FreeBSD

Servers

Inferno

Maintenance

2005-05-14 Hard Drive Upgrade

Installed Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (6Y120L0) and reinstalled OS. Based on the date this was likely FreeBSD 5.3.

2007-07-12 6.2-RELEASE-p5

Added serial console for easier management. Performed source upgrade from 6.1 to 6.2-RELEASE-p5. Not sure when the upgrade was done from 5.3 to 6.1 or how many increments were in between. Such details are lost to history.

2008-01-09 Heat Sink and Fan Replacement

Replaced Heat Sink and Fan (Evercool Socket A). Previous fun died. Inferno didn't like this much.

2008-02-18 Hard Drive Upgrade

Previous hard drive Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (6Y120L0) serial: Y35AK8PE was quickly failing. Added Promise SATA300 TX4 4-port SATA II PCI controller card and Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s NCQ 750GB 32MB Cache (ST3750330AS)

During the upgrade, updated the system from FreeBSD 6.2 to FreeBSD 7.0 RC2.

2008-02-26 Upgrade to FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE

Upgraded from FreeBSD 7.0-RC2 to 7.0-RELEASE. First successful cross-release upgrade using the new freebsd-update utility. Nice!

Essential Ports

ftp/wget

• Retrieve files from the Net via HTTP and FTP

misc/gnuls

I miss the colorized output of ls seen on most Linux systems... Installing the gnuls port and adding the following to /etc/csh.cshrc will add this missing convenience to FreeBSD:

alias ls        gnuls --color=auto -h

net-mgmt/net-snmp

• An extendable SNMP implementation

net/tcpick

tcpick is a textmode sniffer libpcap-based that can track, reassemble and reorder tcp streams. Tcpick is able to save the captured flows in different files or displays them in the terminal, and so it is useful to sniff files that are transmitted via ftp or http.

ports-mgmt/portaudit

• Checks installed ports against a list of security vulnerabilities

ports-mgmt/portupgrade

• FreeBSD ports/packages administration and management tool s

security/sudo

• Allow others to run commands as root

sysutils/screen

• A multi-screen window manager

sysutils/smartmontools

Adds S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) disk monitoring tools. This suite of tools is extremely handy to allow the administrator to be aware of disk problems before they result in a catastrophe.

See the following links for more information:

• smartmontools Home Page
• Monitoring Hard Disks with SMART (Linux Journal)

Example commands:

• smartctl -l selftest /dev/ad0
• smartctl -t long /dev/ad0
• smartctl -Hc /dev/ad0

Technical Notes

Disk image via dd

dd bs=512 if=/dev/rXX# of=/some_dir/foo.dmg conv=noerror,sync

tar over netcat

• nc -v -v -w 40 -l -p 8888 > foo.tar
• tar cjvf * | nc remotehost 8888

Updating root DNS

dig @a.root-servers.net . ns > /etc/namedb/named.root

Portupgrade

Rebuild Package and all dependent packages

portupgrade -rfx openssl openssl

Disable Vulnerability Checking

DISABLE_VULNERABILITIES=yes

Qmail log Timestamps

Can be converted to human readable using the tai64nlocal command.

Name Services

Retrieving Database Entries

As of FreeBSD 7 the getent utility can be used to retrieve entries from the various administrative databases.

Name Service Caching Daemon

The nscd daemon added in FreeBSD 7 improves performance of nsswitch type lookups (users, groups, etc) but can cause some surprising results with new users not being found in the system. The cache can be cleared for all users by running:

%nscd -I cachename

Using IDE CD Burners

Place the following in /boot/loader.conf for IDE CDRW support:

atapicam_load="YES"
hw.ata.atapi_dma=1

Using Memory Disks

FreeBSD >= 5.x have a memory disk utility that can be utilized to mount file system images.

To setup a memory disk

mdconfig -a -t vnode -o readonly -f /path/to/image.iso -u 1
mount -t cd9660 /dev/md1 /mnt/cdrom

To reverse the process:

mount -u /mnt/cdrom
mdconfig -d -u 1