Real FreeBSD Tips

Klein2 posted some very interesting videos over on his blog regarding ZFS. For anyone interested in learning more about ZFS and to see some hardware getting bashed around, check out these YouTube videos.

Thanks to a great plugin WPTouch, now you can browse this blog, iPhone friendly, from the same URL you have always accessed this blog. It feels really nice too, I think I’ll be checking the blog alot more on the road with this nifty interface. :)

One common issue that all systems administrators face is brute force attacks, whether it be SSH, FTP, WWW, SMB and almost anything else on a system. One frustration for admins of web servers are bots trying to gain access to password protected areas, automated scripts looking for vulnerable software, or simply poking around where they shouldn’t. Previously we have looked at stopping SSH and FTP brute force attacks with Bruteblock and IPFW. Today I will be talking about how to use those same techniques to block pesky HTTP traffic.

Read the rest of this entry »

The guys over at FreeBSD News have published quite a nice guide for people wondering the differences between Linux and FreeBSD. Some views are more personal than others, regardless it is a good point by point post.

1. BSD license allows users/companies to modify a program’s source code and not to release changes to the public
2. BSD has the so-called “core system” (without packages)
3. On BSD systems, all add-on packages are strictly installed into the /usr/local directory
4. BSD systems use the system of “ports”, which are fingerprints of applications in the /usr/ports directory

….and so on.

Read the full list here. Do you think this is an apt description? Let us know in the comments.

UPDATE: Feb 3 2009

There has been a nice discussion over on the FreeBSD forums about these differences too, you can check out the hread here.

Today begins a 3 day “bugathon” for network related problem reports. These are all user submitted issues, so if you have submitted a prooblem report to do with the network, perhaps it may get solved in the next few days!

According to the forum:

The FreeBSD bugbusting team is coordinating a network bugathon, which will be held from 2009-01-30 to 2009-02-01 (Fri-Sun). The plan is to work through all network related PRs still open in GNATS. Everyone is welcome to join and help this effort.

Lots of more information is available on the FreeBSD wiki: http://wiki.freebsd.org/Bugathons/January2009

IRC channel where all the fun stuff will happen: #freebsd-bugbusters on EFNet

Jump on IRC and pay them a visit if you feel like lending a hand. On a side note, what do you find to be some of the biggest issues or problems you face with FreeBSD networking?

For those of you who haven’t heard, pfSense is a FreeBSD based firewall and router. Quoting from the about page:

pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution. pfSense is a popular project with more than 1 million downloads since its inception, and proven in countless installations ranging from small home networks protecting a PC and an Xbox to large corporations, universities and other organizations protecting thousands of network devices.

If you are interested in the development of new snapshots coming out for pfSense, you can now follow them on Twitter. Check them out as its an exciting project.

The BSDConferences YouTube channel has just released a new video which gives a basic insight into how kernel internals work on FreeBSD, and most other unix and linux variants. The video is about an hour in length and features the author of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Marshall Kirk McKusick.

Although not very heavy on details the video gives a good history of how some of the internals of unix were born out of older concepts on early 60′s and 70′s operating systems. Definitely worth checking out.

You can read more about Dr McKusick at his personal site.

You’ve got your FreeBSD web server up, server is running smoothly, and you’re getting a lot of hits. Great! Until your webserver stops responding, you log in, see no load, but all your httpd processes are running in zoneli state. You can’t kill them, the only way you can fix it is to reboot the server. Not so great. What happened? Read the rest of this entry »

Browsing through Digg today I came across a very comprehensive guide to configuring a LAMP server on FreeBSD. For those who do not know, LAMP stands for Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP, and is one of the most common configurations for web hosting today.

Technically, on FreeBSD it should be FAMP, but who are we to nitpick, it is linux.com after all. Comprehensive and easy to understand, a great tutorial based on FreeBSD ports, definitely worth a read.

We have another quick bite of information from over at the FreeBSD Foundation, FreeBSD now has both an official forum and a YouTube channel.

BSDConferences aims to provide full video lectures about FreeBSD and other BSD flavours. From the press release:

This channel allows us to post full hour long lectures from FreeBSD conferences. The first four videos that Julian Elisher recorded at MeetBSD have been posted, and more are on the way.

There is now also an official discussion forum for FreeBSD, in addition to their mailing lists:

The FreeBSD project is finally, after much work, pleased to announce the availability of an official FreeBSD web based discussion forum. It is our hope that this forum will serve as a public support channel for FreeBSD users around the world and as a complement to our fine mailing lists.