diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml index 434c8767a3..92720541ad 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml @@ -1,12119 +1,12157 @@ %man; %authors; %bookinfo; ]> Frequently Asked Questions for FreeBSD 2.X, 3.X and 4.X The FreeBSD Documentation Project - $FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml,v 1.167 2001/04/09 00:33:45 dd Exp $ + $FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml,v 1.168 2001/04/10 17:14:48 jim Exp $ 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 The FreeBSD Documentation Project &bookinfo.legalnotice; This is the FAQ for FreeBSD versions 2.X, 3.X, and 4.X. All entries are assumed to be relevant to FreeBSD 2.0.5 and later, unless otherwise noted. Any entries with a <XXX> are under construction. If you are interested in helping with this project, send email to the FreeBSD documentation project mailing list freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org. The latest version of this document is always available from the FreeBSD World Wide Web server. It may also be downloaded as one large HTML file with HTTP or as plain text, postscript, PDF, etc. from the FreeBSD FTP server. You may also want to Search the FAQ. Preface Welcome to the FreeBSD 2.X-4.X FAQ! As is usual with Usenet FAQs, this document aims to cover the most frequently asked questions concerning the FreeBSD operating system (and of course answer them!). Although originally intended to reduce bandwidth and avoid the same old questions being asked over and over again, FAQs have become recognized as valuable information resources. Every effort has been made to make this FAQ as informative as possible; if you have any suggestions as to how it may be improved, please feel free to mail them to the &a.faq;. What is FreeBSD? Briefly, FreeBSD is a UN*X-like operating system for the i386 and Alpha/AXP platforms based on U.C. Berkeley's 4.4BSD-Lite release, with some 4.4BSD-Lite2 enhancements. It is also based indirectly on William Jolitz's port of U.C. Berkeley's Net/2 to the i386, known as 386BSD, though very little of the 386BSD code remains. A fuller description of what FreeBSD is and how it can work for you may be found on the FreeBSD home page. FreeBSD is used by companies, Internet Service Providers, researchers, computer professionals, students and home users all over the world in their work, education and recreation. See some of them in the FreeBSD Gallery. For more detailed information on FreeBSD, please see the FreeBSD Handbook. What are the goals of FreeBSD? The goals of the FreeBSD Project are to provide software that may be used for any purpose and without strings attached. Many of us have a significant investment in the code (and project) and would certainly not mind a little financial compensation now and then, but we're definitely not prepared to insist on it. We believe that our first and foremost mission is to provide code to any and all comers, and for whatever purpose, so that the code gets the widest possible use and provides the widest possible benefit. This is, we believe, one of the most fundamental goals of Free Software and one that we enthusiastically support. That code in our source tree which falls under the GNU General Public License (GPL) or GNU Library General Public License (LGPL) comes with slightly more strings attached, though at least on the side of enforced access rather than the usual opposite. Due to the additional complexities that can evolve in the commercial use of GPL software, we do, however, endeavor to replace such software with submissions under the more relaxed BSD copyright whenever possible. Why is it called FreeBSD? It may be used free of charge, even by commercial users. Full source for the operating system is freely available, and the minimum possible restrictions have been placed upon its use, distribution and incorporation into other work (commercial or non-commercial). Anyone who has an improvement and/or bug fix is free to submit their code and have it added to the source tree (subject to one or two obvious provisos). For those of our readers whose first language is not English, it may be worth pointing out that the word free is being used in two ways here, one meaning at no cost, the other meaning you can do whatever you like. Apart from one or two things you cannot do with the FreeBSD code, for example pretending you wrote it, you really can do whatever you like with it. What is the latest version of FreeBSD? Version 4.2 is the latest STABLE version; it was released in November, 2000. This is also the latest RELEASE version. Briefly explained, -STABLE is aimed at the ISP or other corporate user who wants stability and a low change count over the wizzy new features of the latest -CURRENT snapshot. Releases can come from either branch, but you should only use -CURRENT if you're sure that you're prepared for its increased volatility (relative to -STABLE, that is). Releases are only made every few months. While many people stay more up-to-date with the FreeBSD sources (see the questions on FreeBSD-CURRENT and FreeBSD-STABLE) than that, doing so is more of a commitment, as the sources are a moving target. What is FreeBSD-CURRENT? FreeBSD-CURRENT is the development version of the operating system, which will in due course become 5.0-RELEASE. As such, it is really only of interest to developers working on the system and die-hard hobbyists. See the relevant section in the handbook for details on running -CURRENT. If you are not familiar with the operating system or are not capable of identifying the difference between a real problem and a temporary problem, you should not use FreeBSD-CURRENT. This branch sometimes evolves quite quickly and can be un-buildable for a number of days at a time. People that use FreeBSD-CURRENT are expected to be able to analyze any problems and only report them if they are deemed to be mistakes rather than glitches. Questions such as make world produces some error about groups on the -CURRENT mailing list are sometimes treated with contempt. Every day, snapshot releases are made based on the current state of the -CURRENT and -STABLE branches. Nowadays, distributions of the occasional snapshot are now being made available. The goals behind each snapshot release are: To test the latest version of the installation software. To give people who would like to run -CURRENT or -STABLE but who don't have the time and/or bandwidth to follow it on a day-to-day basis an easy way of bootstrapping it onto their systems. To preserve a fixed reference point for the code in question, just in case we break something really badly later. (Although CVS normally prevents anything horrible like this happening :) To ensure that any new features in need of testing have the greatest possible number of potential testers. No claims are made that any -CURRENT snapshot can be considered production quality for any purpose. If you want to run a stable and fully tested system, you will have to stick to full releases, or use the -STABLE snaphosts. Snapshot releases are directly available from ftp://current.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ for 5.0-CURRENT and releng4.FreeBSD.org for 4-STABLE snapshots. 3-STABLE snapshots are not being produced at the time of this writing (May 2000). Snapshots are generated, on the average, once a day for all actively developed branches. What is the FreeBSD-STABLE concept? Back when FreeBSD 2.0.5 was released, we decided to branch FreeBSD development into two parts. One branch was named -STABLE, with the intention that only well-tested bug fixes and small incremental enhancements would be made to it (for Internet Service Providers and other commercial enterprises for whom sudden shifts or experimental features are quite undesirable). The other branch was -CURRENT, which essentially has been one unbroken line leading towards 5.0-RELEASE (and beyond) since 2.0 was released. If a little ASCII art would help, this is how it looks: 2.0 | | | [2.1-STABLE] *BRANCH* 2.0.5 -> 2.1 -> 2.1.5 -> 2.1.6 -> 2.1.7.1 [2.1-STABLE ends] | (Mar 1997) | | | [2.2-STABLE] *BRANCH* 2.2.1 -> 2.2.2-RELEASE -> 2.2.5 -> 2.2.6 -> 2.2.7 -> 2.2.8 [end] | (Mar 1997) (Oct 97) (Apr 98) (Jul 98) (Dec 98) | | 3.0-SNAPs (started Q1 1997) | | 3.0-RELEASE (Oct 1998) | | [3.0-STABLE] *BRANCH* 3.1-RELEASE (Feb 1999) -> 3.2 -> 3.3 -> 3.4 -> 3.5 -> 3.5.1 | (May 1999) (Sep 1999) (Dec 1999) (June 2000) (July 2000) | | [4.0-STABLE] *BRANCH* 4.0 (Mar 2000) -> 4.1 -> 4.1.1 -> 4.2 -> ... future 4.x releases ... | | (July 2000) (Sep 2000) (Nov 2000) \|/ + [5.0-CURRENT continues] The -CURRENT branch is slowly progressing towards 5.0 and beyond, the previous 2.2-STABLE branch having been retired with the release of 2.2.8. 3-STABLE replaced it, with 3.5.1 (the final 3.X release) being released in July 2000. In May 2000 (even though 3.5 came after that), the 3-STABLE branch was more or less replaced by the 4-STABLE branch. 4.2-RELEASE was released in November 2000. 4-STABLE is the actively developed -STABLE branch, although some bugfixes (mostly security-related) are still being committed to 3-STABLE. It is expected that the 3.X branch will be officially obsoleted some time in summer 2000. 5.0-CURRENT is now the current branch, with the no release date planed. When are FreeBSD releases made? As a general principle, the FreeBSD core team only release a new version of FreeBSD when they believe that there are sufficient new features and/or bug fixes to justify one, and are satisfied that the changes made have settled down sufficiently to avoid compromising the stability of the release. Many users regard this caution as one of the best things about FreeBSD, although it can be a little frustrating when waiting for all the latest goodies to become available... Releases are made about every 4 months on average. For people needing (or wanting) a little more excitement, binary snapshots are made every day... see above. Is FreeBSD only available for PCs ? Since 3.x, FreeBSD has run on the DEC Alpha as well as the x86 architecture. Some interest has also been expressed in a SPARC, PowerPC and IA64 ports. If your machine has a different architecture and you need something right now, we suggest you look at NetBSD or OpenBSD. Who is responsible for FreeBSD? The key decisions concerning the FreeBSD project, such as the overall direction of the project and who is allowed to add code to the source tree, are made by a core team of 9 people. There is a much larger team of more than 200 committers who are authorized to make changes directly to the FreeBSD source tree. However, most non-trivial changes are discussed in advance in the mailing lists, and there are no restrictions on who may take part in the discussion. Where can I get FreeBSD? Every significant release of FreeBSD is available via anonymous ftp from the FreeBSD FTP site: For the current 3.X-STABLE release, 3.5.1-RELEASE, see the 3.5.1-RELEASE directory. The current 4-STABLE release, 4.2-RELEASE can be found in the 4.2-RELEASE directory. 4.X snapshots are usually made once a day. 5.0 Snapshot releases are made once a day for the -CURRENT branch, these being of service purely to bleeding-edge testers and developers. FreeBSD is also available via CDROM, from the following place(s):
BSDi 4041 Pike Lane, Suite F Concord, CA 94520 USA Orders: +1 800 786-9907 Questions: +1 925 674-0783 FAX: +1 925 674-0821 email: BSDi Orders address WWW: BSDi Home page
In Australia, you may find it at:
Advanced Multimedia Distributors Factory 1/1 Ovata Drive Tullamarine, Melbourne Victoria Australia Voice: +61 3 9338 6777 CDROM Support BBS 17 Irvine St Peppermint Grove, WA 6011 Voice: +61 9 385-3793 Fax: +61 9 385-2360
