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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 offerings in the vaporous and … Read the rest
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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 disables the e-mail reception features, … Read the rest
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Updating FreeBSD
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, sometimes my clients are not … Read the rest
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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 of forcing a particular protocol, … Read the rest
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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 fail.
So here comes … Read the rest
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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 of endless restart loop until … Read the rest
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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, I propose today to add … Read the rest
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Backup your MySQL database to OVH storage
This post was updated on 9th September 2022
Backups: one of those things nobody thinks about until it’s too late. Even when we are keeping local backups, natural disasters may happen. So, if we really want to keep our data safe, off-site back ups are a must. Moreover, this will free resources in our production server.
Fortunately for those of … Read the rest
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FreeBSD network setup for VMs in OVH
One of the reasons why FreeBSD fans are not very fond of OVH is the fact that networking will simply not work out of the box when you create a virtualization guest. In my case I have used Proxmox, but these instructions should work with any other virtualization host.
Installing FreeBSD is otherwise very straightforward and I won’t cover that … Read the rest
My name is Juan and I’m a spaniard living in Poland. My goal with this site is to make FreeBSD more approachable for beginners by explaining how to accomplish simple tasks.
I’m also available for hire – check my services site