Interacting with FreeBSD – Learning the Fundamentals of the FreeBSD Shell
The time of the CLI might seem over given the plethora of UIs these days, however, any experienced sysadmin knows just how necessary a powerful CLI like the FreeBSD shell can be. In FreeBSD 14, the default root shell is changing, and in this article we talk about the background and motivations for this change and what implications and advantages this change brings.
Controlling Resource Limits with rctl in FreeBSD
As an administrator, you may often need to limit the amount of system resources an individual uses. FreeBSD provides several methods to do just that. The rctl command can be used to provide an effective method for controlling resource limits or it can be used to set resource constraints on processes and jails. Find out how to configure and enforce your limits.
The FreeBSD Boot Process
Let’s talk about the FreeBSD boot process. It is very robust and complex, as it is well-thought. Find out what are the differences when you boot from UEFI or legacy BIOS, or from GPT and MBR partitioning schemes. Learn what happens when you use ZFS or UFS filesystem.
Using FreeBSD’s pkg audit to Investigate Known Security Issues
Keeping systems secure and free of any vulnerabilities is an important task in any sysadmin’s or developer’s book. Fortunately, FreeBSD systems come with several tools to accomplish that task for both its Base System and installed 3rd party packages.
In this article, we will take a look at how these tools can help us efficiently manage security vulnerabilities in our FreeBSD systems
Explaining top(1) on FreeBSD
We all know and have at least once used the top(1) command on FreeBSD to track information about our cpu and processes, but how many of you know what each field means? By default, top(1) displays the ‘top’ processes on each system and periodically updates this information every 2.0 seconds using the raw cpu use percentage to rank the processes in the list.
This article will give you some insight on how to better understand top (1).