And in the UK:
The Public Domain & Shareware Library Winscombe House, Beacon Rd Crowborough Sussex. TN6 1UL Voice: +44 1892 663-298 Fax: +44 1892 667-473
 Where do I find info on the FreeBSD mailing lists? You can find full information in the Handbook entry on mailing-lists. Where do I find the FreeBSD Y2K info? You can find full information in the FreeBSD Y2K page. What FreeBSD news groups are available? You can find full information in the Handbook entry on newsgroups. Are there FreeBSD IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels? Yes, most major IRC networks host a FreeBSD chat channel: Channel #FreeBSD on EFNet is a FreeBSD forum, but don't go there for tech support or to try and get folks there to help you avoid the pain of reading man pages or doing your own research. It is a chat channel, first and foremost, and topics there are just as likely to involve sex, sports or nuclear weapons as they are FreeBSD. You Have Been Warned! Available at server irc.chat.org. Channel #FreeBSDhelp on EFNet is a channel dedicated to helping FreeBSD users. They are much more sympathetic to questions then #FreeBSD is. Channel #FreeBSD on DALNET is available at irc.dal.net in the US and irc.eu.dal.net in Europe. Channel #FreeBSD on UNDERNET is available at us.undernet.org in the US and eu.undernet.org in Europe. Since it is a help channel, be prepared to read the documents you are referred to. Channel #FreeBSD on HybNet. This channel is a help channel. A list of servers can be found on the HybNet web site. Each of these channels are distinct and are not connected to each other. Their chat styles also differ, so you may need to try each to find one suited to your chat style. As with *all* types of IRC traffic, if you're easily offended or can't deal with lots of young people (and more than a few older ones) doing the verbal equivalent of jello wrestling, don't even bother with it. Books on FreeBSD There is a FreeBSD Documentation Project which you may contact (or even better, join) at the freebsd-doc mailing list: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org. This list is for discussion of the FreeBSD documentation. For actual questions about FreeBSD, there is the freebsd-questions mailing list: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org. A FreeBSD handbook is available, and can be found as: the FreeBSD Handbook. Note that this is a work in progress; some parts may be incomplete or out-of-date. The definitive printed guide on FreeBSD is The Complete FreeBSD, written by Greg Lehey and published by BSDi (formerly Walnut Creek CDROM) Books. Now in its third edition, the book contains 773 pages of install & system administration guidance, program setup help, and manual pages. The book (and current FreeBSD release) can be ordered from BSDi, CheapBytes, or at your favorite bookstore. The ISBN is 1-57176-246-9 (this may not be unique). Since FreeBSD is based upon Berkeley 4.4BSD-Lite, most of the 4.4BSD manuals are applicable to FreeBSD. O'Reilly and Associates publishes the following manuals: 4.4BSD System Manager's Manual By Computer Systems Research Group, UC Berkeley 1st Edition June 1994, 804 pages ISBN: 1-56592-080-5 4.4BSD User's Reference Manual By Computer Systems Research Group, UC Berkeley 1st Edition June 1994, 905 pages ISBN: 1-56592-075-9 4.4BSD User's Supplementary Documents By Computer Systems Research Group, UC Berkeley 1st Edition July 1994, 712 pages ISBN: 1-56592-076-7 4.4BSD Programmer's Reference Manual By Computer Systems Research Group, UC Berkeley 1st Edition June 1994, 886 pages ISBN: 1-56592-078-3 4.4BSD Programmer's Supplementary Documents By Computer Systems Research Group, UC Berkeley 1st Edition July 1994, 596 pages ISBN: 1-56592-079-1 A description of these can be found via WWW as: 4.4BSD books description. Due to poor sales, however, these manuals may be hard to get a hold of. For a more in-depth look at the 4.4BSD kernel organization, you can't go wrong with: McKusick, Marshall Kirk, Keith Bostic, Michael J Karels, and John Quarterman. The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System. Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley, 1996. ISBN 0-201-54979-4 A good book on system administration is: Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Scott Seebass & Trent R. Hein, Unix System Administration Handbook, Prentice-Hall, 1995 ISBN: 0-13-151051-7 Make sure you get the second edition, with a red cover, instead of the first edition. This book covers the basics, as well as TCP/IP, DNS, NFS, SLIP/PPP, sendmail, INN/NNTP, printing, etc.. It's expensive (approx. US$45-$55), but worth it. It also includes a CDROM with the sources for various tools; most of these, however, are also on the FreeBSD 2.2.6R CDROM (and the FreeBSD CDROM often has newer versions). How do I access your Problem Report database? The Problem Report database of all user change requests may be queried (or submitted to) by using our web-based PR submission and query interfaces. The send-pr(1) command can also be used to submit problem reports and change requests via electronic mail. Is the documentation available in other formats, such as plain text (ASCII), or Postscript? Yes. The documentation is available in a number of different formats and compression schemes on the FreeBSD FTP site, in the /pub/FreeBSD/doc/ directory. The documentation is categorised in a number of different ways. These include: The document's name, such as faq, or handbook. The document's language and encoding. These are based on the locale names you will find under /usr/share/locale on your FreeBSD system. The current languages and encodings that we have for documentation are as follows: Name Meaning en_US.ISO_8859-1 US English de_DE.ISO_8859-1 German es_ES.ISO_8859-1 Spanish fr_FR.ISO_8859-1 French ja_JP.eucJP Japanese (EUC encoding) ru_RU.KOI8-R Russian (KOI8-R encoding) zh_TW.Big5 Chinese (Big5 encoding) Some documents may not be available in all languages. The document's format. We produce the documentation in a number of different output formats to try and make it as flexible as possible. The current formats are; Format Meaning html-split A collection of small, linked, HTML files. html One large HTML file containing the entire document pdb Palm Pilot database format, for use with the iSilo reader. pdf Adobe's Portable Document Format ps Postscript rtf Microsoft's Rich Text Format Page numbers are not automatically updated when loading this format in to Word. Press CTRL+A, CTRL+END, F9 after loading the document, to update the page numbers. txt Plain text The compression and packaging scheme. There are three of these currently in use. Where the format is html-split, the files are bundled up using &man.tar.1;. The resulting .tar file is then compressed using the compression schemes detailed in the next point. All the other formats generate one file, called book.format (i.e., book.pdb, book.html, and so on). These files are then compressed using three compression schemes. Scheme Description zip The Zip format. If you want to uncompress this on FreeBSD you will need to install the archivers/unzip port first. gz The GNU Zip format. Use &man.gunzip.1; to uncompress these files, which is part of FreeBSD. bz2 The BZip2 format. Less widespread than the others, but generally gives smaller files. Install the archivers/bzip2 port to uncompress these files. So the Postscript version of the Handbook, compressed using BZip2 will be stored in a file called book.sgml.bz2 in the handbook/ directory. The formatted documentation is also available as a FreeBSD package, of which more later. After choosing the format and compression mechanism that you want to download, you must then decide whether or not you want to download the document as a FreeBSD package. The advantage of downloading and installing the package is that the documentation can then be managed using the normal FreeBSD package management comments, such as &man.pkg.add.1; and &man.pkg.delete.1;. If you decide to download and install the package then you must know the filename to download. The documentation-as-packages files are stored in a directory called packages. Each package file looks like document-name.lang.encoding.format.tgz. For example, the FAQ, in English, formatted as PDF, is in the package called faq.en_US.ISO_8859-1.pdf.tgz. Knowing this, you can use the following command to install the English PDF FAQ package. &prompt.root; pkg_add ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/packages/faq.en_US.ISO_8859-1.pdf.tgz Having done that, you can use &man.pkg.info.1; to determine where the file has been installed. &prompt.root; pkg_info -f faq.en_US.ISO_8859-1.pdf Information for faq.en_US.ISO_8859-1.pdf: Packing list: Package name: faq.en_US.ISO_8859-1.pdf CWD to /usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq File: book.pdf CWD to . File: +COMMENT (ignored) File: +DESC (ignored) As you can see, book.pdf will have been installed in to /usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq. If you do not want to use the packages then you will have to download the compressed files yourself, uncompress them, and then copy the appropriate documents in to place. For example, the split HTML version of the FAQ, compressed using &man.gzip.1;, can be found in the en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq/book.html-split.tar.gz file. To download and uncompress that file you would have to do this. &prompt.root; fetch ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq/book.html-split.tar.gz &prompt.root; gzip -d book.html-split.tar.gz &prompt.root; tar xvf book.html-split.tar You will be left with a collection of .html files. The main one is called index.html, which will contain the table of contents, introductory material, and links to the other parts of the document. You can then copy or move these to their final location as necessary. I'd like to become a FreeBSD Web mirror! Certainly! There are multiple ways to mirror the Web pages. Using CVSup: You can retrieve the formatted files using CVSup, and connecting to a CVSup server. To retrieve the webpages, please look at the example supfile, which can be found in /usr/share/examples/cvsup/www-supfile. Using ftp mirror: You can download the FTP server's copy of the web site sources using your favorite ftp mirror tool. Keep in mind that you have to build these sources before publishing them. Simply start at ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/www. I'd like to translate the documentation into Friesian. Well, we can't pay, but we might arrange a free CD or T-shirt and a Contributor's Handbook entry if you submit a translation of the documentation. Before you begin translating please contact the freebsd-doc mailing list at freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org; you may find somebody to help with the translation effort. You may also find out there is already a team translating the docs into your chosen language, who surely wouldn't turn down your help. Other sources of information. The following newsgroups contain pertinent discussion for FreeBSD users: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.announce (moderated) comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc comp.unix.bsd.misc Web resources: The FreeBSD Home Page. If you have a laptop, be sure and see Tatsumi Hosokawa's Mobile Computing page in Japan. For information on SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing), please see the SMP support page. For information on FreeBSD multimedia applications, please see the multimedia page. If you're interested specifically in the Bt848 video capture chip, then follow that link. The FreeBSD handbook also has a fairly complete bibliography section which is worth reading if you're looking for actual books to buy. Installation Which file do I download to get FreeBSD? Prior to release 3.1, you only needed one floppy image to install FreeBSD, namely floppies/boot.flp. However, since release 3.1 the Project has added base support for a wide variety of hardware which needed more space, and thus for 3.x and 4.x we now use two floppy images, namely floppies/kernel.flp and floppies/mfsroot.flp. These images need to be copied onto floppies by tools like fdimage or &man.dd.1;. If you need to download the distributions yourself (for a DOS filesystem install, for instance), below are some recommendations for distributions to grab: bin/ manpages/ compat*/ doc/ src/ssys.