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Installing A Secure FreeBSD Box
ltwally writes "The guys over at LittleWhiteDog have a how-to on securing FreeBSD. Topics range from the basics to custom kernels, blowfish encryption, smtp, and custom firewall scripts. Definitely worth a look if you're running a FreeBSD box, or are interested in *nix security in general."
But unless one really needs something special out of FreeBSD ( eg, SMP ) why not start with OpenBSD?
/me likes OpenBSD :)
OpenBSD's security is alot more than just services disabled by default, and is usefull well beyond a firewall.
...still needs work.
NitPick 1: a cvsup cron job every 3 hours? Cvsup traffic is always high at the top of the hour because everyone does this. Fix: Look at the second hand / second readout on your watch right now. Pick that value as the minute your cron job does its thing. It's a simple psuedo-randomizer that makes things a little easier on the cvsup.freebsd.org servers.
NitPick 2: a cvsup cron job every 3 hours? (Is there an echo?) freefall.freebsd.org is the authoritative cvsup source. Its only client is cvs-master.freebsd.org, which checks freefall every 6 minutes. Official mirrors are allowed access to cvs-master, and generally update between 1 hour and 4 hours. If you're updating more often than once a day via cron, maybe you need to think about becoming a mirror. Besides, the smart thing to do is do a cvsup on your src and ports trees and keep it back a day and watch the mail lists to see if anyone else's machine burnt their toast. If there aren't (m)any complaints, go for it.
Nit 3: An official warning and a gruff "who the heck are you" getty message aren't going to keep kids from nmapping you. Try Fooling Nmap for Whatever Reason. If you're worried your OS and your kernel version will give you away, maybe you aren't keeping as up-to-date on your security lists?
Nit 4: Sendmail. Sure. You could run sendmail, but why not look into qmail, written by djb. While you're there, check out djbdns if you need DNS services.
Well taking recent events remove ssh and sendmail. Access via telnet only. No one will ever see my password that way
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
*generic BSD troll*
How about server stability?
take a quick look at Netcraft's longest-uptimes page and see what OS is most prominent on that page.
Here's a summary for you.
BSD/OS and FreeBSD: 50
GNU/Linux (all distros): 0
All other *NIX's combined: 0
Windows (98, XP, 2k and 2k3): 0
Mac OS and OS/X: 0
I'd have drawn a pie chart, but I think you know what a circle looks like already..
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
This is one of the most comprehensive articles I've ever seen about locking down a FreeBSD box. It covers stuff I didn't expect, including using schg to deny the ability to overwrite files.
:).
The but is that I felt it could have included more information about *why* you'd do these kinds of things instead of just how. This information would help people who are newer to FreeBSD understand how to expand on this. While it is comprehensive, I feel it could give people a little more idea of the 'why' rather than the 'how' so that people could do some securing of their own
www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
This request is outrageous. There is any amount of material on the net already about security theory and practice. I've read most of it myself. How much of it am I practicing myself? Not very much. I'm not a full time sysadmin, I sysadmin during my recess breaks from my development activities. Why do I not bother to take security measures I hear preached on every street corner? Because the devil is in the details, and I can't afford to have my FreeBSD server go offline because ICMP was accomplishing something I didn't know about.
This guide is more useful to me than another dozen sermons. It gives me confidence that I can lock down aspects of the system I don't have time to understand in depth with a modicum of confidence that the essential functions of my box will continue to perform.
In my development life there are some aspects of security I work with daily: OpenSSH (tunnels, authpf), OpenSSL, IPsec. Despite my meager time budget to practice host-based security, I'm far from clueless about good security practices.
Do people forget what an incredible sinkhole of human productivity security has become? A simple overview of X.509 destroyed a week of my time. Yet another horror show more easily avoided in theory than practice.
One of the problems with Google is that you never see the thickness of the fully assembled tome. I recall an era where system documentation was measured in shelf-feet. Whenever I had the urge to make my life more complicated than necessary, I just had to look at that bookshelf and ask myself "do I really want to go there?"
I'm at the point in my life where I'm never again going to set aside whole days to master intricacies like all the special perm bits on the FreeBSD implementation of FFS.
I cherish the people out there who return from the trenches with a tattered cheat sheet with the barbed wire, machine gun nests, and landmine locations carefully documented. And then I read highly rated comments from the Rear Admiral types that "this is all well and good, but it isn't another volume of War and Peace". I would love to find to a complete set of VAX manuals on Ebay to donate to this idiot, but I don't think I could afford the shipping charge.
What this article needs is not more theory, but more warnings about "if you experience this kind of problem after making these changes, you took your security measures too far too fast". The art of security is not in knowing what you ought to be doing, it's knowing *what you get away with hardening* given other constraints, such as having any time left over to accomplish something productive.
I always remember the famous quote about building the Fermilab accelerator. When challenged about how Fermilab improved national security, someone shot back: Fermilab is the kind of project that makes America *worth* defending. People and nations who can't grasp that response end up eating their own tails.
> Never heard of Gentoo? How about LFS? How about downloading the source and compiling it yourself?
First: Haven't heard of LFS, so please elucidate. TLA's don't google well (now there's an idiomatic phrase). As for downloading and compiling the source: that's precisely what ports do. More to the point that they download, patch, configure, compile, package, and install automatically but that you can manually intervene in any of these steps, and that you need only edit very modular and flexible makefiles to do so. Gentoo requires a special tool, and if emerge doesn't fit your needs for one purpose or another for a particular package, let's hope you're a very dedicated python hacker. There's a lot of very neat stuff portage does but it looks to have started complex, not based on anything all that simple or flexible.
> I didn't know that packages in FreeBSD were actually source! I thought ports were source?
Packages are binaries. Ports builds and installs a package. If you want custom, you just cd to the work/src/ directory and you have the source tree just like the author made it (modulo any patches) from which you're free to do the usual configure && make before going up to the port dir and doing a "make package" (or just "make install" if you want to auto install it). Compare this to the tedium of customizing a source RPM.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
587 is the "mail submission port", and is designed to be the port on which mail is originated, leaving port 25 for transferring mail between MTA's. This has various properties in that they can treat authentication differently (SMTP auth is required on port 587), and therefore has a number of anti-spam properties as well as some other benefits. Obviously port 25 is not going away for MSA's anytime soon, but it's a step. One big adopter of this is AOL: AOL users using AOL network services (e.g. corporate accounts) already are required to use port 587 when not using an AOL dialup, as AOL already rejects direct-to-MX on port 25 for most dynamic IP's.
It's all spelled out in RFC2476
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.