First things first

nospam@example.com (Matt) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:25:36 -0700

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!

Long time between posts...

nospam@example.com (Matt) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:39:02 -0700

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.

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H E X I D . N E T - FreeBSD

First things first

Long time between posts...