* Full instructions on this procedure and a little bit more about installation issues in general can be found in the Handbook entry on installing FreeBSD. Help! The boot floppy image will not fit on a single floppy! A 3.5 inch (1.44MB) floppy can accomodate 1474560 bytes of data. The boot image is exactly 1474560 bytes in size. Common mistakes when preparing the boot floppy are: Not downloading the floppy image in binary mode when using FTP. Some FTP clients default their transfer mode to ascii and attempt to change any end-of-line characters received to match the conventions used by the client's system. This will almost invariably corrupt the boot image. Check the size of the downloaded boot image: if it is not exactly that on the server, then the download process is suspect. To workaround: type binary at the FTP command prompt after getting connected to the server and before starting the download of the image. Using the DOS copy command (or equivalent GUI tool) to transfer the boot image to floppy. Programs like copy will not work as the boot image has been created to be booted into directly. The image has the complete content of the floppy, track for track, and is not meant to be placed on the floppy as a regular file. You have to transfer it to the floppy raw, using the low-level tools (e.g. fdimage or rawrite) described in the installation guide to FreeBSD. Where are the instructions for installing FreeBSD? Installation instructions can be found in the Handbook entry on installing FreeBSD. What do I need in order to run FreeBSD? You'll need a 386 or better PC, with 5 MB or more of RAM and at least 60 MB of hard disk space. It can run with a low end MDA graphics card but to run X11R6, a VGA or better video card is needed. See also the section on I have only 4 MB of RAM. Can I install FreeBSD? FreeBSD 2.1.7 was the last version of FreeBSD that could be installed on a 4MB system. Newer versions of FreeBSD, like 2.2, need at least 5MB to install on a new system. All versions of FreeBSD, including 3.0, will run in 4MB of RAM, they just can't run the installation program in 4MB. You can add extra memory for the install process, if you like, and then after the system is up and running, go back to 4MB. Or you could always just swap your disk into a system which has >4MB, install onto it and then swap it back. There are also situations in which FreeBSD 2.1.7 will not install in 4 MB. To be exact: it does not install with 640 kB base + 3 MB extended memory. If your motherboard can remap some of the lost memory out of the 640kB to 1MB region, then you may still be able to get FreeBSD 2.1.7 up. Try to go into your BIOS setup and look for a remap option. Enable it. You may also have to disable ROM shadowing. It may be easier to get 4 more MB just for the install. Build a custom kernel with only the options you need and then get the 4MB out again. You may also install 2.0.5 and then upgrade your system to 2.1.7 with the upgrade option of the 2.1.7 installation program. After the installation, if you build a custom kernel, it will run in 4 MB. Someone has even succeeded in booting with 2 MB (the system was almost unusable though :-)) How can I make my own custom install floppy? Currently there's no way to just make a custom install floppy. You have to cut a whole new release, which will include your install floppy. To make a custom release, follow the instructions here. Can I have more than one operating system on my PC? Have a look at The multi-OS page. Can Windows 95/98 co-exist with FreeBSD? Install Windows 95/98 first, after that FreeBSD. FreeBSD's boot manager will then manage to boot Win95/98 and FreeBSD. If you install Windows 95/98 second, it will boorishly overwrite your boot manager without even asking. If that happens, see the next section. Windows 95/98 killed my boot manager! How do I get it back? You can reinstall the boot manager FreeBSD comes with in one of three ways: Running DOS, go into the tools/ directory of your FreeBSD distribution and look for bootinst.exe. You run it like so: ...\TOOLS> bootinst.exe boot.bin and the boot manager will be reinstalled. Boot the FreeBSD boot floppy again and go to the Custom installation menu item. Choose Partition. Select the drive which used to contain your boot manager (likely the first one) and when you come to the partition editor for it, as the very first thing (e.g. do not make any changes) select (W)rite. This will ask for confirmation, say yes, and when you get the Boot Manager selection prompt, be sure to select Boot Manager. This will re-write the boot manager to disk. Now quit out of the installation menu and reboot off the hard disk as normal. Boot the FreeBSD boot floppy (or CD-ROM) and choose the Fixit menu item. Select either the Fixit floppy or CD-ROM #2 (the live file system option) as appropriate and enter the fixit shell. Then execute the following command: Fixit# fdisk -B -b /boot/boot0 bootdevice substituting bootdevice for your real boot device such as ad0 (first IDE disk), ad4 (first IDE disk on auxiliary controller), da0 (first SCSI disk), etc. I have an IBM Thinkpad in the A, T, or X series that FreeBSD installs on, but then the machine locks up on next boot. How can I solve this? A bug in early revisions of IBM's BIOS on these machines mistakenly identifies the FreeBSD partition as a potential FAT suspend-to-disk partition. When the BIOS tries to parse the FreeBSD partition it hangs. According to IBM In an e-mail from Keith Frechette kfrechet@us.ibm.com., the following model/BIOS release numbers incorporate the fix. Model BIOS revision T20 IYET49WW or later T21 KZET22WW or later A20p IVET62WW or later A20m IWET54WW or later A21p KYET27WW or later A21m KXET24WW or later A21e KUET30WW If you have an earlier BIOS, and upgrading is not an option a workaround is to install FreeBSD, change the partition ID FreeBSD uses, and install new boot blocks that can handle the different partition ID. First, you'll need to to restore the machine to a state where it can get through its self-test screen. Doing this requires powering up the machine without letting it find a FreeBSD partition on its primary disk. One way is to remove the hard disk and temporarily move it to an older ThinkPad (such as a ThinkPad 600) or a desktop PC with an appropriate conversion cable. Once it's there, you can delete the FreeBSD partition and move the hard disk back. The ThinkPad should now be in a bootable state again. With the machine functional again, you can use the workaround procedure described here to get a working FreeBSD installation. Download boot1 and boot2 from http://people.freebsd.org/~bmah/ThinkPad/. Put these files somewhere you will be able to retrieve them later. Install FreeBSD as normal on to the ThinkPad. Do not use Dangerously Dedicated mode. Do not reboot when the install has finished. Either switch to the Emergency Holographic Shell (ALT F4) or start a fixit shell. Use &man.fdisk.8; to change the FreeBSD partition ID from 165 to 166 (this is the type used by OpenBSD). Bring the boot1 and boot2 files to the local filesystem. Use &man.disklabel.8; to write boot1 and boot2 to your FreeBSD slice. &prompt.root; disklabel -B -b boot1 -s boot2 ad0sn n is the number of the slice where you installed FreeBSD. Reboot. At the boot prompt you will be given the option of booting OpenBSD. This will actually boot FreeBSD. Getting this to work in the case where you want to dual boot OpenBSD and FreeBSD on the same laptop is left as an exercise for the reader. Can I install on a disk with bad blocks? Prior to 3.0, FreeBSD included a utility known as bad144, which automatically remapped bad blocks. Because modern IDE drives perform this function themselves, bad144 has been removed from the FreeBSD source tree. If you wish to install FreeBSD 3.0 or later, we strongly suggest you purchase a newer disk drive. If you do not wish to do this, you must run FreeBSD 2.x. If you are seeing bad block errors with a modern IDE drive, chances are the drive is going to die very soon (the drive's internal remapping functions are no longer sufficient to fix the bad blocks, which means the disk is heavily corrupted); we suggest you by a new hard drive. If you have a SCSI drive with bad blocks, see this answer. Strange things happen when I boot the install floppy! If you're seeing things like the machine grinding to a halt or spontaneously rebooting when you try to boot the install floppy, here are three questions to ask yourself:- Did you use a new, freshly-formatted, error-free floppy (preferably a brand-new one straight out of the box, as opposed to the magazine coverdisk that's been lying under the bed for the last three years)? Did you download the floppy image in binary (or image) mode? (don't be embarrassed, even the best of us have accidentally downloaded a binary file in ASCII mode at least once!) If you're using Windows95 or Win98 did you run fdimage or rawrite in pure DOS mode? These OS's can interfere with programs that write directly to hardware, which the disk creation program does; even running it inside a DOS shell in the GUI can cause this problem. There have also been reports of Netscape causing problems when downloading the boot floppy, so it's probably best to use a different FTP client if you can. I booted from my ATAPI CD-ROM, but the install program says no CD-ROM is found. Where did it go? The usual cause of this problem is a mis-configured CD-ROM drive. Many PCs now ship with the CD-ROM as the slave device on the secondary IDE controller, with no master device on that controller. This is illegal according to the ATAPI specification, but Windows plays fast and loose with the specification, and the BIOS ignores it when booting. This is why the BIOS was able to see the CD-ROM to boot from it, but why FreeBSD can not see it to complete the install. Reconfigure your system so that the CD-ROM is either the master device on the IDE controller it is attached to, or make sure that it is the slave on an IDE controller that also has a master device. Help! I can't install from tape! If you are installing 2.1.7R from tape, you must create the tape using a tar blocksize of 10 (5120 bytes). The default tar blocksize is 20 (10240 bytes), and tapes created using this default size cannot be used to install 2.1.7R; with these tapes, you will get an error that complains about the record size being too big. Connect two FreeBSD boxes over a parallel line (PLIP) Get a laplink cable. Make sure both computer have a kernel with lpt driver support. &prompt.root; dmesg | grep lp lpt0 at 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa lpt0: Interrupt-driven lp0: TCP/IP capable interface Plug in the laplink cable into the parallel interface. Configure the network interface parameters for lp0 on both sites as root. For example, if you want connect the host max with moritz max <-----> moritz IP Address 10.0.0.1 10.0.0.2 on max start &prompt.root; ifconfig lp0 10.0.0.1 10.0.0.2 on moritz start &prompt.root; ifconfig lp0 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.1 Thats all! Please read also the manpages &man.lp.4; and &man.lpt.4; . You should also add the hosts to /etc/hosts. 