The FreeBSD Diary

In the past two weeks, I have set up FreeBSD three times, on two different boxes, but three different disks. One drive I have put aside for future use. In the short term, I have a workstation to create and a gateway to set up. I have just obtained a DSL connection, and a gateway/firewall is required for that. For a while, I will have both DSL and cable. Hopefully some interesting reading will come from that play time....

On a side note, I've been anticipating this moment for a few weeks. And it has arrived. This article is the 500th to be added to the database.

Now before you anal rententives rush off to count, not all articles are still on the website. Some have been removed as they are no longer relevant. Actually, the article count is 492, but, nonetheless, this article has id 500

These are the things I add to almost every new box I create:

bash

my favorite shell (shells/bash2)

cvsup

cvsup is used to upgrade your ports and/or your source tree.

dnetc

I put dnetc on all boxes to use up the spare CPU cycles. (misc/dnetc)

joe

I was put onto joe when I became disillusioned with ee. I only use vi if I have to. What I like about joe is the ability to have multiple files open and copy/paste/move from one file to another. (editors/joe and chinese/joe).

logcheck

logcheck is a nice little tool for looking for odd things in your logs. It goes on every one of my boxes. (security/logcheck; yes, I am the maintainer for this port).

screen

screen is a great tool! If you access remote boxes and want to leave things running, then this is the tool for you! (misc/screen)

sudo

sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser or another user, as specified in the sudoers file. (security/sudo)

xtail

xtail is like tail, but it works on multiple files at the same time. Very useful, especially when you do something like this:

xtail /var/log /www/log

It can be useful to see the log message from all around the system when trying to diagnose a problem. (misc/xtail)

See also System tools - toys I have found.

I also modify this entry in /etc/mail/aliases and then run newaliases:

# root: me@my.domain

to be like this

root: dan@example.org

That change will ensure that any and all mail for root will be automagically forwarded to you at that address. This is especially useful if the box is remote and you don't normally log onto it. Similary, if you normally get your mail from that box, you can just as easily omit the @example.org and have root's mail redirected to your personal account.

See also the meta port article which shows you how to install all of this with one port.