I promised last night that I'd make an attempt to record my experiences as I rebuild my home FreeBSD server.
Well, I've just run through the typical installation procedure for creating a new system using the provided CDs, and while I
portsnap fetch/extract/update the ports collection I figured I'd take a few moments to make a quick inventory of what I intend to do:
First and foremost - this rig has GOT to be able to serve out the existing data on my 1 TB RAID 5 array.... otherwise I'd be without any backups of my other systems, would have to rebuild my media collection, and, most annoyingly, I'd have to rewrite all my conf files. I use the nfs and smb protocols concurrently for file serving.
NTP client/server - this is just a fun thing to have.
Dynamic DHCP/DNS - I'll probably revisit this in more detail as I get to it; suffice it to say, this is a cool trick that lets you do things like DHCP reservations for specific hosts based upon MAC, as well as automatic resolution of internal boxes based upon their canonical names.
FreeRADIUS EAP-TLS security for my WiFi network - this is much less of a concern now that I live in the great white North (and not in my old apartment block), but it's still another worthwhile thing to have. As an added bonus for using this, you get to see who's trying to connect to your network and when. If I had any doubts about its effectiveness before they've been all but squashed now... very cool.
Apache + mod_dav + SSL + Subversion - The web server is really just here to house the DAV functionality (which I use for Mozilla Sunbird), the Subversion repos that I sometimes play with, and for an easy way to access files remotely from outside my network (e.g. xbel.xml FireFox
bookmarks).
...Anyway - that's a good place to start. Back with more later!
