Written by Leigh Renfrow and last updated on 06/01/2005 - [ freebsd | netbsd ]

Chrooting has been around for a long time now. Chrooting makes a program believe that the root of the file system is higher up in the hierarchy. For example, if I wanted to create a chroot in /chroot/httpd, a program executed from within the chroot would believe that "/chroot/httpd" was actually "/". There in lies the beauty as the program can't reach any files outside "/chroot/httpd". Security of the server as a whole is increased due to the fact that the system binaries are off limits. In addition, chroots usually only have the bare minimum files inside, so exploits have a harder time breaking in. Chroots can be broken out of. On FreeBSD, jail can also be used. Jail does the same as chroot, but on top of what chroot does, jail restricts what a process can do. One of the benefits of OpenBSD is the fact that apache comes chrooted by default, which is nice. But, that's not going to stop NetBSD or FreeBSD from doing this also. So, why chroot instead of jail? Jailing processes is actually a simple task. Basically I want to help you out with 2 areas in this article. The first is to get apache and php chrooted while working with a chrooted mysql. And the second, I hope you can figure out from this how to chroot your own processes. Once you figure out how to setup chroot trees, configuring jails should not be a challenge for you at all.

Written by Jon LaBass and last updated on 12/05/2004 - [ freebsd | openbsd | netbsd | macosx ]

Apache is the most popular web server in use today. But, not everybody that sets up their Apache server takes the necessary steps to secure it properly from intruders. This guide will show you some good security changes to make to your Apache installation.