FreeBSD is Fun

Practical recipes for FreeBSD

  • 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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  • 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…

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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…

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  • Coloring your shell

    Introduction If you are like me and enjoy spending time fiddling with FreeBSD, or you want to make it a bit harder to avoid making mistakes because you edited the wrong file or something, it pays off to set up some coloring in your FreeBSD shell. Not for the aesthetics, but to identify easier: who…

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  • Your own NGINX web server

    This is an updated version of a tutorial originally posted in Metin2Dev in 2014. Today I will explain how to set up the nginx webserver in FreeBSD. While Apache has a long tradition, it has been overtaken performance wise by newer, more robust software like nginx, as can be seen in this comparison graph depicting…

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  • Basic SSH security

    This tutorial was first published in 2014 in Metin2Dev. I have corrected a few bits, but the procedures are exactly the same as 10 years ago. Today I will show you how to make your server safer easily while at the same time avoiding having to type your login and password every time you want…

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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.