD flavors are known for security and stability. The downside to these points...

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How to Upgrade FreeBSD 10.x to FreeBSD 11.0

Andrew Volpe — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 23:07:47 +0000

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...

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