Getting The Server Available

Nice to have a server. Better would be able to connect it to the network.

My aging UPS has been replaced with a APC Back-UPS. Nothing special to making the package.

Moving from Linux one needs to pay special attention to where the config files are located.

I'm a big fan of fwbuilder. It does all I need it to do. One gotcha with FreeBSD is you need to add kldload ipl to your /boot/loader.conf file. It also seems to be sensitive to the Directions in the policy. Having the direction set to both generates the error" warning: Changing rule direction due to self reference" Also make sure the firewall can send packets out. :)

-JJ

Okay back *BSD

Since 9.1 was out I decided to give it a go.

I installed PC-BSD. I like the fact that it lays out my hard disks and gets me going with a desktop. Downside, I was not able to get my head wrapped around AppCafe, PBI and how they work with ports and packages.

PC-BSD has an option where it will setup a FreeBSD server. Free advice: when they say "installs a basic, vanilla installation of FreeBSD" they mean just that. Which for me works perfect. The fact that it will set up a ZFS drive is a bonus. Due to a server breach and the ongoing investigation there are no packages available from the FreeBSD servers. Building from ports really is not *ALL* that bad. Especially Xfce.

-JJ

UPS Failed Me

Ditches Smoking gun!

My UPS had been giving me a battery warning for several months. It quit warning me. So did my computers. I came into a dark, silent and cold room.

UPS was bypassed and everything booted. Slackware started to give me weird errors and the final straw was a loss of several 100 emails. I went through all the recovery processes, and found I lost my work Virtual Machine. Several profanities were expelled. My backup is a couple of months old. I was able to get my data off the VM. I lost a couple of weeks worth of emails. The several hundred missing were found, just not by my mail client.

I don't recommend is ignoring that little "Replace Battery" LED.

-JJ

The 720, Back to Slackware

Are we getting dizzy?

Ran into some dependency problems with CentOS. Back to Slackware.

Update 11/01/2012: It took, running Slackware.&#59;D

-JJ

On to CentOS

Slackware blew chunks due to a mis-configuration on my part. I was not able to get Apache configured to run phpmyadmin. Not sure where I missed my step. I took another run at FreeBSD, got it going and it blew chunks during an update. Wound up in an upgrade loop.

For whatever reason FreeBSD will go through all the motions of the installation and not boot. I looks like it never writes to the drive. I also found that the SCSI drive does not survive a reboot.

I went back Slackware 14 and found that it was not reading the order of my drives correctly. Given that I was installing to an encrypted partition, this was critical.

And I'm running out of time on this.

I've been wanting to get back to Red Hat so I installed CentOS 6.3.

...and now to clean up a couple of gigs of data.

-JJ