tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-333578042012-01-14T16:00:11.006-05:00Tips for the FreeBSD user. No shirt, no shoes, no kerne1 hacking! ... just making FreeBSD work great for you.kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.comBlogger491100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-27470176924876513802010-08-25T12:30:00.004-04:002010-08-28T00:18:43.144-04:00

This is a surprisingly easy fix to a very irritating problem. My problem was just this: I'm using the system log (syslog/syslogd/logger) for things other than just system messages. If there's a long message, it will get the end chopped off. The log message is too short. This isn't working for me.I don't even remember where I found all of this, but the problem is that syslogd has a hard limit

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-373576028672352562010-06-27T15:39:00.002-04:002010-06-27T16:00:04.574-04:00

I was trying to run/install a PHP site and I was getting blank pages and found this error in my web server logs: "PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function preg_replace() in /path/to/file.php" This is not a terribly difficult problem and people with PHP experience are probably already yelling: "PCRE!" at the screen. :) (That stands for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions.") I only write

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-39288367334139992422010-01-25T16:42:00.004-05:002010-01-25T21:33:53.116-05:00

The subject above is an error I found in my maillogs (/var/log/maillog) when trying to figure out why periodic emails from a server had stopped. I was running the default sendmail on FreeBSD 7.2, though what I've found should be broadly applicable to many versions of sendmail on many OSes.Let there be no doubt, I'm not a mail expert. I nearly cried this weekend when I discovered I'd be

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-133626143766153112009-09-10T13:54:00.004-04:002009-09-10T14:20:56.766-04:00

Of all the things you'd expect to "just work", the venerable ftp should be near the top of the list. But, it's been giving me some trouble lately. I've been having to upload some files to another organization's servers. and getting strange errors like this one:425 Unable to build data connection: Invalid argumentIt took a bit of digging, but in this case it turns out that the extended EPSV and

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-91123205931459841542009-07-02T10:38:00.004-04:002009-09-27T22:50:23.472-04:00

[* Almost script-free. The value of the the 'onChange' attribute is actually a one-line script.]This is just a tidbit, but I found it a real pain to find. So, here it is to save you the trouble. I wanted a drop-down menu in a web page, filled with links, and without using JavaScript. Why no scripts? It just seems to me like it's a simple enough thing that it shouldn't need it. But, all of the

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-2010169585810569912009-06-29T11:55:00.007-04:002009-09-10T14:21:57.471-04:00

I sure love Subversion. What a great tool. But, I'm more a user than an administrator of it. So, when I went to set-up another of my own repositories, I couldn't remember squat about how I'd done it before. I do recall there was a lot of reading involved. (With great power comes ... longer manuals. :p) First, you must create the new repository with a command like this, "svnadmin create /svnrepos/

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-16397223834524956562009-04-08T23:45:00.003-04:002009-05-14T23:04:03.025-04:00

I've gotten an amd64 desktop and started running FreeBSD/amd64 on it. I've had an amd64 capable machine before, but chose to run the i386 version of FreeBSD on it so I could use Nvidia drivers and have hardware accelerated graphics. (I think the linux flash player only runs on i386 too, but am not sure.)So, I installed without issue. I included X in the installation and it worked fine. But, as I

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-42380209089900376182009-03-01T02:48:00.004-05:002009-03-04T00:11:42.429-05:00

The issues with gotbsd.net have been resolved. Yay!

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-19968368468626829202009-02-25T14:07:00.003-05:002009-02-26T09:44:47.758-05:00

This is a quick and easy tip, for the detail-oriented! Say a computer that you're interested in is down for some reason. Maybe you've rebooted it and you want to know the second that it's back on-line. Or maybe it's someone else's box and it's down and you (again) want to know as soon as it's up. You could just run ping and watch for the responses, but that's more traffic than is needed for a

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-61348435554444250512009-02-07T14:36:00.004-05:002009-02-07T15:42:03.594-05:00

In a previous post, I introduced many useful bash shell aliases that I use. There's one that I've made a notable improvement to that I'd like to share. If you spend a lot of time on the command-line and use bash, you should really try this out.'bhg', for "bash history grep," was a pretty simple alias to search through your bash history file. Previously, I used it like this:alias bhg='cat $

