FreeBSD is Fun

Practical recipes for FreeBSD

  • Installing old software

    Once in a while you may come across the situation where you want to install a particular version of a software package that is not available anymore through ports, usually because it’s considered obsolete (also known as EOL or End-of-life) and thus deemed insecure for production use. But being humans with free will, it may…

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  • FreeBSD 14 is here

    FreeBSD has recently launched version 14 of their operating system. I have personally worked with it for a while and haven’t found any issue or incompatibility with my existing software. However, there are some things worth remarking for from within the long list of changes published by the FreeBSD foundation, as it directly may affect…

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  • Copy files between servers with SCP

    Need to move large files from one server to another? It’s time to grow out of WinSCP and skip the middleman. Copying from server to server is easier than you think!

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  • Installing FreeBSD in OVH dedicated

    French giant OVH is, at least at the moment of writing these lines, the largest dedicated server provider worldwide. So it only makes sense that we want our system of choice to work out of the box with their dedicated server line, named by the marketing guys as Bare Metal to difference it from their…

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  • SSMTP, or e-mail delivery made simple

    One of the most notorious features of FreeBSD is the inclusion of Sendmail, an ancient SMTP server that has its origins in the early eighties. The complexity of its configuration and the security risk it poses leads to many tutorials to recommend disabling it straight away, by setting sendmail_enable to NO in rc.conf. This setting…

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  • Updating FreeBSD

    downloading patches

    It’s often during my freelance gigs that I come across clients using dinosaur age versions of FreeBSD, requiring to spend hours to bring the OS and applications to a minimum usable standard. So today I’d like to show you, my potential future clients *wink*, how to keep your system in top condition. (By the way,…

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  • Geolocating users in nginx

    I know, I know… why not just use Cloudflare? Except, there is cases where you can’t; or not the free version anyway. One such case I experienced recently happened when I needed to fetch the user’s IP for an application which only supports IPv4. Turns out, that the free Cloudflare account doesn’t have the option…

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  • NGINX Troubles

    Initially I thought of this as a troubleshooting section for my nginx installation guide; however and given that as a beginner you will spend far more time fixing your configuration than installing anything, it grew into its own post, which I will keep updating over time with all the wonderful ways your web server can…

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  • Keeping your logs tidy

    If you’ve ever run a fairly busy webserver on FreeBSD -or you just happen to have particularly badly written code spamming the error log, such as some wordpress based plugin spaghetti- you probably found yourself into the situation where your logs grow out of proportion. Or maybe you ran software that went into some sort…

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  • Playing with text

    Although I named this blog “FreeBSD is Fun”, most of the articles on it deal with very practical matters, albeit in a simpler and more light hearted way than the FreeBSD documentation. Which is not saying a lot, I admit. Therefore and, as a sort of follow up to my previous text on shell colors,…

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My name is Juan and my goal with this site is to make FreeBSD more approachable for beginners by explaining how to accomplish simple tasks.