I've obviously not posted in a long time, so I wanted to make use of an "opportunity" that's popped up with respect to the FreeBSD server I run at home.
It's been several months since the FreeBSD team released their latest production quality version of the operating system: 7.0. I've not been keeping up with upgrades on this box, mostly because I've always seen this machine as being a sort of set-it-and-forget-it appliance. It does a lot of the basics that keep my network happily chugging, but nothing too special.
Recently I decided I wanted to try out making a
GRUB network boot environment and host it on this machine. The idea (although still not implemented) was to make a GRUB PXE that allowed the client to choose from any number of bootable OS images, most notably the excellent
System Rescue CD. This way I wouldn't need to go to the bother of burning discs, and I could more easily work on machines that are without CD drives (such as my shiny new
Eee PC).
The problem was that the GRUB environment that's available through FreeBSD's ports system is only for 32 bit systems (my box runs the AMD64 architecture). So, after tinkering for a bit to try and build GRUB and its dependencies from the source tarballs available from the GNU website, and without much luck, I decided that I might as well look into upgrading the system itself since I was already playing with it.
Short version: I've decided to do a fresh install of FreeBSD 7.0 RELEASE after spending several hours working with the
freebsd-update and portupgrade systems. The major issue I've run into has to do with the replacement of the libpthread library in this version and programs from ports still trying to link against it. It's likely that I've introduced other small b0rks into the system as well, so rather than spending the time to fix the problem I've decided a clean reinstall will do nicely.
Some info:
1 terrabyte RAID 5 array :: holds all of my media, backups, installer packages, and some utilities I've written here and there.
AMD64 dual core processor :: nothing too amazing - it was a budget CPU at the time that I bought it, but it serves its purpose brilliantly.
Functionality includes dynamically-updating DNS/DHCP, FreeRADIUS implementation of EAP-TLS security protocol for locking down my wireless network (check out the
DD-WRT firmware if you want to set this up on a home wifi router...), Subversion access via Apache and a few other odds and ends.
Over the weekend I hope to rebuild the system from the ground-up. I'll admit, however, that it won't be as pain-staking an operation as it was to initially get things running as I've made backups of all the important configuration files.
What I'd like to do in the coming days is make a log of the steps I take to make this all happen, and hopefully record some of the tricks and tweaks I've made over time in the process.
Stay tuned....