127.0.0.1 localhost.my.domain localhost 10.0.0.1 max.my.domain max 10.0.0.2 moritz.my.domain To check if it works do: on max: &prompt.root; ifconfig lp0 lp0: flags=8851<UP,POINTOPOINT,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 inet 10.0.0.1 --> 10.0.0.2 netmask 0xff000000 &prompt.root; netstat -r Routing tables Internet: Destination Gateway Flags Refs Use Netif Expire moritz max UH 4 127592 lp0 &prompt.root; ping -c 4 moritz PING moritz (10.0.0.2): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=2.774 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=2.530 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=2.556 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=2.714 ms --- moritz ping statistics --- 4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.530/2.643/2.774/0.103 ms Can I install on my laptop over PLIP (Parallel Line IP)? Connect the two computers using a Laplink parallel cable to use this feature: Wiring a parallel cable for networking A-name A-End B-End Descr. Post/Bit DATA0 -ERROR 2 15 15 2 Data 0/0x01 1/0x08 DATA1 +SLCT 3 13 13 3 Data 0/0x02 1/0x10 DATA2 +PE 4 12 12 4 Data 0/0x04 1/0x20 DATA3 -ACK 5 10 10 5 Strobe 0/0x08 1/0x40 DATA4 BUSY 6 11 11 6 Data 0/0x10 1/0x80 GND 18-25 18-25 GND -
See also this note on the Mobile Computing page. Which geometry should I use for a disk drive? By the geometry of a disk, we mean the number of cylinders, heads and sectors/track on a disk - I'll refer to this as C/H/S for convenience. This is how the PC's BIOS works out which area on a disk to read/write from. This seems to cause a lot of confusion for some reason. First of all, the physical geometry of a SCSI drive is totally irrelevant, as FreeBSD works in term of disk blocks. In fact, there is no such thing as the physical geometry, as the sector density varies across the disk - what manufacturers claim is the quote physical geometry is usually the geometry that they've worked out results in the least wasted space. For IDE disks, FreeBSD does work in terms of C/H/S, but all modern drives will convert this into block references internally as well. All that matters is the logical geometry - the answer that the BIOS gets when it asks what is your geometry? and then uses to access the disk. As FreeBSD uses the BIOS when booting, it's very important to get this right. In particular, if you have more than one operating system on a disk, they must all agree on the geometry, otherwise you will have serious problems booting! For SCSI disks, the geometry to use depends on whether extended translation support is turned on in your controller (this is often referred to as support for DOS disks >1GB or something similar). If it's turned off, then use N cylinders, 64 heads and 32 sectors/track, where N is the capacity of the disk in MB. For example, a 2GB disk should pretend to have 2048 cylinders, 64 heads and 32 sectors/track. If it is turned on (it's often supplied this way to get around certain limitations in MSDOS) and the disk capacity is more than 1GB, use M cylinders, 63 sectors per track (*not* 64), and 255 heads, where 'M' is the disk capacity in MB divided by 7.844238 (!). So our example 2GB drive would have 261 cylinders, 63 sectors per track and 255 heads. If you are not sure about this, or FreeBSD fails to detect the geometry correctly during installation, the simplest way around this is usually to create a small DOS partition on the disk. The correct geometry should then be detected (and you can always remove the DOS partition in the partition editor if you don't want to keep it, or leave it around for programming network cards and the like). Alternatively, there is a freely available utility distributed with FreeBSD called pfdisk.exe (located in the tools subdirectory on the FreeBSD CDROM or on the various FreeBSD ftp sites) which can be used to work out what geometry the other operating systems on the disk are using. You can then enter this geometry in the partition editor. Any restrictions on how I divide the disk up? Yes. You must make sure that your root partition is below 1024 cylinders so the BIOS can boot the kernel from it. (Note that this is a limitation in the PC's BIOS, not FreeBSD). For a SCSI drive, this will normally imply that the root partition will be in the first 1024MB (or in the first 4096MB if extended translation is turned on - see previous question). For IDE, the corresponding figure is 504MB. What about disk managers? Or, I have a large drive! FreeBSD recognizes the Ontrack Disk Manager and makes allowances for it. Other disk managers are not supported. If you just want to use the disk with FreeBSD you don't need a disk manager. Just configure the disk for as much space as the BIOS can deal with (usually 504 megabytes), and FreeBSD should figure out how much space you really have. If you're using an old disk with an MFM controller, you may need to explicitly tell FreeBSD how many cylinders to use. If you want to use the disk with FreeBSD and another operating system, you may be able to do without a disk manager: just make sure the the FreeBSD boot partition and the slice for the other operating system are in the first 1024 cylinders. If you're reasonably careful, a 20 megabyte boot partition should be plenty. When I boot FreeBSD I get Missing Operating System This is classically a case of FreeBSD and DOS or some other OS conflicting over their ideas of disk geometry. You will have to reinstall FreeBSD, but obeying the instructions given above will almost always get you going. I can't get past the boot manager's F? prompt. This is another symptom of the problem described in the preceding question. Your BIOS geometry and FreeBSD geometry settings do not agree! If your controller or BIOS supports cylinder translation (often marked as >1GB drive support), try toggling its setting and reinstalling FreeBSD. Do I need to install the complete sources? In general, no. However, we would strongly recommend that you install, at a minimum, the base source kit, which includes several of the files mentioned here, and the sys (kernel) source kit, which includes sources for the kernel. There is nothing in the system which requires the presence of the sources to operate, however, except for the kernel-configuration program &man.config.8;. With the exception of the kernel sources, our build structure is set up so that you can read-only mount the sources from elsewhere via NFS and still be able to make new binaries. (Because of the kernel-source restriction, we recommend that you not mount this on /usr/src directly, but rather in some other location with appropriate symbolic links to duplicate the top-level structure of the source tree.) Having the sources on-line and knowing how to build a system with them will make it much easier for you to upgrade to future releases of FreeBSD. To actually select a subset of the sources, use the Custom menu item when you are in the Distributions menu of the system installation tool. Do I need to build a kernel? Building a new kernel was originally pretty much a required step in a FreeBSD installation, but more recent releases have benefited from the introduction of a much friendlier kernel configuration tool. When at the FreeBSD boot prompt (boot:), use the flag and you will be dropped into a visual configuration screen which allows you to configure the kernel's settings for most common ISA cards. It's still recommended that you eventually build a new kernel containing just the drivers that you need, just to save a bit of RAM, but it's no longer a strict requirement for most systems. Should I use DES passwords, or MD5, and how do I specify which form my users receive? The default password format on FreeBSD is to use MD5-based passwords. These are believed to be more secure than the traditional UNIX password format, which used a scheme based on the DES algorithm. DES passwords are still available if you need to share your password file with legacy operating systems which still use the less secure password format (they are available if you choose to install the crypto distribution in sysinstall, or by installing the crypto sources if building from source). Which password format to use for new passwords is controlled by the passwd_format login capability in /etc/login.conf, which takes values of either des (if available) or md5. See the login.conf(5) manpage for more information about login capabilities. The boot floppy starts but hangs at the Probing Devices... screen. If you have a IDE Zip or Jaz drive installed, remove it and try again. The boot floppy can get confused by the drives. After the system is installed you can reconnect the drive. Hopefully this will be fixed in a later release. I get a panic: cant mount root error when rebooting the system after installation. This error comes from confusion between the boot block's and the kernel's understanding of the disk devices. The error usually manifests on two-disk IDE systems, with the hard disks arranged as the master or single device on separate IDE controllers, with FreeBSD installed on the secondary IDE controller. The boot blocks think the system is installed on wd1 (the second BIOS disk) while the kernel assigns the first disk on the secondary controller device wd2. After the device probing, the kernel tries to mount what the boot blocks think is the boot disk, wd1, while it is really wd2, and fails. To fix the problem, do one of the following: For FreeBSD 3.3 and later, reboot the system and hit Enter at the Booting kernel in 10 seconds; hit [Enter] to interrupt prompt. This will drop you into the boot loader. Then type set root_disk_unit="disk_number" . disk_number will be 0 if FreeBSD is installed on the master drive on the first IDE controller, 1 if it is installed on the slave on the first IDE controller, 2 if it is installed on the master of the second IDE controller, and 3 if it is installed on the slave of the second IDE controller. Then type boot, and your system should boot correctly. To make this change permanent (ie so you don't have to do this everytime you reboot or turn on your FreeBSD machine), put the line root_disk_unit="disk_number" in /boot/loader.conf.local . If using FreeBSD 3.2 or earlier, at the Boot: prompt, enter 1:wd(2,a)kernel and press Enter. If the system starts, then run the command echo "1:wd(2,a)kernel" > /boot.config to make it the default boot string. Move the FreeBSD disk onto the primary IDE controller, so the hard disks are consecutive. Rebuild your kernel, modify the wd configuration lines to read: controller wdc0 at isa? port "IO_WD1" bio irq 14 vector wdintr disk wd0 at wdc0 drive 0 # disk wd1 at wdc0 drive 1 # comment out this line controller wdc1 at isa? port "IO_WD2" bio irq 15 vector wdintr disk wd1 at wdc1 drive 0 # change from wd2 to wd1 disk wd2 at wdc1 drive 1 # change from wd3 to wd2 Install the new kernel. If you moved your disks and wish to restore the previous configuration, replace the disks in the desired configuration and reboot. Your system should boot successfully. What are the limits for memory? For memory, the limit is 4 gigabytes. This configuration has been tested, see wcarchive's configuration for more details. If you plan to install this much memory into a machine, you need to be careful. You'll probably want to use ECC memory and to reduce capacitive loading use 9 chip memory modules vice 18 chip memory modules. What are the limits for ffs filesystems? For ffs filesystems, the maximum theoretical limit is 8 terabytes (2G blocks), or 16TB for the default block size of 8K. In practice, there is a soft limit of 1 terabyte, but with modifications filesystems with 4 terabytes are possible (and exist). The maximum size of a single ffs file is approximately 1G blocks (4TB) if the block size is 4K. Maximum file sizes fs block size 2.2.7-stable 3.0-current works should work 4K 4T-1 4T-1 4T-1 4+t 8K 32+G 8T-1 32+G 32T-1 16K 128+G 16T-1 128+G 32T-1 32K 512+G 32T-1 512+G 64T-1 64K 2048+G 64T-1 2048+G 128T-1