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-35020323896692698912009-01-03T11:23:00.003-05:002009-01-03T12:07:12.397-05:00

I wrote about this annoying "E10" error once before. It doesn't crash anything, it just gives a long error message and pause (/"Enter to continue") every time you open a php file in vim with syntax high-lighting enabled. It's probably triggered by other syntax rule files as well. (Several variants of vim are found in FreeBSD ports under the editors category.)I wrote to the port maintainer and he

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-36173381508762253472008-12-18T23:42:00.005-05:002008-12-19T01:02:18.733-05:00

... On FreeBSD, of course. There're many great games in ports of course. In the area of board games, gnuchess, gnugo, and gnubg have been around for a while and are all excellent. gnubg (backgammon) is a very tough opponent! Turns out computers are a lot (lot!) better at backgammon than they are at Go.So, I like board games. I also like to play board games against humans because, well, I guess

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-5861352013754016882008-11-24T11:31:00.004-05:002008-12-18T23:41:58.073-05:00

In a previous post (and a follow-up), I wrote about a number of useful and time-saving aliases that I use in the bash shell. Those posts are pretty old now. In the meantime, I've defined another interesting alias. While nothing special in itself, I've discovered that this is one task that can be done better in another way.The new alias is this:pig='pkg_info | grep 'I've found it to be very useful

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-1181112552104397042008-11-10T11:31:00.005-05:002009-01-03T12:09:13.028-05:00

Here's a minor irritation with the vim port (editors/vim-lite, and probably the others). When I go to edit a php file I get this non-fatal error:"~/somefile.php" 99 lines, 2345 charactersError detected while processing /usr/local/share/vim/vim72/syntax/php.vim:line 479:E10: \ should be followed by /, ? or &line 482:E10: \ should be followed by /, ? or &line 488:E10: \ should be followed by /,

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-68893952038829545662008-07-17T15:37:00.003-04:002008-11-13T15:52:51.560-05:00

I often use Eterm as my terminal. But, it's a little bit heavy and sometimes I use xterm too. Thing is, xterm is not user friendly and the defaults you get by starting it without options are just horrible.Now, the basic, cosmetic options for xterm are pretty straight-forward. Also, it's usually good to specify '-ls' to make it a login shell. So:xterm -ls -bg black -fg yellow -g 120x60will give

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-36118447119682112912008-06-17T11:47:00.010-04:002008-11-13T15:52:51.669-05:00

Here is a fun thing that Firefox is trying to do: set the Guinness World Record for most downloads in a day, to promote their new browser. Wow, I have been using Firefox on FreeBSD since well before version 1.0 and it has served me well.So, the question is, how do we FreeBSDers (and other non-Windows users) participate? I can't say for sure -- I looked over their FAQ and they didn't go into that

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-16499929686796601462008-05-24T13:13:00.007-04:002009-11-26T19:14:37.154-05:00

Something possessed me to install Snood on the kids' computer again. That's a great, little game. (If you want the same basic game in FreeBSD, take a look at "games/frozenbubble" or "games/monkeybubble" in ports.)But, after a day of play, we noticed something horrible. Most high scores were not being saved! I've had this issue before with some other Windows games so it was no great mystery. On

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-31332532534624472962008-05-08T22:42:00.009-04:002008-11-13T15:52:52.486-05:00

Dru Lavigne mentioned an interesting new project in her recent post, "Calling All BSD Users". It's called The Open Source Census. They want to collect data on the use of open source software. I've looked over their site and it certainly has a professional presentation and all of the assurances regarding privacy that you'd want and expect. I have a scan running on one of my home machines right

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-10441877095394407562008-04-01T22:38:00.006-04:002008-11-13T15:52:52.818-05:00

I've been playing around with xscreensaver (x11/xscreensaver) and I've done something fun with a couple of the hacks that you'll want to try. There are many hacks that let you use your own image or images. Many of those, like XAnalogTV or Carousel, work best with a large number of pictures that get rotated. There are a couple of hacks that only work on one picture at a time, and what I've done

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-2721373398139470232008-03-17T00:13:00.004-04:002008-03-19T22:37:21.448-04:00

