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
]]>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
]]>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
]]>Ran into some dependency problems with CentOS. Back to Slackware.
Update 11/01/2012: It took, running Slackware.
-JJ
]]>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
]]>The install went off without a hitch. One of my problems is I have a Seagate 500GB drive that has the rattles and shakes my whole desk. If I remove it I lose the order of my disks and the system won't boot. I tried rewriting my lilo.conf but was not able to come up with a working combination. However using the hdparm command lets be spin down the drive that has the shakes. I will not post the parameters, this is a very dangerous command and you will need to man the command so you know what you are doing.
I set my desktop to XFCE. I don't need all the fancy of KDE and since this is a server, a smaller hit on resources is best.
Next is setup Apache: Edit http.conf, set IP address; activate needed modules, ssl, cgi; set server name and enable php.
MySQL was turn on and phpmyadmin installed.
PS: Slackware has both perl and PHP install as default. However I need to do some tweaking of php for nagios.
... To be continued.
-JJ
]]>I finally had to give up on the SCSI drive. I was sick of fighting with the hardware.
I could not install any of the BSD's and Slackware failed to start on the reboot. With being in bed I did a lot of thinking and decided I wanted FreeBSD and configured my hardware to meet the needs of the FreeBSD. SCSI hardware removed.
So I manage to kick off the install of FreeBSD and started the installation of /usr/ports/x11/xorg before I went to bed. On one of my bed breaks I got my fonts installed and kicked off /usr/ports/x11/kde4. It failed with a stop error on LDAP. I reconfigure to remove LDAP from, oh crap now I forget which program I selected it in. Oops. I kicked off the KDE4 build and back to bed.
In latest bed break I noticed that the time on the server was off and set up ntpd.
Well, heck. Ran into a dependency problem with KDEPIM, so I removed it. Reran my build and kdeplasma-addons and got the error:
/usr/local/kde4/lib/libakonadi-kde.so.5.0.1: undefined reference to `Akonadi::FavoriteCollectionsModel::collections() const'
After 15 hours and 33 mins I'm throwing in that towel of building from ports. I was also transfering data to my laptop via a USB Thumb drive when I Panac'ed the system. Oops Oh !!!
I wanted to have a pure FreeBSD Server. I also want data security.
I installed PC-BSD 9.0, but I am getting missing library errors when I start konqueror:
Cannot load library /usr/local/lib/kde4/libkhtmlpart.so: (Shared object "libgif.so.5" not found, required by "libkhtml.so.7")
So onto PC-BSD 9.1 RC1... It installed fine, but never survived the reboot. Okay it was worth a shot.
Back to FreeBSD 9.0. I am installing Xfce. I used it on my Slackware server and since this will also be a server it will be fine for all I'm doing.
Xfce would not initialize. This is getting tiring.
OK back to PC-BSD 9.0.
Found a hiccup in PC-BSD. It takes forever to move files on a ext2fs. Give that I have about 2GB of data spread across half a dozen drives with ext and NTFS file systems, this is not going to work.
Well okay, I've been at this for 3 days without what I call a successful BSD installation. Towel tossed on BSD. I think it is an awesome OS but after several tries and not a complete success It is time to move on.
Slack has always worked for me, I'm going back.
]]>I narrowed it down to FreeBSD is not able to create a partition on a SCSI hard disk when it is booted off PATA CD-ROM, or when a PATA CD-ROM connected to the system. If I disconnect the CD-ROM I can write partitions.
I even tried PC-BSD had a little more success. But as of today FreeBSD is a no go. I had to give up on such an awesome OS, but if I can't get it installed, I can't get it installed. I've been without a server for a week it is time to move on.
Back to Slack.
]]>