Slashdot Mirror

What kind of tabs do you have open? 2GIGS?! 9 Tabs for me, and I'm at 285 megs:

This page
This one
This one
Dealnews
This one
This one
And, a couple of intranet pages.

http://www.freebsddiary.org/portupgrade.php

Not really that hard. Just like the first time you figured out how to upgrade with apt you probably did it because you googled or someone told you how, you should have googled 'freebsd port upgrade' as the first link goes right to a page that tells you how to do it with the least pain and suffering.

The system also has mergemaster for dealing with changes associated with OS upgrades like /etc updates and the like.

portupgrade does the same thing for ports, as well as making sure you upgrade all the dependencies and the like so everything works when done.

You can, of course, just like with apt, use the binary packages instead of recompiling everything.

And most of us DON'T upgrade apache, mysql or php often. In a production environment you upgrade when you have a reason to, not because there is a new version.

FreeBSD isn't hard to use, its just different, if you don't put any effort into learning the differences and just assume everything should work like it did with a Linux distro, then you are the one who failed, not the OS. If you want it to act just like Linux then why are you trying FreeBSD?

We, Slashdot readers/writers, are the future of freedom - we need to put our coding where our values lie. If we can make it easy to use, the general public can enjoy protection from "democratic" bodies.

If it is, it's a good thing to have, though all that "commercial firm pitching a free version of their product into baseline kernel" thing sounds a bit dodgy.

There are a number of reasons for this. In the beginning, Linux has better support for low end hardware (e.g.: 386's). FreeBSD was geared only towards the server market at that time. For example, FreeBSD only supported SCSI drives for a while while Linux supported IDE drives.

Another factor was that Linux development was happening in public, through Usenet, while FreeBSD development was happening on private mailing lists. This was before the web had really taken off, and Usenet was quite popular.

In addition, the USL lawsuit against BSDI and the Regeants of the University of California was in full swing when Linux was starting to gain momentum. Lots of folks were afraid that if the lawsuit went USL's way, that it would be very bad news for the BSD variants.

There is a paper that expands on some of these details here: http://www.freebsddiary.org/linux.php. I didn't write it, but it is an interesting read.

There's another guy collecting suggestions too - I saw it someone's .sig - slashdotemail@gmail.com I think. I have no idea what he's going to do with them but I sent him a few and he thanked me for the list. I think I suggested 'Smartdot'.

I think the Darwin thing is coming on and making advancements. I had a skim of an O'Reilly book 'OSX for Unix Geeks' and it had a chapter on getting X up and running... using Fink(?) which I think maybe be similar to Gentoo emerge (back on topic!). Looks like they might have KDE working as well.

As for the *BSDs Free, Open, Net etc. if you liked DOS then you should get on just fine. It can take a while to get to know the *nix alernatives to DOS commands and where things are kept but I found it soon becomes comfortable. And the best thing is that you're soon able to weild the power and then you don't want to go back! I don't know if this works for you - but I've found keeping a notebook can be really handy for esoteric command switches, useful sequences of piped commands, temporary changes I'm not sure about etc. Just a thought - it's saved me a lot of time.

If you do decide to give FreeBSD a whirl I recommend going through the handbook as it covers a lot of Unix basics as well. FreeBSDDiary is well worth a look too. If it wasn't for a few big commercial programs I could happily switch from XP to FreeBSD and KDE. These days it's that good.

No beer, no foul? Think yourself lucky emerge tried to hump my leg :(

1. Get xplanet!
2. Setup instructions (despite BSD-related site, pretty useful even on win32!)
3. ???
4. NICE DESKTOP!

Daemon News

FreeBSD Diary

BSDvault

FreeBSDAddicts

FreeBSD Tips

Hope that helps.

The complaint of many people who don't want to switch to BSD from Linux is that there aren't binary packages available and that they don't want to compile everything in ports. This article demonstrates that, indeed, using the ports collection, it is possible to check out and install binary packages using the pkg-* utilities.

There are tons of really neat things about FreeBSD; I won't list them here because they're probably quite off topic. But for anybody interested in learning more; feel free to contact me and/or check out the FreeBSD handbook and the FreeBSD diary.

Don't you mean FretBSD?

First start with the tutorial here

There is only one change needed: after getting sendmail built and installed, and my sendmail.cf set up from the bsd-4.4 default cm file with M4, local delivery wouldn't work, and gave this error:

stat=Deferred: local mailer (/usr/libexec/mail.local) exited with EX_TEMPFAIL

You fix this problem with:

chown root /usr/libexec/mail.local
chmod u+s /usr/libexec/mail.local

There's a really good article on the FreeBSD Diary about install it.