When the fs block size is 4K, triple indirect blocks work and everything should be limited by the maximum fs block number that can be represented using triple indirect blocks (approx. 1K^3 + 1K^2 + 1K), but everything is limited by a (wrong) limit of 1G-1 on fs block numbers. The limit on fs block numbers should be 2G-1. There are some bugs for fs block numbers near 2G-1, but such block numbers are unreachable when the fs block size is 4K. For block sizes of 8K and larger, everything should be limited by the 2G-1 limit on fs block numbers, but is actually limited by the 1G-1 limit on fs block numbers, except under -STABLE triple indirect blocks are unreachable, so the limit is the maxiumum fs block number that can be represented using double indirect blocks (approx. (blocksize/4)^2 + (blocksize/4)), and under -CURRENT exceeding this limit may cause problems. Using the correct limit of 2G-1 blocks does cause problems. How can I put 1TB files on my floppy? I keep several virtual ones on floppies :-). The maxiumum file size is not closely related to the maximum disk size. The maximum disk size is 1TB. It is a feature that the file size can be larger than the disk size. The following example creates a file of size 8T-1 using a whole 32K of disk space (3 indirect blocks and 1 data block) on a small root partition. The dd command requires a dd that works with large files. &prompt.user; cat foo df . dd if=/dev/zero of=z bs=1 seek=`echo 2^43 - 2 | bc` count=1 ls -l z du z df . &prompt.user; sh foo Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/da0a 64479 27702 31619 47% / 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 1 bytes transferred in 0.000187 secs (5346 bytes/sec) -rw-r--r-- 1 bde bin 8796093022207 Sep 7 16:04 z 32 z Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/da0a 64479 27734 31587 47% / Bruce Evans, September 1998 I compiled a new kernel and now I get the error message archsw.readin.failed when booting. You can boot by specifying the kernel directly at the second stage, pressing any key when the | shows up before loader is started. More specifically, you have upgraded the source for your kernel, and installed a new kernel builtin from them without making world. This is not supported. Make world. How do I upgrade from 3.X -> 4.X? We strongly recommend that you use binary snapshots to do this. 4-STABLE snapshots are available at releng4.FreeBSD.org. If you wish to upgrade using source, please see the FreeBSD Handbook for more information. Upgrading via source is never recommended for new users, and upgading from 3.X -> 4.X is even less so; make sure you have read the instructions carefully before attempting to upgrade via source this! What are these security profiles? A security profile is a set of configuration options that attempts to achieve the desired ratio of security to convenience by enabling and disabling certain programs and other settings. The more severe the security profile, the less programs will be enabled by default; this is one of the basic principles of security: do not run anything except what you must. Please note that the security profile is just a default setting. All programs can be enabled and disabled after you've installed FreeBSD by editing or adding the appropriate line(s) to /etc/rc.conf. For more information on the latter, please see the &man.rc.conf.5; manual page. Following is a table that describes what each security profile does. The columns are the choices you have for a security profile, and the rows are the program or feature that is enabled or disabled. Possible security profiles Extreme High Moderate Low &man.inetd.8; NO NO YES YES &man.sendmail.8; NO YES YES YES &man.sshd.8; NO YES YES YES &man.portmap.8; NO NO [1] YES NFS server NO NO YES YES &man.securelevel.8; YES (2) [2] YES (1) [2] NO NO
Notes: The portmapper is enabled if the machine has been configured as an NFS client or server earlier in the installation. If you choose a security profile that sets the securelevel (Extreme or High), you must be aware of the implications. Please read the &man.init.8; manual page and pay particular attention to the meanings of the security levels, or you may have significant trouble later! The security profile is not a silver bullet! Setting it high does not mean you do have to keep up with security issues by reading an appropriate mailing list, using good passwords and passphrases, and generally adhering to good security practices. It simply sets up the desired security to convenience ration out of the box. The security profile mechanism is meant to be used when you first install FreeBSD. If you already have FreeBSD installed, it would probably be more beneficial to simply enable or disable the desired functionality. If you really want to use a security profile, you can re-run &man.sysinstall.8; to set it. Hardware compatibility What kind of hard drives does FreeBSD support? FreeBSD supports EIDE and SCSI drives (with a compatible controller; see the next section), and all drives using the original Western Digital interface (MFM, RLL, ESDI, and of course IDE). A few ESDI controllers that use proprietary interfaces may not work: stick to WD1002/3/6/7 interfaces and clones. Which SCSI controllers are supported? See the complete list in the Handbook. Which CD-ROM drives are supported by FreeBSD? Any SCSI drive connected to a supported controller is supported. The following proprietary CD-ROM interfaces are also supported: Mitsumi LU002 (8bit), LU005 (16bit) and FX001D (16bit 2x Speed). Sony CDU 31/33A Sound Blaster Non-SCSI CD-ROM Matsushita/Panasonic CD-ROM ATAPI compatible IDE CD-ROMs All non-SCSI cards are known to be extremely slow compared to SCSI drives, and some ATAPI CDROMs may not work. As of 2.2 the FreeBSD CDROM from BSDi supports booting directly from the CD. Does FreeBSD support ZIP drives? FreeBSD supports the SCSI ZIP drive out of the box, of course. The ZIP drive can only be set to run at SCSI target IDs 5 or 6, but if your SCSI host adapter's BIOS supports it you can even boot from it. I don't know which host adapters let you boot from targets other than 0 or 1... look at your docs (and let me know if it works out for you). ATAPI (IDE) Zip drives are supported in FreeBSD 2.2.6 and later releases. FreeBSD has contained support for Parallel Port Zip Drives since version 3.0. If you are using a sufficiently up to date version, then you should check that your kernel contains the scbus0, da0, ppbus0, and vp0 drivers (the GENERIC kernel contains everything except vp0). With all these drivers present, the Parallel Port drive should be available as /dev/da0s4. Disks can be mounted using mount /dev/da0s4 /mnt OR (for dos disks) mount_msdos /dev/da0s4 /mnt as appropriate. Also check out this note on removable drives, and this note on formatting. Does FreeBSD support JAZ, EZ and other removable drives? Apart from the IDE version of the EZ drive, these are all SCSI devices, so the should all look like SCSI disks to FreeBSD, and the IDE EZ should look like an IDE drive. I'm not sure how well FreeBSD supports changing the media out while running. You will of course need to dismount the drive before swapping media, and make sure that any external units are powered on when you boot the system so FreeBSD can see them. See this note on formatting. Which multi-port serial cards are supported by FreeBSD? There is a list of these in the Miscellaneous devices section of the handbook. Some unnamed clone cards have also been known to work, especially those that claim to be AST compatible. Check the sio man page to get more information on configuring such cards. I have a USB keyboard. Does FreeBSD support it? USB device support was added to FreeBSD 3.1. However, it is still in preliminary state and may not always work as of version 3.2. If you want to experiment with the USB keyboard support, follow the procedure described below. Use FreeBSD 3.2 or later. Add the following lines to your kernel configuration file, and rebuild the kernel. device uhci device ohci device usb device ukbd options KBD_INSTALL_CDEV In versions of FreeBSD before 4.0, use this instead: controller uhci0 controller ohci0 controller usb0 controller ukbd0 options KBD_INSTALL_CDEV Go to the /dev directory and create device nodes as follows: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; ./MAKEDEV kbd0 kbd1 Edit /etc/rc.conf and add the following lines: usbd_enable="YES" usbd_flags="" After the system is rebooted, the AT keyboard becomes /dev/kbd0 and the USB keyboard becomes /dev/kbd1, if both are connected to the system. If there is the USB keyboard only, it will be /dev/ukbd0. If you want to use the USB keyboard in the console, you have to explicitly tell the console driver to use the existence of the USB keyboard. This can be done by running the following command as a part of system initialization. &prompt.root; kbdcontrol -k /dev/kbd1 < /dev/ttyv0 > /dev/null Note that if the USB keyboard is the only keyboard, it is accessed as /dev/kbd0, thus, the command should look like: &prompt.root; kbdcontrol -k /dev/kbd0 < /dev/ttyv0 > /dev/null /etc/rc.i386 is a good place to add the above command. Once this is done, the USB keyboard should work in the X environment as well without any special settings. Hot-plugging and unplugging of the USB keyboard may not work quite right yet. It is a good idea to connect the keyboard before you start the system and leave it connected until the system is shutdown to avoid troubles. See the &man.ukbd.4; man page for more information. I have an unusual bus mouse. How do I set it up? FreeBSD supports the bus mouse and the InPort bus mouse from such manufactures as Microsoft, Logitech and ATI. The bus device driver is compiled in the GENERIC kernel by default in FreeBSD versions 2.X, but not included in version 3.0 or later. If you are building a custom kernel with the bus mouse driver, make sure to add the following line to the kernel config file In FreeBSD 3.0 or before, add: device mse0 at isa? port 0x23c tty irq5 vector mseintr In FreeBSD 3.X, the line should be: device mse0 at isa? port 0x23c tty irq5 And in FreeBSD 4.X and later, the line should read: device mse0 at isa? port 0x23c irq5 Bus mice usually comes with dedicated interface cards. These cards may allow you to set the port address and the IRQ number other than shown above. Refer to the manual of your mouse and the &man.mse.4; man page for more information. How do I use my PS/2 (mouse port or keyboard) mouse? If you're running a post-2.2.5 version of FreeBSD, the necessary driver, psm, is included and enabled in the kernel. The kernel should detect your PS/2 mouse at boot time. If you're running a previous but relatively recent version of FreeBSD (2.1.x or