FreeBSD is a clean, powerful, secure, and reliable Unix-like Operating System built for performance and freedom, and that’s why I’ve been happily nerding out with it for almost 30 years.
FreeBSD is a free, open-source operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a branch of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s known for being stable, secure, highly performant, and extremely well-suited for servers, networking, storage, and appliances.
In this blog post we will document basic FreeBSD 14.3 operational procedures.
SSH on my macOS Tahoe 26.1 uses cryptographic algorithm ssh-ed25519. SSH on my FreeBSD 14.3 uses cryptographic algorithm ssh-rsa.
Why?
The difference between ssh-rsa and ssh-ed25519 SSH keys comes down to cryptographic algorithm, security level, performance, and future-proofing.
Let's deep dive into details ...
FreeBSD is great operating system to be used as router, firewall, and VPN concentrator. When you install and configure FreeBSD router you should begin with standard FreeBSD server installation and configuration covered in another my blog post - Typical tasks after FreeBSD installation.
After typical FreeBSD server installation we can follow with configuration of other roles as
In this blog post, I will document various roles basic configurations.
FreeBSD manual installation from ISO is very simple and straight forward. It typically takes few minutes. In this blog post, I will document my typical tasks after fresh FreeBSD install.
These tasks are
Smokeping is an open-source network latency monitoring tool created by Tobias Oetiker (the same author as MRTG). It measures, records, and graphically displays network latency, packet loss, and jitter over time.
Smokeping sends repeated pings (ICMP, TCP, HTTP, or other probe types) to a set of targets and stores the results in RRD (Round Robin Database) files. It then generates time-series graphs showing:
In this blog post we will install simple implementation of Smokeping to test quality of internet line.