Just so you know, you dont' have to rebuilt the entire source tree to fix this particular problem. You can do the following commands just to update sendmail (after updating the sources):

• cd /usr/src/lib/libsm
• make
• cd /usr/src/lib/libsmutil
• make
• cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail
• make
• make -f /etc/mail/Makefile stop
• make install
• make -f /etc/mail/Makefile start

The go back to those three directories and do a make clean to clean up all the files.

There's a chapter in the FreeBSD Handbook about this.

I was having similar problems with FreeBSD, regarding newer versions of ports, and portupgrade helps a lot in making this easy to handle. It's made managing things just so much easier. It's incredible, really.

First of all, great work. FreeBSD (and the others) will benefit greatly from this!

The only problem I have is that you're only searching "major FreeBSD search engines." Now, I know it's a beta, but there is quite a lot of other sites that, while not being a search engine, have contributed to the advancement of FreeBSD. Examples: Daemonnews's Search Page FreeBSDDiary, BSDToday, and of course Slashdot!. You might also think about adding newgroups, discussions, etc. Don't forget that the other BSD sites can also provide information that covers FreeBSD. Don't think they're "not worthy."

Keep up the good work!

Reasons to try: ports system, easy way to upgrade every part of the core system (make world), everything being in the One True Location (/usr/local, of course...let the flames begin! :-). For some reason I find getting the login prompt back when I've typed in the wrong password *much* faster in FreeBSD compared to Linux. Weird.

Just about all your fave. programs should be around in ports, so I don't think you'll miss too much. Oh, one weird thing I found: can't do...oh crap...what's the term for s00per-high resolution in text...framebuffer...arghh! Stupid head...anyway, can't do in in FreeBSD w/my graphic (don't ask me which one; as you can see, I'm no graphics geek), but it works just fine in Linux. I checked around at the time, and there was talk of source code hacks you could do to enable it, but I couldn't get it to work.

Give it a try; one more OS shouldn't scare you at this point...:-) Oh, and check out www.freebsddiary.org for tips.

I posted this in some other discussion the other day but.........

Why not just use IPSec? My co worker and I have been trying to figure out how to securely deploy 802.11b around the office and I came up with the idea of using IPSec. I'm the lone Macintosh island in a sea of Windows desktops and laptops at the office so I'm waiting for next week(when I get my copy of Jaguar and hence IPSec support) to really get to hack on this but the current plan is use an IPSec VPN(and throw WEP out the f'ing window) to secure the line of communication. I will set up either an OpenBSD, FreeBSD or Linux(preference in that order, yeah I know I've got a BSD partiality) firewall between the AP and the wired LAN and only allow traffic over the IPSec VPN. From my initial research I found some docs on doing wired IPSec communication but in theory that should apply to the wireless as well.

here's some useful links. I hope to be able to adapt some of the information to suit using OS X.
OpenBSD IPSec
FreeBSD IPSec
Windows 2000 to FreeBSD
DaemonNews Article
FreebsdDiary Article

After pondering the "secureness" of using IPSec in lieu of WEP I've come up with one weakness and one side affect since clients get DHCP addresses in the clear and any communication to the wired LAN is encrypted. Say jane sales chick shows up with her personal laptop and tries to use the wireless network in the office she gets a IP address but can't get into the wired net because she can't establish a IPSec VPN. Joe cust service has his laptop in the office too. he get an IP but gets blocked by the IPSec Firewall. as a side affect there is nothing stopping Joe and Jane from swapping music, warez or pr0n. The only weakness I can think of is that Johnny hacker could try to exploit one of the wireless clients(if there are any) and use that as a jumping off point to the LAN or to his/her credentials. Another thing I've given some thought to is depending on the overhead of IPSec you could take the onion skin approach making the side effect a little more difficult to non tech type(we all know how secure WEP is) by also using 64 or 128 bit wep in addition to IPSec.

Since this is all theory until next week when I get Jaguar, feel free to point out any stupid lines off thought, inaccuracies, etc. I've got going on here. If I'm successful I'll probably document it and post on the Web.