better) then you can simply enable it in the kernel configuration menu at installation time, otherwise later with at the boot: prompt. It is disabled by default, so you will need to enable it explicitly. If you're running an older version of FreeBSD then you'll have to add the following lines to your kernel configuration file and compile a new kernel. In FreeBSD 3.0 or earlier, the line should be: device psm0 at isa? port "IO_KBD" conflicts tty irq 12 vector psmintr In FreeBSD 3.1 or later, the line should be: device psm0 at isa? tty irq 12 In FreeBSD 4.0 or later, the line should be: device psm0 at atkbdc? irq 12 See the Handbook entry on configuring the kernel if you've no experience with building kernels. Once you have a kernel detecting psm0 correctly at boot time, make sure that an entry for psm0 exists in /dev. You can do this by typing: &prompt.root; cd /dev; sh MAKEDEV psm0 when logged in as root. Is it possible to make use of a mouse in any way outside the X Window? If you are using the default console driver, syscons, you can use a mouse pointer in text consoles to cut & paste text. Run the mouse daemon, moused, and turn on the mouse pointer in the virtual console: &prompt.root; moused -p /dev/xxxx -t yyyy &prompt.root; vidcontrol -m on Where xxxx is the mouse device name and yyyy is a protocol type for the mouse. See the &man.moused.8; man page for supported protocol types. You may wish to run the mouse daemon automatically when the system starts. In version 2.2.1, set the following variables in /etc/sysconfig. mousedtype="yyyy" mousedport="xxxx" mousedflags="" In versions 2.2.2 to 3.0, set the following variables in /etc/rc.conf. moused_type="yyyy" moused_port="xxxx" moused_flags="" In 3.1 and later, assuming you have a PS/2 mouse, all you need to is add moused_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf. In addition, if you would like to be able to use the mouse daemon on all virtual terminals instead of just console at boot-time, add the following to /etc/rc.conf. allscreens_flags="-m on" Staring from FreeBSD 2.2.6, the mouse daemon is capable of determining the correct protocol type automatically unless the mouse is a relatively old serial mouse model. Specify auto the protocol to invoke automatic detection. When the mouse daemon is running, access to the mouse needs to be coordinated between the mouse daemon and other programs such as the X Window. Refer to another section on this issue. How do I cut and paste text with mouse in the text console? Once you get the mouse daemon running (see previous section), hold down the button 1 (left button) and move the mouse to select a region of text. Then, press the button 2 (middle button) or the button 3 (right button) to paste it at the text cursor. In versions 2.2.6 and later, pressing the button 2 will paste the text. Pressing the button 3 will extend the selected region of text. If your mouse does not have the middle button, you may wish to emulate it or remap buttons using moused options. See the moused(8) man page for details. I have a USB mouse. Does FreeBSD support the USB mouse? USB device support was added to FreeBSD 3.1. However, it is still in a preliminary state and may not always work as of version 3.2. If you want to experiment with the USB mouse support, follow the procedure described below. Use FreeBSD 3.2 or later. Add the following lines to your kernel configuration file, and rebuild the kernel. device uhci device ohci device usb device ums In versions of FreeBSD before 4.0, use this instead: controller uhci0 controller ohci0 controller usb0 device ums0 Go to the /dev directory and create a device node as follows: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; ./MAKEDEV ums0 Edit /etc/rc.conf and add the following lines: moused_enable="YES" moused_type="auto" moused_port="/dev/ums0" moused_flags="" usbd_enable="YES" usbd_flags="" See the previous section for more detailed discussion on moused. In order to use the USB mouse in the X session, edit XF86Config. If you are using XFree86 3.3.2 or later, be sure to have the following lines in the Pointer section: Device "/dev/sysmouse" Protocol "Auto" If you are using earlier versions of XFree86, be sure to have the following lines in the Pointer section: Device "/dev/sysmouse" Protocol "SysMouse" Refer to another section on the mouse support in the X environment. Hot-plugging and unplugging of the USB mouse may not work quite right yet. It is a good idea connect the mouse before you start the system and leave it connected until the system is shutdown to avoid trouble. My mouse has a fancy wheel and buttons. Can I use them in FreeBSD? The answer is, unfortunately, It depends. These mice with additional features require specialized driver in most cases. Unless the mouse device driver or the user program has specific support for the mouse, it will act just like a standard two, or three button mouse. For the possible usage of wheels in the X Window environment, refer to that section. My mouse does not seem working. The mouse cursor jumps around on the screen. The mouse has a wheel and is connected to the PS/2 mouse port. The PS/2 mouse driver psm in FreeBSD versions 3.2 or earlier has difficulty with some wheel mice, including Logitech model M-S48 and its OEM siblings. Apply the following patch to /sys/i386/isa/psm.c and rebuild the kernel. Index: psm.c =================================================================== RCS file: /src/CVS/src/sys/i386/isa/Attic/psm.c,v retrieving revision 1.60.2.1 retrieving revision 1.60.2.2 diff -u -r1.60.2.1 -r1.60.2.2 --- psm.c 1999/06/03 12:41:13 1.60.2.1 +++ psm.c 1999/07/12 13:40:52 1.60.2.2 @@ -959,14 +959,28 @@ sc->mode.packetsize = vendortype[i].packetsize; /* set mouse parameters */ +#if 0 + /* + * A version of Logitech FirstMouse+ won't report wheel movement, + * if SET_DEFAULTS is sent... Don't use this command. + * This fix was found by Takashi Nishida. + */ i = send_aux_command(sc->kbdc, PSMC_SET_DEFAULTS); if (verbose >= 2) printf("psm%d: SET_DEFAULTS return code:%04x\n", unit, i); +#endif if (sc->config & PSM_CONFIG_RESOLUTION) { sc->mode.resolution = set_mouse_resolution(sc->kbdc, - (sc->config & PSM_CONFIG_RESOLUTION) - 1); + (sc->config & PSM_CONFIG_RESOLUTION) - 1); + } else if (sc->mode.resolution >= 0) { + sc->mode.resolution + = set_mouse_resolution(sc->kbdc, sc->dflt_mode.resolution); + } + if (sc->mode.rate > 0) { + sc->mode.rate = set_mouse_sampling_rate(sc->kbdc, sc->dflt_mode.rate); } + set_mouse_scaling(sc->kbdc, 1); /* request a data packet and extract sync. bits */ if (get_mouse_status(sc->kbdc, stat, 1, 3) < 3) { Versions later than 3.2 should be all right. How do I use the mouse/trackball/touchpad on my laptop? Please refer to the answer to the previous question. And check out this note on the Mobile Computing page. What types of tape drives are supported? FreeBSD supports SCSI and QIC-36 (with a QIC-02 interface). This includes 8-mm (aka Exabyte) and DAT drives. Some of the early 8-mm drives are not quite compatible with SCSI-2, and may not work well with FreeBSD. Does FreeBSD support tape changers? FreeBSD 2.2 supports SCSI changers using the ch(4) device and the chio(1) command. The details of how you actually control the changer can be found in the chio(1) man page. If you're not using AMANDA or some other product that already understands changers, remember that they're only know how to move a tape from one point to another, so you need to keep track of which slot a tape is in, and which slot the tape currently in the drive needs to go back to. Which sound cards are supported by FreeBSD? FreeBSD supports the SoundBlaster, SoundBlaster Pro, SoundBlaster 16, Pro Audio Spectrum 16, AdLib and Gravis UltraSound sound cards. There is also limited support for MPU-401 and compatible MIDI cards. Cards conforming to the Microsoft Sound System specification are also supported through the pcm driver. This is only for sound! This driver does not support CD-ROMs, SCSI or joysticks on these cards, except for the SoundBlaster. The SoundBlaster SCSI interface and some non-SCSI CDROMS are supported, but you can't boot off this device. Workarounds for no sound from es1370 with pcm driver? You can run the following command everytime the machine booted up: &prompt.root; mixer pcm 100 vol 100 cd 100 Which network cards does FreeBSD support? See the Ethernet cards section of the handbook for a more complete list. I don't have a math co-processor - is that bad? This will only affect 386/486SX/486SLC owners - other machines will have one built into the CPU. In general this will not cause any problems, but there are circumstances where you will take a hit, either in performance or accuracy of the math emulation code (see the section on FP emulation). In particular, drawing arcs in X will be VERY slow. It is highly recommended that you buy a math co-processor; it's well worth it. Some math co-processors are better than others. It pains us to say it, but nobody ever got fired for buying Intel. Unless you're sure it works with FreeBSD, beware of clones. What other devices does FreeBSD support? See the Handbook for the list of other devices supported. Does FreeBSD support power management on my laptop? FreeBSD supports APM on certain machines. Please look in the LINT kernel config file, searching for the APM keyword. My Micron system hangs at boot time Certain Micron motherboards have a non-conforming PCI BIOS implementation that causes grief when FreeBSD boots because PCI devices don't get configured at their reported addresses. Disable the Plug and Play Operating System flag in the BIOS to work around this problem. More information can be found at http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html#micron I have a newer Adaptec controller and FreeBSD can't find it. The newer AIC789x series Adaptec chips are supported under the CAM SCSI framework which made it's debut in 3.0. Patches against 2.2-STABLE are in ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/development/cam/. A CAM-enhanced boot floppy is available at http://people.FreeBSD.org/~abial/cam-boot/. In both cases read the README before beginning. I have an internal Plug & Play modem and FreeBSD can't find it. You will need to add the modem's PnP ID to the PnP ID list in the serial driver. To enable Plug & Play support, compile a new kernel with controller pnp0 in the configuration file, then reboot the system. The kernel will print the PnP IDs of all the devices it finds. Copy the PnP ID from the modem to the table in /sys/i386/isa/sio.c, at about line 2777. Look for the string SUP1310 in the structure siopnp_ids[] to find the table. Build the kernel again, install, reboot, and your modem should be found. You may have to manually configure the PnP devices using the pnp command in the boot-time configuration with a command like pnp 1 0 enable os irq0 3 drq0 0 port0 0x2f8 to make the modem show. How do I get the boot: prompt to show on the serial console? Build a kernel with options COMCONSOLE. Create /boot.config and place as the only text in the file. Unplug the keyboard from the system. See /usr/src/sys/i386/boot/biosboot/README.serial for information. Why doesn't my 3Com PCI network card work with my Micron computer? Certain Micron motherboards have a non-conforming PCI BIOS implementation that does not configure PCI devices at the addresses reported. This causes grief when FreeBSD boots. To work around this problem, disable the Plug and Play Operating System flag in the BIOS. More information on this problem is available at URL: http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html#micron