More on FreeBSD - getting OT.

["Paul Sims" <nospam [at] lombard.co.uk>]

Sorry to ramble ...........

I'm messing about with FreeBSD more out of curiosity than need. It's 
installed on a DEC Prioris 5150 server which has an onboard DEC Tulip 
ethernet chipset and 512K Cirrus Logic graphics, plus Adaptec scsi & scsi 
CD-ROM. I bunged in a Cirrus 1Mb PCI card for more X pixels at 16bpp and a 
Xnyx PCI Etheraction pci network card because the kernel refused to see the 
onboard adapter, even though the chipset is the same as on the pci card.

BSD is real Unix, in fact as standards go it's **the** standard Unix. 
Anyone familiar with the blood'n'guts approach of Debian administration 
will be quite happy with FreeBSD - like Debian you need to get familiar 
with the config files rather than relying on fancy config utilities like 
YaST or Linuxconf. Yes, there is a post-install config utility, but it's 
limited in scope. Still, if you're setting up a Unix box for real 
production stuff you should know what you're doing.

I remember the first eight or ten times I installed Linux - Slackware from 
an ancient PC Plus cover CD, then a bunch of ?2 disks from the Linux 
Emporium (Debian, Slackware, RH 5, OpenLinux 1.3). I got to know how linux 
installed in various guises (except Debian - dselect is still a black art 
to me!), how to set up X, networking, etc. I know far more now than I did 
two years ago, which is about where I am with FreeBSD now. That's no bad 
thing - we all need reminding from time to time that as individuals we 
don't know everything, and highlights the value of an active group like 
this in sorting problems and sharing experiences.

By the way, a real headbanger was trying to mount a CD - "mount -t iso9660 
/dev/cd0a /cdrom" gave errors about bad superblock. In desperation I tried 
"mount /cdrom"  which did the bus, and I still hadn't resorted to R-ing the 
FM !

One good feature in the post-install config, setting the box up as an nfs 
server opened /etc/exports for editing to add exported filesystems. Nice.

Another feature - samba comes without Swat defined in the inetd config 
file. Presumably swat is seen as a security hole.

Oh well, I'm looking forward to the curry night (as long as my cold goes 
away!).



"WorldSecure Server <lombard.co.uk>" made the following
 annotations on 02/08/00 11:13:36
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