IPSec is really the big thing that got me excited about 10.2(and Windows network browsing and Quartz Extreme and CUPS and PAM blah blah.) My co worker and I were trying to figure out how to securely deploy 802.11b. I'm waiting for next week to really get to hack on this but the current plan is use an IPSec VPN(and throw WEP out the f'ing window) to secure the line of communication. I will set up either an OpenBSD, FreeBSD or Linux(preference in that order, yeah I know I've got a BSD partiality) firewall and only allow traffic over the IPSec VPN. From my inital research I found some docs on doing hardwired IPSec communication but in theory that should apply to the wireless as well.

here's some useful links. I hope to be able to adapt some of the information to suit using OS X.
OpenBSD IPSec
FreeBSD IPSec
Windows 2000 to FreeBSD
DaemonNews Article
FreebsdDiary Article

After pondering the "secureness" of using IPSec in lieu of WEP I've come up with one weakness and one side affect since clients get DHCP addresses in the clear and any communication to the wired LAN is encrypted. Say jane sales chick shows up with her personal laptop and tries to use the wireless network in the office she gets a IP address but can get into the wired net because she can't esablish a IPSec VPN. Joe cust service has his laptop in the office too. he get an IP but gets blocked by the IPSec Firewall. as a side affect there is nothing stopping Joe and Jane from swapping music, warez or pr0n. The only weakness I can think of is that Johnny hacker could try to exploit one of the wireless clients(if there are any) and use that as a jumping off point to the LAN or to his credentials. Another thing I've given some thought to is depending on the overhead of IPSec you could take the onion skin approach making the side effect a little more difficult to non tech type(we all know how secure WEP is) by also using 64 or 128 bit wep in addition to IPSec.

Since this is all theory until next week when I get Jaguar. Feel free to point out any stupid lines off thought I've got going on here. If I'm successful I'll probably document it and post on the Web.
--

Also be sure to checkout the FreeBSD Diary [ http://freebsddiary.org/ ] for some great tutorials.

They range from SSL protecting your services [ http://freebsddiary.org/stunnel.php ] to how to restart a service [ http://freebsddiary.org/hup.php ] for the real newbie.

Also be sure to checkout the FreeBSD Diary [ http://freebsddiary.org/ ] for some great tutorials.

They range from SSL protecting your services [ http://freebsddiary.org/stunnel.php ] to how to restart a service [ http://freebsddiary.org/hup.php ] for the real newbie.

Also be sure to checkout the FreeBSD Diary [ http://freebsddiary.org/ ] for some great tutorials.

They range from SSL protecting your services [ http://freebsddiary.org/stunnel.php ] to how to restart a service [ http://freebsddiary.org/hup.php ] for the real newbie.

I'm thinking about an encrypted filesystem -- I looked briefly for one for Linux/FreeBSD but wasn't satisfied.

There is some CPU overhead, but otherwise the mechanism is well-tested, stable, and secure.

This is a decent explanation:
http://www.freebsddiary.org/current.php
Check out
http://www.freebsddiary.org/makeworld-script.php
for a nice makefile that pretty much does everything you need to upgrade too.

This is a decent explanation:
http://www.freebsddiary.org/current.php
Check out
http://www.freebsddiary.org/makeworld-script.php
for a nice makefile that pretty much does everything you need to upgrade too.

I'm assuming that there wouldn't be any services running during the install/upgrade, and no listening ports, so my guess is that I'd be relatively safe during the process, but I want to be sure.

I have relied on cvsup; make world for so long I'm not too sure what goes on with a fresh install. I can only guess that you would be safe using an ftp upgrade/install, I'm not sure exactly what is on the bootdisk. Sorry.

If you have a freebsd machine inside of the firewall you can use that to grab the latest sources and run make buildworld. Some pointers can be found here. That would allow highest security and the least downtime.

Check out http://www.freebsddiary.org/makeworld-script.html

Its usually a good idea to rebuild the kernel after an upgrade too...and a merge of config files. There's a great script on FreeBSDDiary.org that I use to simplify the build process.

