The hardware we are using for benchmarking this time was a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 2GB of system memory, a 100GB Hitachi HTS72201 7200RPM SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M graphics processor powering a 1680 x 1050 LVDS panel.

Getting FreeBSD to act as a wireless access point involves the following steps:

• Make sure your installation includes hostapd and named (BIND)
  
• Recompile your kernel for pf support
  
• pf is not the only way to do this, but I strongly prefer pf to the ipfw/ipfilter and have written the How-To to use it
  
• Configure NAT (and any firewall rules)
  
• Install isc-dhcp3-server
  
• Configure daemons and start them

This Howto article is intended to be a practical example, and I will start my host system with FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE. The Install will be of the "minimal" variety, and for the first part of this document, we will not update the system with buildworld. After a jail is created, we will then update the host, and then update the jail. This will demonstrate a practical example of how to build, and then maintain a jail thru critical security releases.

This should get you started on using steganography utilities. The only question you may be asking yourself is "why use such a utility?" Probably the most common use is to safeguard passwords. We all know that we should use different passwords for various tasks. For example, you should use a different password to log into your computer, another to retrieve email, another for online banking, and yet another for when you create an account on a web server. It can be very handy to make a text file of each password and its usage, and to safeguard that file by hiding it in a place no one would suspect to look.

Setting up a LAMP server is a common task for systems administrators, and FreeBSD is one of the most reliable and stable operating systems available. Why not combine both LAMP and FreeBSD to build a fast and reliable Web server?

In this article I assume FreeBSD is already installed. If not, make sure you download the latest stable production version of FreeBSD and run the installer. I recommend choosing the MINIMUM option at the installer screen to quickly install only the most basic and necessary things.

Many computer systems around the world have been possessed by penguins; some have even been possessed by dead rats. In light of this, it is desireable to exorcize these evil spirits, and replace them with a nice, friendly daemon.

I've put together some code for building a FreeBSD disk image which will boot into memory, configure the network, set a root password, and enable SSH. This can be used to "depenguinate" a Linux box, without requiring any access beyond a network connection.

There are several tasks to which we must attend before actually making use of our freshly installed FreeBSD system. Immediately upon reboot, you will find yourself in the console. While it is possible to setup and use the graphical login managers -- kdm, gdm or others -- it is important to note that this uses extra resources. One of our assumptions is that you might not have all that excess horsepower, so we'll stick with the console login for now.

This howto walks you through the process of building one of the most stable and secure firewalls available - a FreeBSD-STABLE firewall with IPFILTER. As a part of the installation process, all services will be disabled except OpenSSH, which will have its access controlled via TCP-Wrappers. The firewall will be configured to log through the syslog facility, but will have its own firewall log files (rather than filling up /var/log/messages). We'll add VESA support into the kernel so that we can use 132x43 screen resolutions, as well as compile support into the kernel for a second ISA Ethernet card if you have one. After we add a warning banner to the system, we'll make BASH the default shell for root, perform a rudimentary setup for root's BASH environment, and redirect root's email to your "normal" account so that the root account on the firewall itself doesn't fill up. Next, we'll download, compile, install, and configure Tripwire, as well as install cvsup so that your ports collection stays up to date. And, lastly, we'll modify the /etc/fstab entries so that some of your partitions are mounted 'nosuid', 'noexec', or 'ro' so that your installation is as secure as possible.