Does FreeBSD support Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP)? SMP is supported in 3.0-STABLE and later releases only. SMP is not enabled in the GENERIC kernel, so you will have to recompile your kernel to enable SMP. Take a look at /sys/i386/conf/LINT to figure out what options to put in your kernel config file. The boot floppy hangs on a system with an ASUS K7V motherboard. How do I fix this? Go in to the BIOS setup and disable the boot virus protection. Troubleshooting I have bad blocks on my hard drive! With SCSI drives, the drive should be capable of re-mapping these automatically. However, many drives are shipped with this feature disabled, for some mysterious reason... To enable this, you'll need to edit the first device page mode, which can be done on FreeBSD by giving the command (as root) &prompt.root; scsi -f /dev/rsd0c -m 1 -e -P 3 and changing the values of AWRE and ARRE from 0 to 1:- AWRE (Auto Write Reallocation Enbld): 1 ARRE (Auto Read Reallocation Enbld): 1 The following paragraphs were submitted by Ted Mittelstaedt: For IDE drives, any bad block is usually a sign of potential trouble. All modern IDE drives come with internal bad-block remapping turned on. All IDE hard drive manufacturers today offer extensive warranties and will replace drives with bad blocks on them. If you still want to attempt to rescue an IDE drive with bad blocks, you can attempt to download the IDE drive manufacturer's IDE diagnostic program, and run this against the drive. Sometimes these programs can be set to force the drive electronics to rescan the drive for bad blocks and lock them out. For ESDI, RLL and MFM drives, bad blocks are a normal part of the drive and are no sign of trouble, generally. With a PC, the disk drive controller card and BIOS handle the task of locking out bad sectors. This is fine for operating systems like DOS that use BIOS code to access the disk. However, FreeBSD's disk driver does not go through BIOS, therefore a mechanism, bad144, exists that replaces this functionality. bad144 only works with the wd driver (which means it is not supported in FreeBSD 4.0), it is NOT able to be used with SCSI. bad144 works by entering all bad sectors found into a special file. One caveat with bad144 - the bad block special file is placed on the last track of the disk. As this file may possibly contain a listing for a bad sector that would occur near the beginning of the disk, where the /kernel file might be located, it therefore must be accessible to the bootstrap program that uses BIOS calls to read the kernel file. This means that the disk with bad144 used on it must not exceed 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors. This places an effective limit of 500MB on a disk that is mapped with bad144. To use bad144, simply set the Bad Block scanning to ON in the FreeBSD fdisk screen during the initial install. This works up through FreeBSD 2.2.7. The disk must have less than 1024 cylinders. It is generally recommended that the disk drive has been in operation for at least 4 hours prior to this to allow for thermal expansion and track wandering. If the disk has more than 1024 cylinders (such as a large ESDI drive) the ESDI controller uses a special translation mode to make it work under DOS. The wd driver understands about these translation modes, IF you enter the translated geometry with the set geometry command in fdisk. You must also NOT use the dangerously dedicated mode of creating the FreeBSD partition, as this ignores the geometry. Also, even though fdisk will use your overridden geometry, it still knows the true size of the disk, and will attempt to create a too large FreeBSD partition. If the disk geometry is changed to the translated geometry, the partition MUST be manually created with the number of blocks. A quick trick to use is to set up the large ESDI disk with the ESDI controller, boot it with a DOS disk and format it with a DOS partition. Then, boot the FreeBSD install and in the fdisk screen, read off and write down the blocksize and block numbers for the DOS partition. Then, reset the geometry to the same that DOS uses, delete the DOS partition, and create a cooperative FreeBSD partition using the blocksize you recorded earlier. Then, set the partition bootable and turn on bad block scanning. During the actual install, bad144 will run first, before any filesystems are created. (you can view this with an Alt-F2) If it has any trouble creating the badsector file, you have set too large a disk geometry - reboot the system and start all over again (including repartitioning and reformatting with DOS). If remapping is enabled and you are seeing bad blocks, consider replacing the drive. The bad blocks will only get worse as time goes on. FreeBSD does not recognize my Bustek 742a EISA SCSI! This info is specific to the 742a but may also cover other Buslogic cards. (Bustek = Buslogic) There are 2 general versions of the 742a card. They are hardware revisions A-G, and revisions H - onwards. The revision letter is located after the Assembly number on the edge of the card. The 742a has 2 ROM chips on it, one is the BIOS chip and the other is the Firmware chip. FreeBSD doesn't care what version of BIOS chip you have but it does care about what version of firmware chip. Buslogic will send upgrade ROMS out if you call their tech support dept. The BIOS and Firmware chips are shipped as a matched pair. You must have the most current Firmware ROM in your adapter card for your hardware revision. The REV A-G cards can only accept BIOS/Firmware sets up to 2.41/2.21. The REV H- up cards can accept the most current BIOS/Firmware sets of 4.70/3.37. The difference between the firmware sets is that the 3.37 firmware supports round robin The Buslogic cards also have a serial number on them. If you have a old hardware revision card you can call the Buslogic RMA department and give them the serial number and attempt to exchange the card for a newer hardware revision. If the card is young enough they will do so. FreeBSD 2.1 only supports Firmware revisions 2.21 onward. If you have a Firmware revision older than this your card will not be recognized as a Buslogic card. It may be recognized as an Adaptec 1540, however. The early Buslogic firmware contains an AHA1540 emulation mode. This is not a good thing for an EISA card, however. If you have an old hardware revision card and you obtain the 2.21 firmware for it, you will need to check the position of jumper W1 to B-C, the default is A-B. My HP Netserver's SCSI controller is not detected! This is basically a known problem. The EISA on-board SCSI controller in the HP Netserver machines occupies EISA slot number 11, so all the true EISA slots are in front of it. Alas, the address space for EISA slots >= 10 collides with the address space assigned to PCI, and FreeBSD's auto-configuration currently cannot handle this situation very well. So now, the best you can do is to pretend there is no address range clash :), by bumping the kernel option EISA_SLOTS to a value of 12. Configure and compile a kernel, as described in the Handbook entry on configuring the kernel. Of course, this does present you with a chicken-and-egg problem when installing on such a machine. In order to work around this problem, a special hack is available inside UserConfig. Do not use the visual interface, but the plain command-line interface there. Simply type eisa 12 quit at the prompt, and install your system as usual. While it's recommended you compile and install a custom kernel anyway, Hopefully, future versions will have a proper fix for this problem. You can not use a dangerously dedicated disk with an HP Netserver. See this note for more info. What's up with this CMD640 IDE controller? It's broken. It cannot handle commands on both channels simultaneously. There's a workaround available now and it is enabled automatically if your system uses this chip. For the details refer to the manual page of the disk driver (man 4 wd). If you're already running FreeBSD 2.2.1 or 2.2.2 with a CMD640 IDE controller and you want to use the second channel, build a new kernel with options "CMD640" enabled. This is the default for 2.2.5 and later. I keep seeing messages like ed1: timeout. This is usually caused by an interrupt conflict (e.g., two boards using the same IRQ). FreeBSD prior to 2.0.5R used to be tolerant of this, and the network driver would still function in the presence of IRQ conflicts. However, with 2.0.5R and later, IRQ conflicts are no longer tolerated. Boot with the -c option and change the ed0/de0/... entry to match your board. If you're using the BNC connector on your network card, you may also see device timeouts because of bad termination. To check this, attach a terminator directly to the NIC (with no cable) and see if the error messages go away. Some NE2000 compatible cards will give this error if there is no link on the UTP port or if the cable is disconnected. When I mount a CDROM, I get Incorrect super block. You have to tell mount the type of the device that you want to mount. By default, mount(8) will assume the filesystem is of type ufs. You want to mount a CDROM filesystem, and you do this by specifying the option to mount(8). This does, of course, assume that the CDROM contains an ISO 9660 filesystem, which is what most CDROMs have. As of 1.1R, FreeBSD automatically understands the Rock Ridge (long filename) extensions as well. As an example, if you want to mount the CDROM device, /dev/cd0c, under /mnt, you would execute: &prompt.root; mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0c /mnt Note that your device name (/dev/cd0c in this example) could be different, depending on the CDROM interface. Note that the option just causes the mount_cd9660 command to be executed, and so the above example could be shortened to: &prompt.root; mount_cd9660 /dev/cd0c /mnt When I mount a CDROM, I get Device not configured. This generally means that there is no CDROM in the CDROM drive, or the drive is not visible on the bus. Feed the drive something, and/or check its master/slave status if it is IDE (ATAPI). It can take a couple of seconds for a CDROM drive to notice that it's been fed, so be patient. Sometimes a SCSI CD-ROM may be missed because it hadn't enough time to answer the bus reset. If you have a SCSI CD-ROM please try to add the following symbol into your kernel configuration file and recompile. options "SCSI_DELAY=15" When I mount a CDROM, all non-English characters in filenames show up as ?. Most likely your CDROM uses the Joilet extention for storing information about files and directories. This extension specifies that all filenames are stored using Unicode two-byte characters. Currently, efforts are under way to introduce a generic Unicode interface into the FreeBSD kernel, but since that isn't ready yet, the CD9660 driver does not have the ability to decode the characters in the filenames. As a temporary solution, starting with FreeBSD 4.3, a special hook has been added into the CD9660 driver to allow the user to load an appropriate conversion table on the fly. Modules for some of the common encodings are available via the sysutils/cd9660_unicode port. My printer is ridiculously slow. What can I do ? If it's parallel, and the only problem is that it's terribly slow, try setting your printer port into polled mode: &prompt.root; lptcontrol -p Some newer HP printers are claimed not to work correctly in interrupt mode, apparently due to some (not yet exactly understood) timing problem. My programs occasionally die with Signal 11 errors. Signal 11 errors