1. Download an iso for 4.2. Burn and install normally. Read the faq and handbook at www.freebsd.org for instructions.
2. Now, upgrade that 4.2 using cvsup . If you installed supplemental documentation, you can do a one-liner. Just type in something like sed -e 's/CHANGE_THIS/cvsup4/g' /usr/share/examples/cvsup/stable-supfile > /tmp/stable-supfile && cvsup /tmp/stable-supfile . Substitute in cvsup[1-6] for that cvsup4 reference, since we all don't need to hit cvsup4. Or, read the darn file and learn what cvsup does, and then select an appropriate mirror. You get the idea. The cvsup mirrors are freebsd.org all have it.
3. This will give you the incremental changes between 4.2 and 4.3. Now, build it with something like cd /usr/src/ && make world . Be sure to run mergemaster, etc. and rebuild any user profiles. Now sure what that means? If this is your first build world, Read the handbook on building your world.. It's actually easier than a linux kernel build.
4. Stuck? Read the www.freebsdiary.org, which details one (once novice, now fairly proficient) bsd user's experience with install, use and fun over the years.

I've always had a bitch of a time finding the solutions I need under linux, probally because there are 90 million different ways to do things. That could be good or bad, depending on your viewpoint.

FreeBSD has had USB support since 3.3 iirc. Go check LINT, search FreeBSD.org, look at FreeBSD Diary and the FreeBSD Handbook for further information about setting up your FreeBSD box. I'm sure you'll see just how solid it is.

If that's how you feel about Linux, why not go over to FreeBSD and revel in its non-mainstream glory?

Disclaimer: This is a not a frothing at the mouth defend-my-OS-to-the-death post. This is just my observation.

Actually, I find that the BSD community as a whole is pretty accepting of folks who are new to this whole thing. The FreeBSD Diary is quite possibly the best newbie resource for any OS out there. Back when I was using RedHat Linux, I was often wishing for a site exactly like that.

In addition to that, the mailing list archives for all of the *BSDs are excellent. I've gotten a lot more help out of them than I got from RedHat's documentation. The only thing I don't like about the mailing list archives is that the search function for FreeBSD's archive is about as intelligent as a monkey with braindamage. But after two or three tries, I find usually find exactly what I'm looking for.

And I won't continue to go on about the wonders of the ports system (packages under NetBSD). But suffice it to say, they are clean, simple, and just plain wonderful. (I do have to give credit where credit is due though and mention that Debian's system is pretty awesome too.)

There's not as much information out there about BSD as there is about Linux, but the documentation/assistance that is there I've found to be truly excellent.

There is a great site called The FreeBSD Diary that is exactly what this is about. The author of this site basically has numerous tutorials for all sorts of areas relating to the setup and maintanence of FreeBSD. Very helpful indeed.

If big business endorses it, it will succeed.

[Debian's] package management system is simply amazing. No other Linux distribution (well, except the ones based on Debian ;-) come even close. Heck, no other OS has anything like it, period!

This statement is put into doubt by the ignorance you show below about BSDs.

Imagine a system, similar to FreeBSD's ports, that:

1. Works with binaries. You can download and install binaries instead of having to wait for it to compile.

Why, FreeBSD's pkg_add does this. Downloads dependencies, too.

You can also request to get source though, and compile it (just like in FreeBSD).

Not just like FreeBSD. The Debian support for auto-managing dependencies does not extend to source. If you don't have the packages required to build the source, it will simply fail.

2. Figures out dependencies auto-magically and downloads all the required libraries.

FreeBSD already does this.

3. *Handles upgrades*. "apt-get upgrade" will upgrade the packages you have installed.

Take a look here. Essentially, pkg_version -cv' is the FreeBSD equivalent to apt-get upgrade.

The point is simple-- the philosphies behind apt and the ports trees are different, and there are many intricacies behind each. To make a fair comparison one needs to know each in depth.

The ports tree's emphasis is on building from source, and it simply whoops apt/dpkg's ass at this. In my particular environment, I'm finding that this is a feature I could use-- I build a few Debian packages by hand frequently to enable features, which I see could more easily done in FreeBSD.

I've yet to try FreeBSD, but I suspect Debian's automatic configuration of packages is superior, and will get even better as more and more packages are made to use debconf. But once your system is configured appropriately, this is no longer an issue.

Also, I think FreeBSDs development model (e.g. the base OS/ports split) lends itself to more frequent, high quality stable releases for the basic system, and fairly up to date additional packages. You can't get this combination in Debian-- you either run stable, where you get a well-tested system with out of date software, or unstable, where you are on the bleeding edge. (I run both versions in two different machines).

In short, FreeBSD, from what I've researched, is a very good system, which I suspect I will much prefer to Debian (and this comes from a 2.5 year Debian user).

3.5-RELEASE is an updated version under the 3.0 branch, whereas 4.0-RELEASE is the first official (almost stable) release under the 4.0 branch. 4.0-RELEASE wasn't meant to be a mainstream release (I think 4.1 would be).

