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…
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,…
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…
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:…
FreeBSD 11.0 was officially released on September 28th, 2016. Summary changelog Full changelog This release is a marginal update, mostly consisting of performance increases, new hardware support, and security improvements. There are only a few new features. Here are some highlights: NFS performance greatly improved NVMe support enabled by default Options for some common system…
