Creating a jailed web server is a fun exercise to learn how about jails. If you are reading this post, you are probably already convinced of the benefits of running your services inside jails. A jailed service provides additional security by restricting the jailed environment to access only to its perceived root directory. We can run many services in the same host, and we could isolate them to their own jailed environment. Another useful trait of jails is dependency segregation. We can run different jails that depend on different versions of the same libraries or programs, without causing problems between them. Each jail will have its own userland. In this post, we are going to explore how to run a service inside a jail. We are going to use Nginx as an example, but you can take what you learned in the post and apply it to your specific case.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #26!
Did you manage to see the launch of SpaceX first crew mission? It was a success! There were 10.3 million concurrent watchers on the stream, that’s massive. If you somehow miss it here is the link to space.com article, it includes videos. It was cool to watch. It felt like the beginnings of a sci-fi story.
Anyways, Important news for humanity aside. There was also other important news around. In the previous newsletter (#25), we talked about the new unc0ver jailbreak for iOS. This week Apple released new updates, iOS 13.5.1 and iPadOS 13.5.1, that fix the kernel bug that allowed this exploit. You can read the release notes here. I guess some people won’t be wanting to apply that patch if they’re going to jailbreak their phones.
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Sometimes deciding on a partition schema could be a confusing, here are my notes on partitioning a GPT disk. I hope you find them useful.
I will advice creating a virtual machine using FreeBSD and take it for a spin. It would be nice if we had lots of physical devices we could work with to gain more experience, but a virtual machine will do.
Before we begin, make sure you have a copy of FreeBSD. You can download it from here. My architecture is amd64 so that’s what I’ll use.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #23!
How are things your way? I hope that coping1 well with the changes and keeping safe. Things are quite different from what I expect them to be by this time in the year. I was hoping this year I was going to make a significant career change, but there is no international travel, and things seem to be slowing down. So, who knows what the future might bring.
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I use Parallels on macOS to spin virtual machines for learning purposes. Lately, I’ve been interested in FreeBSD, so I wanted to create a slimmed-down version of the FreeBSD Kernel for my VM. And that is the topic of this post, how to create a custom FreeBSD Kernel for a Parallels virtual machine. It is not limited to Parallels tho. You can easily use the content of this note to build any custom Kernel.
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