3.5 was released for people who were not quite ready to jump onto the 4.0 branch due to changes in some of structure and syscalls.

You can think of -RELEASE as a completed product, but it can have bugs and possibly some exploits that were not caught during final testing of the code before the official release.

-STABLE usually contains patched code that fixes problems found after -RELEASE was released. Many people keep up with -STABLE to make sure that the latest programs compile and that there isn't quite as much risk when it comes to bugs and what-not.

-CURRENT is usually considered the current code while that version is in development. This allows developers and contributors to check out the code and make changes before -RELEASE goes live. I could be wrong on this portion of it since I haven't been caught up with -CURRENT.

4.0-RELEASE is a full version (not pre-release or upgrade-only but was not aimed to be the mainstream release) and 4.0-STABLE is now available on the CVS servers. FreeBSD Diary [www.freebsddiary.org] has an article on upgrading from 4.0-RELEASE to 4.0-STABLE. I have used their upgrade process on three different machines with a lot of success.

Some people really, really like FreeBSD installation, some don't. Some do stupid things (like using the "Custom" or "Expert" install options without being experienced users) and end up hating it because it delivered the bullet to the place where you aimed the gun at: Mr. Foot.

Pros: the context-sensitive help is mostly ok; partitioning has an Auto option that makes reasonably-sized partition sizes; Standard installation will step you through all installation steps in the correct order (you will still get all the options available through a Custom install, btw); there are reasonable "distribution sets" that auto-select what should be installed depending on what's your intended use.

Cons: the interface has it's quirks, a result of the lousy UI library with which it was written half a decade ago; there is no set of "packages" to be auto-installed, which means you don't get many of the GNU goodies Linux users come to expect; it's post-install management is very poor; it won't configure packages; it does have a couple of bugs that cause crashes under certain rare situations; editing and compiling a new kernel are still required for some goodies, though things will mostly work.

Anyway, post-installation configuration help can be found on the handbook or the FreeBSD Diary. They are very useful resources, so do search them when you have problems or want to know how to do something.

Also, read the message that appears when you first log. It provides some useful references for the beginner. Finally, BSD man pages are good and useful. man and apropos are your friends.

How can you substantiate this? The BSD community is by far the most active by scale.

when ./ posts a .00000000001 upgrade to the freaking linux kernel you sheep come out droves.

Amen to that brother! Slashdot is VERY Linux-centric. Just look at the way the ignorant zealots flocked to the Slackware story over this. Stigma is all that matters rather than maturity and performance. Anything that is remotely BSD is crucified on slashdot plus most BSD users avoid slashdot because of its one-sidedness. if you want the current BSD news check out OpenBSD Journal, Daily Daemon News, FreeBSD'zine, FreeBSD Diary, FreeBSD Rocks and OpenBSD Explained

At first much of the BSDI codebase will remain proprietary. It will only be freed as it is integrated with FreeBSD. There are some parts of the codebase that cannot be freed because the code was written under a contract that does not permit disclosure.

According the Karels the only thing that will remain proprietary is the kernel...for now. And a lot of the things they can't just put under a BSDL comes from things under NDA's.

Have you tried the FreeBSD Diary?

Outside of Linux circles, "IP masquerading" is called NAT (network address translation). This is supported in FreeBSD in the form of natd, and more specific information on setting it up can be found in numerous places.

One place to get more informations, other than mailing list searching, is a great site called The FreeBSD Diary, where there's actually an entire section of the topics devoted to NAT :)

--

Outside of Linux circles, "IP masquerading" is called NAT (network address translation). This is supported in FreeBSD in the form of natd, and more specific information on setting it up can be found in numerous places.

One place to get more informations, other than mailing list searching, is a great site called The FreeBSD Diary, where there's actually an entire section of the topics devoted to NAT :)

--

FreeBSD does not have HOWTOs, we have documentation. :-)

Anyway, I do not know if it would be interesting for you, in particular to try FreeBSD. Some people like it better, some don't. It's a matter of taste.

For help, check out the official website for general information, the handbook for general documentation, the FAQ for frequently asked questions (including some installation problems) and the FreeBSD Diary for the most recommended beginner's site.

BTW, FreeBSD installation is generally known to be easy and painless. It can be done through the net by downloading just two floppy disk images, and there are mirror sites all over the world, and this list of mirror sites is shown to you during the installation. :-)