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Mad love for FreeBSD

But NOT mad love for compile times. I mean, this is rediculous.It’s been a while since I’ve had to tinker with my server, but with that old quantom fireball powering the OS I know it’s only a matter of time before it dies out on me. So I want to throw something relatively newer in there, and it’s what i’m currently doing. But the time its taking ports to compile and install things is absurd.

KDE I can understand, that’s quite a bit of stuff. But why should it take a half hour to install PHPmyAdmin? I’ll admit it’s a hefty PHP program, but it’s still a PHP program. The sucker shouldn’t need any compilation at all, so why in the world does it go though all this?

That being said, FreeBSD 7 is nice so far. I got apache with php and mysql (BAMP stack if you will) as well as my SSH, FTP, and general server configs. All that’s really left is Samba and the other programming bits I need to install. Like Ruby on Rails and Python for web (gotta be ready to develop anything you know).I may decide to open a VPN tunnel, which would be super badass, but we’ll see.

For anyone interested in setting up a FreeBSD server, it’s not that hard. UFS is rock solid as far as everything I’ve experienced and the server itself has been termendously stable throughout everything, recovering from any kind of power outage or anything else that I could have thrown at it. The entire process is essentically changing directories a million times, running “make config ; make install clean” a million times, and doing a little configuration.

I’d highly recommend picking up this book:

It goes through pretty much everything, as well as a few interesting little fixes as far as “It’s a good idea to do _____, so we’re going to take care of it right now”. There’s a few snags I’ve found going through this book (like for some reason I had PERL installed, but Apache said I didn’t, so I had to deinstall PERL before installing it again), which isn’t mentioned in the book. There’s also a few other things you may want to look into, such as enabling Linux binary compatability (because you never know when you’re going to want to add something in from the Linux family). But most server stuff you’ll be able to do easily with this book, such as LDAP, BIND, DHCP, SMB, Apache, CUPS, SMTP, IMAP, POP, MySQL, AUTHLIB, and others.

Some other maintenance stuff is shown in here, but you’ll want to be a little familiar with the workings of the FreeBSD system just in case you encounter any areas (like you’ll at least want some command line familiarity, know what the Ports System is, know about UFS, what makes BSD different from Linux, stuff like that).

Like I said, it’s all pretty easy to follow, instructions are good and the amount of work on your part is relatively low. But the compile times make this a weekend project in itself. Yay for me.

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