I started a website, gotbsd.net. It's for getting FreeBSD and PC-BSD and FreeSBIE ISO's via BitTorrent. It's been a lot of fun.I was inspired to start it because the Project had shut down their official torrent site and I thought there was a need and desire for a dedicated BSD torrent site. FreeBSD has since started a new, official torrent site. However, there's still a need for good torrents

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-56178197030592235502008-01-21T12:18:00.000-05:002008-02-02T10:52:26.588-05:00

I've had a little project going on for the last few months. It is gotbsd.net, a site for downloading FreeBSD ISO's via BitTorrent. The subject of this entire project should really be a post of its own (... one day). But, the short story is that I think BitTorrent is a great way to distribute large files and when the Project's official torrent site was taken off-line, I thought hey, FreeBSD should

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-52755751036739664802008-01-08T00:42:00.000-05:002008-02-02T10:52:37.929-05:00

This is too good to wait on, even though it's late and I'm a little tired. May fill in more later. I have a printer. I hate the Windows drivers that come with it, they're full of ads, obnoxious automated update pop-ups, they hog a lot of memory and CPU, etc. That's alright, I usually use FreeBSD anyway and CUPS ends up working great. I had to find the linux drivers for my particular printer

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-1231626117344235632007-12-18T22:10:00.000-05:002007-12-21T00:16:46.228-05:00

If you use bash as a login shell you might have had the problem of it getting broken and then being unable to login. Now that's a problem! I've burnt myself on this a couple of times. But, in both cases it was not a big deal to fix. (In one case, though, I was locked out over the weekend until I could get to the box.) This is more of a problem in some operating systems (like FreeBSD) where bash

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-35139495881566584972007-12-11T00:03:00.000-05:002008-11-13T15:52:53.108-05:00

Why do so many people send Adobe PDF files? Especially if it's just text. Why not just send text? Why should I have to open another application to read your precious newsletter?!Ugh. Anyway, sometimes PDF's are useful. Maybe they've got maps and directions or whatever. Then maybe you'll want to print them out. Well, I don't know what's going on with my Adobe Reader (port "print/acroread7")

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-33706524502991573902007-11-22T01:01:00.000-05:002008-01-25T11:46:15.450-05:00

I have saved tons of compile time in the past by using updated 6-STABLE binary packages, even though I'm running 6.2-RELEASE. (As discussed in past articles here and here.) Well, the last couple of days I gave some of that time back. :/ Packages grabbed from the '/packages-6-stable/' subdirectory are not running for me in 6.2-RELEASE. They would mostly exit immediately with an error message

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-75335301463423077762007-11-10T11:28:00.000-05:002008-11-13T15:52:53.466-05:00

Here is a quick tip on adding some color to your command line interface (CLI). And, when I say CLI, I mean both the console and your typical graphical terminal as well (xterm, Eterm, etc.).First, and easiest, is to color the directory listings. There are two ways to do this. One, you can define the variable CLICOLOR in your environment. In bash, you could do this with the command "export CLICOLOR

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-79198259683670668742007-10-17T00:04:00.000-04:002007-10-21T18:35:26.532-04:00

This is funny. I'm not sure what came first: the chicken or the egg. I'm also not sure which of these came first: me running into this page about creating search plugins for Firefox or my idea to create one for FreshPorts.Anyway, the idea percolated around for a while. I finally got around to doing it. It was just a little more trouble than I expected, but not too bad. It helped to look at

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-59660427281984684332007-09-02T16:58:00.000-04:002007-10-25T00:23:35.265-04:00

If you're using FreeBSD you may not realize that you already have the software on your system to run a DNS server. Why should you run a DNS server process?! Really just to tinker. Networks are so much faster and reliable than they once were, that the small amount of network traffic you could save from running your own caching DNS server is probably not worth the trouble.For you tinkerers who

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-78813392551519247812007-08-26T14:51:00.000-04:002007-10-16T23:56:07.747-04:00

It's been just a year since I started this blog. My first post was "Top Ten Rules for Using Ports system". So, it seems like as good a time as any to write this post -- which probably should have been the first post. :)FreeBSD is not only a secure, reliable, high performance operating system, it is one of the best documented open source projects I've ever encountered. From the handbook to the

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-53052016732468173162007-08-19T22:19:00.000-04:002007-10-21T18:28:04.069-04:00

