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Posts in FreeBSD
Printing previous dates with the FreeBSD date utility
In a previous post, I described how to get the date for a day in the past. This method unfortunately doesn't work on FreeBSD hosts, since FreeBSD doesn't come with the GNU date utility. As an alternative to GNU date, you can pass a time value to the date utilities "-v" option to print a date in the past: I think I prefer the GNU date syntax, but this seems to work pretty well.
$ read more →Monitoring FreeBSD installations
I decided to re-partition my x86 laptop hard drive today, which required me to re-install FreeBSD (the disk label changed rather drastically). After I hit "commit" to propogate the changes, I hit "control-alt-F2" and was thrown into virtual terminal #2. This virtual terminal contained the output from the package extractions, and I found it a bit more useful that the progress meter that was updating in virtual terminal #1. I digs me some FreeBSD!
$ read more →Fixing FreeBSD /etc/rc.conf typos
I just finished installing gnome 2.12 this afternoon on my FreeBSD 6.0 desktop, and wanted to reboot the system to test out the gdm_enable line I added to /etc/rc.conf. When I rebooted the box, I was greeted with the following error: Ack -- it looks like I forgot to properly quote the "YES" value of the name=value pair in /etc/rec.conf. I thought to myself, no problem, I will just fire up vi and fix this anomaly: Ack -- now the file system is mounted Read-only and I need to write to it! Not to fear, mount's "-w" option is here: I have done this numerous times with Solaris using "mount -o remount," but this was the first time I needed to do this with FreeBSD…
$ read more →Managing FreeBSD ports
I was reading through this months SysAdmin magazine, and came across Richard Bejtlich's article "Keeping FreeBSD Up to Date." This article was well timed, since I decided to migrate my laptop from Ubuntu Linux to FreeBSD 6.0. One hurdle in moving to any new Operating System is application and system patch management. Since I haven't used FreeBSD since release 4.X, I needed to get up to speed on how FreeBSD handled system and application updates. Richard's article mentions several tools that can be used to keep systems up to date, but one that caught my eye was Colin Pervical's portsnap utility…
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