Contrary to popular belief, firewalls are useless when it comes to securing web applications. I used the general term firewall because most people in the IT field, generally relate to. But the correct term would be network firewall and that’s the one I will use in this post from now on. A network firewall like …
I use a MacBook since late 2007 when I realized that Linux, is not my OS choice and FreeBSD needs a lot of time to spend, in order to keep your ports up to date. My desktop needs are not that demanding. Email, web and terminal are my basic daily needs, although a word processor …
Time machine for Mac OSX was introduced in Leopard 10.5.0 and it is certainly a very nice feature for maintaining backups of your MAC. But until today you had to use an external disk or Apple’s Time Capsule in order for this to work. There have been some workarounds for using a NAS over CIFS …
If you google a bit regarding this controller you will definitely find a lot of people complaining about weird problems regarding this controller. The most common are strange timeout messages occurring, devices being lost, even kernel panics. If you search a little more at FreeBSD old PRs you will find this. Well, I didn’t so …
ZFS is a very advanced file system with numerous features and currently FreeBSD is the only open source mainstream OS that fully supports it. One of its great feature is the ability to create snapshots. An ever better one is the ability to send those snapshots to a different location. But the coolest of all …
We were expecting ZFS v28 in FreeBSD 9.0-Release. Fortunately for those who don’t want to wait, ZFS v28 was merged in to 8.2-Stable. The new version promises much better performance and comes with two new features: autoexpand & dedup Like the name suggests, autoexpand allows a pool to expand its capacity. Imagine that you have …
The new bsdInstaller is here but unfortunately as we saw it still doesn’t support a full ZFS installation. Also, due to the new layout of the installer the traditional way of installing from <FIXIT> doesn’t work anymore. The installation files are now located under /usr/freebsd-dist and the new “Live CD” option doesn’t create any kind …
With the upcoming release 0f FreeBSD 9 a lot of exciting new features are on the way. Today we will take a look at bsdinstall the replacement of the traditional sysinstall. For the purpose of this introduction to the new installer I am using a 9-current snapshot made on April 12. I have created a …
I always thought that ZFS was the most exciting addition to FreeBSD during the last ten years that I am involved. Generally speaking the process of cloning a live system has been the cause of many headaches in the past. You can find many tools, commercial and open source, that try to ghost the full …
We saw earlier how easy it is to set up munin in FreeBSD. Now, what if a system that you wish to monitor is located somewhere beyond your firewall(s) perimeter ? You could install munin-node and let the whole world to grab your system statistics or become a victim of a future exploit! You could …