There was an article linked in the press section of the FreeBSD site that mentioned something pretty cool. It in turn linked to another article with lots of details. More details than suit me frankly. :p But, darned useful nonetheless.If you have to switch back and forth between W1ndows and Unix often, as do I, you may sometimes reach for a key that doesn't work as you expect it to (or at all)

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-39561447015434639882007-08-03T23:50:00.000-04:002007-08-20T00:02:21.384-04:00

I've written before about what I think is a good way to layout your partitions. Now I want to show a bad way! This is from an actual, FreeBSD, dedicated server that someone I know rented. (The provider shall go unnamed ... to protect the guilty.) Let's look:$ df -h -t ufsFilesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on/dev/ad0s1a 6.6G 79M 6.0G 1% //dev/ad0s1e 965M

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-14598361753127853032007-06-26T20:51:00.000-04:002007-06-29T01:57:11.157-04:00

Below I've got a simple script that will check your disk utilization every time it's run and then alert you if it exceeds a certain level. It could be run as often as you like from cron. This script is not pretty but it's effective. It should probably be modified for your particular situation before you use it.Although it's pretty simple, some parts of it may be mysterious if you're not

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-52661607536306761932007-06-06T01:08:00.000-04:002007-06-26T00:14:50.814-04:00

In a previous post, I talked about my typical disk layout. I don't do anything radical. From the standard, auto-defaults I eliminate the "/tmp" partition, linking it back to "/var/tmp", and then tweak the sizes of the partitions, based on factors like the machine's future role and total space available. To be clear, I'm just talking about the file system partitions here, not the swap partition(

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-20666882127967525422007-04-06T01:35:00.000-04:002007-11-22T23:55:57.072-05:00

In a previous post, I discussed how to set the environment variable PACKAGESITE such that your various package tools would fetch the more recent packages instead of the release packages.* We specified a full URL there, so you could change the ftp server to one closer to you as well in the same variable.If you're changing the server, say from 'ftp.freebsd.org' to 'ftp2.freebsd.org', the question

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-40022024739506494612007-03-13T00:34:00.000-04:002007-11-22T23:53:05.498-05:00

This is a quick tip for saving some compile time and using binary packages instead, where possible.* This assumes that you've updated your ports tree (using cvsup or portsnap) from what it was at installation or the latest upgrade/release. One might choose to not update the ports tree and to just leave your ports tree as it was at installation (or at the last release your system has achieved).

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-922137261297366842007-03-02T00:16:00.000-05:002007-05-29T00:28:20.187-04:00

Help to crack keys (for money!). Found in ports at "misc/dnetc", this program will run at low priority and, if your machine happens to be the one to find the key first, you (or your team) can win $10,000. Not as easy as it sounds, of course. Patience required. :) In the meanwhile, though, your processing power will be making a positive impression for FreeBSD. See here:

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-12274263889163072952007-02-26T23:46:00.000-05:002007-02-27T01:29:47.368-05:00

If you're like me you may have started shell scripting very simply, maybe just to collect a number of other unwieldy commands into one executable file to call with just one short command (the name of the script). Over time (hopefully!), you will have discovered many of the other useful features of shells, like variables, redirections, and conditional expressions. As one's scripts become more

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-70688653281234391332007-02-24T15:38:00.000-05:002007-10-21T18:28:04.070-04:00

This is a quick tip. It's been around for a while and I'm not even sure where I first saw it. But, if you have a mouse with a roller wheel, you can add this one line option to your X configuration file to enable it. You'll then be able to use it to scroll up and down in your web browser, terminal windows, pretty much any program that has an "up" and "down."I'm using xorg on my systems now, but

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-38709297505233250682007-01-31T22:56:00.000-05:002008-11-13T15:52:53.880-05:00

I've got a quick tip regarding how you partition your FreeBSD slice when you are installing. I'm not going to address the D0S partitions (or disk slices as they're usually called in FreeBSD), but the FreeBSD partitions that will be put within the slice (or slices) that you install FreeBSD into. This is covered in the Handbook in the section "2.6.5 Creating Partitions Using Disklabel" found here (

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-15212405685437634502007-01-04T00:06:00.000-05:002007-02-07T15:08:04.579-05:00

munk over at freebsd.munk.me.uk writes this in his recent post "Portupgrade fails to upgrade dependencies": An example is when I just went to run the weekly 'portupgrade -arR' and whilst upgrading p5-PathTools-3.21, portupgrade found that another port - p5-Scalar-List-Utils-1.18 - also needed upgrading. Unfortunately the upgrade of that port failed with the following error:===> Checking if lang/

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-39754386005083569002006-12-22T16:44:00.000-05:002007-06-26T00:15:57.806-04:00

If you're planning to do a source based upgrade of FreeBSD after the next release, here's an idea: beat the rush and cvsup to the new release branch before the release date. If you look at the 6.2 release schedule here, you'll see that the new branch for this release was created on November the 15th. It has a cvs tag of 'RELENG_6_2'. This will be the same tag that you might use later to keep up

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-35032359092453557762006-11-05T22:48:00.000-05:002007-02-27T01:31:53.578-05:00

This article will expand on my previous post, Useful shell aliases. All of the below was done with the bash shell on a FreeBSD system, but ought to be largely adaptable to other shells and systems.One of the aliases I defined in the previous article was this one:alias psa='ps auwx'which shows the entire process table with my preferred options. But, often you're just looking for one or a few

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-1160628604701488272006-10-11T23:29:00.000-04:002006-11-06T00:36:18.654-05:00

In a shell, an alias is a user defined command that will execute some other predefined, and usually longer, command. It's a tremendously useful command line feature that allows you take the longer commands that you use often and make them very short. I also use aliases to, in effect, redefine basic commands to always use the options that I prefer. For example, two commands I often use in

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-1160108290122129762006-10-05T23:54:00.000-04:002007-06-26T00:39:03.848-04:00

You know, some of us will like to reminisce about the old days of getting Java on FreeBSD. You could't just type "make install" because a manual download was required. You had to go to a Sun website, create an account, dig around for the right SCSL source files, then check off on some license agreement, then go to another site for the FreeBSD patches, check off on something else. After all of

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-1159508695191802342006-09-29T01:03:00.000-04:002006-10-22T17:25:10.121-04:00

These days it's really pretty easy to just run ntpd and have your system clock almost perfectly accurate all the time. But, you may prefer not to run ntpd. You may have security concerns with it or resource concerns or network problems. Or, maybe you're just running a work station and you don't want to waste a time server's resources. Here is an interesting little trick to take the major

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-1158475097741635712006-09-17T01:52:00.000-04:002006-10-22T17:25:10.064-04:00

If you've got a home network or are running any sort of network server that you want open to the internet, then the bare bones home firewall won't work for you. You need something a little fancier.Before we get to the script and rules there are a couple of requirements. I am using ppp to connect to the internet and that is an important part of this puzzle because I am using ppp's own NAT (

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-1157173934812827612006-09-01T23:47:00.000-04:002006-12-11T00:25:56.849-05:00

Here we're going to look at a simple firewall using FreeBSD's own 'ipfw'. This is a bare bones, protect-this-machine-only firewall and will work fine if you have no network behind your FreeBSD machine and no special needs:#!/bin/sh/sbin/ipfw add 00100 allow ip from any to any via lo0/sbin/ipfw add 00200 deny ip from any to 127.0.0.0/8/sbin/ipfw add 00300 deny ip from 127.0.0.0/8 to any/sbin/ipfw

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-1156655272504305732006-08-27T01:06:00.000-04:002006-10-22T17:25:09.879-04:00

This short article is mainly to support the article "Top ten rules for using ports system," which contains some terminology that may be confusing to someone who isn't already familiar with the FreeBSD ports system.What's a port? In FreeBSD, a port usually refers to third party software that may be installed via the ports system.What's the ports tree? It's a large directory tree usually

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33357804.post-1156569148232094792006-08-25T21:55:00.000-04:002007-12-28T22:56:56.344-05:00

(This article assumes a basic knowledge of the FreeBSD ports system. You may want to read this article first if you're unfamiliar with the ports system.)10. Decide up front whether you really need or want to update your ports tree every day. Or every week. Or every month. Unless you're learning/playing/experimenting I recommend that you do not schedule updates to the ports tree, but only update

kacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16003251245625256598noreply@blogger.com4