are caused when your process has attempted to access memory which the operating system has not granted it access to. If something like this is happening at seemingly random intervals then you need to start investigating things very carefully. These problems can usually be attributed to either: If the problem is occurring only in a specific application that you are developing yourself it is probably a bug in your code. If it's a problem with part of the base FreeBSD system, it may also be buggy code, but more often than not these problems are found and fixed long before us general FAQ readers get to use these bits of code (that's what -current is for). In particular, a dead giveaway that this is *not* a FreeBSD bug is if you see the problem when you're compiling a program, but the activity that the compiler is carrying out changes each time. For example, suppose you're running make buildworld, and the compile fails while trying to compile ls.c in to ls.o. If you next run make buildworld again, and the compile fails in the same place then this is a broken build -- try updating your sources and try again. If the compile fails elsewhere then this is almost certainly hardware. What you should do: In the first case you can use a debugger e.g. gdb to find the point in the program which is attempting to access a bogus address and then fix it. In the second case you need to verify that it's not your hardware at fault. Common causes of this include : Your hard disks might be overheating: Check the fans in your case are still working, as your disk (and perhaps other hardware might be overheating). The processor running is overheating: This might be because the processor has been overclocked, or the fan on the processor might have died. In either case you need to ensure that you have hardware running at what it's specified to run at, at least while trying to solve this problem. i.e. Clock it back to the default settings. If you are overclocking then note that it's far cheaper to have a slow system than a fried system that needs replacing! Also the wider community is not often sympathetic to problems on overclocked systems, whether you believe it's safe or not. Dodgy memory: If you have multiple memory SIMMS/DIMMS installed then pull them all out and try running the machine with each SIMM or DIMM individually and narrow the problem down to either the problematic DIMM/SIMM or perhaps even a combination. Over-optimistic Motherboard settings: In your BIOS settings, and some motherboard jumpers you have options to set various timings, mostly the defaults will be sufficient, but sometimes, setting the wait states on RAM too low, or setting the RAM Speed: Turbo option, or similar in the BIOS will cause strange behaviour. A possible idea is to set to BIOS defaults, but it might be worth noting down your settings first! Unclean or insufficient power to the motherboard. If you have any unused I/O boards, hard disks, or CDROMs in your system, try temporarily removing them or disconnecting the power cable from them, to see if your power supply can manage a smaller load. Or try another power supply, preferably one with a little more power (for instance, if your current power supply is rated at 250 Watts try one rated at 300 Watts). You should also read the SIG11 FAQ (listed below) which has excellent explanations of all these problems, albeit from a Linux viewpoint. It also discusses how memory testing software or hardware can still pass faulty memory. Finally, if none of this has helped it is possible that you've just found a bug in FreeBSD, and you should follow the instructions to send a problem report. There's an extensive FAQ on this at the SIG11 problem FAQ When I boot, the screen goes black and loses sync! This is a known problem with the ATI Mach 64 video card. The problem is that this card uses address 2e8, and the fourth serial port does too. Due to a bug (feature?) in the sio(4) driver it will touch this port even if you don't have the fourth serial port, and even if you disable sio3 (the fourth port) which normally uses this address. Until the bug has been fixed, you can use this workaround: Enter at the bootprompt. (This will put the kernel into configuration mode). Disable sio0, sio1, sio2 and sio3 (all of them). This way the sio driver doesn't get activated -> no problems. Type exit to continue booting. If you want to be able to use your serial ports, you'll have to build a new kernel with the following modification: in /usr/src/sys/i386/isa/sio.c find the one occurrence of the string 0x2e8 and remove that string and the preceding comma (keep the trailing comma). Now follow the normal procedure of building a new kernel. Even after applying these workarounds, you may still find that the X Window System does not work properly. If this is the case, make sure that the XFree86 version you are using is at least XFree86 3.3.3 or higher. This version and upwards has built-in support for the Mach64 cards and even a dedicated X server for those cards. I have 128 MB of RAM but the system only uses 64 MB. Due to the manner in which FreeBSD gets the memory size from the BIOS, it can only detect 16 bits worth of Kbytes in size (65535 Kbytes = 64MB) (or less... some BIOSes peg the memory size to 16M). If you have more than 64MB, FreeBSD will attempt to detect it; however, the attempt may fail. To work around this problem, you need to use the kernel option specified below. There is a way to get complete memory information from the BIOS, but we don't have room in the bootblocks to do it. Someday when lack of room in the bootblocks is fixed, we'll use the extended BIOS functions to get the full memory information...but for now we're stuck with the kernel option. options "MAXMEM=n" Where n is your memory in Kilobytes. For a 128 MB machine, you'd want to use 131072. FreeBSD 2.0 panics with kmem_map too small! The message may also be mb_map too small! The panic indicates that the system ran out of virtual memory for network buffers (specifically, mbuf clusters). You can increase the amount of VM available for mbuf clusters by adding: options "NMBCLUSTERS=n" to your kernel config file, where n is a number in the range 512-4096, depending on the number of concurrent TCP connections you need to support. I'd recommend trying 2048 - this should get rid of the panic completely. You can monitor the number of mbuf clusters allocated/in use on the system with netstat -m. The default value for NMBCLUSTERS is 512 + MAXUSERS * 16. CMAP busy panic when rebooting with a new kernel. The logic that attempts to detect an out of date /var/db/kvm_*.db files sometimes fails and using a mismatched file can sometimes lead to panics. If this happens, reboot single-user and do: &prompt.root; rm /var/db/kvm_*.db ahc0: brkadrint, Illegal Host Access at seqaddr 0x0 This is a conflict with an Ultrastor SCSI Host Adapter. During the boot process enter the kernel configuration menu and disable uha0, which is causing the problem. Sendmail says mail loops back to myself This is answered in the sendmail FAQ as follows:- * I'm getting "Local configuration error" messages, such as: 553 relay.domain.net config error: mail loops back to myself 554 <user@domain.net>... Local configuration error How can I solve this problem? You have asked mail to the domain (e.g., domain.net) to be forwarded to a specific host (in this case, relay.domain.net) by using an MX record, but the relay machine doesn't recognize itself as domain.net. Add domain.net to /etc/sendmail.cw (if you are using FEATURE(use_cw_file)) or add "Cw domain.net" to /etc/sendmail.cf. The current version of the sendmail FAQ is no longer maintained with the sendmail release. It is however regularly posted to comp.mail.sendmail, comp.mail.misc, comp.mail.smail, comp.answers, and news.answers. You can also receive a copy via email by sending a message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with the command send usenet/news.answers/mail/sendmail-faq as the body of the message. Full screen applications on remote machines misbehave The remote machine may be setting your terminal type to something other than the cons25 terminal type required by the FreeBSD console. There are a number of possible work-arounds for this problem: After logging on to the remote machine, set your TERM shell variable to ansi or sco if the remote machine knows about these terminal types. Use a VT100 emulator like screen at the FreeBSD console. screen offers you the ability to run multiple concurrent sessions from one terminal, and is a neat program in its own right. Each screen window behaves like a VT100 terminal, so the TERM variable at the remote end should be set to vt100. Install the cons25 terminal database entry on the remote machine. The way to do this depends on the operating system on the remote machine. The system administration manuals for the remote system should be able to help you here. Fire up an X server at the FreeBSD end and login to the remote machine using an X based terminal emulator such as xterm or rxvt. The TERM variable at the remote host should be set to xterm or vt100. My machine prints calcru: negative time... This can be caused by various hardware and/or software ailments relating to interrupts. It may be due to bugs but can also happen by nature of certain devices. Running TCP/IP over the parallel port using a large MTU is one good way to provoke this problem. Graphics accelerators can also get you here, in which case you should check the interrupt setting of the card first. A side effect of this problem are dying processes with the message SIGXCPU exceeded cpu time limit. For FreeBSD 3.0 and later from Nov 29, 1998 forward: If the problem cannot be fixed otherwise the solution is to set this sysctl variable: &prompt.root; sysctl -w kern.timecounter.method=1 This means a performance impact, but considering the cause of this problem, you probably will not notice. If the problem persists, keep the sysctl set to one and set the NTIMECOUNTER option in your kernel to increasingly large values. If by the time you have reached NTIMECOUNTER=20 the problem isn't solved, interrupts are too hosed on your machine for reliable timekeeping. I see pcm0 not found or my sound card is found as pcm1 but I have device pcm0 in my kernel config file This occurs in FreeBSD 3.x with PCI sound cards. The pcm0 device is reserved exclusively for ISA-based cards so, if you have a PCI card, then you will see this error, and your card will appear as pcm1. You cannot remove the warning by simply changing the line in the kernel config file to device pcm1 as this will result in pcm1 being reserved for ISA cards and your PCI card being found as pcm2 (along with the warning pcm1 not found). If you have a PCI sound card you will also have to make the snd1 device rather than snd0: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; ./MAKEDEV snd1 This situation does not arise in FreeBSD 4.x as has a lot of work has been done to make the it more PnP-centric and the pcm0 device is no longer reserved exclusively fo ISA cards My PnP card is no longer found (or found as unknown) since upgrading to FreeBSD 4.x FreeBSD 4.x is now much more PnP-centric and this has had the side effect of some PnP devices (e.g. sound cards and internal modems) not working even though they worked under FreeBSD 3.x. The reasons for this behaviour are explained by the following e-mail, posted to the freebsd-questions mailing list by Peter Wemm, in answer to a question about an internal modem that was no longer found after an upgrade to FreeBSD 4.x (the comments in [] have been added to clarify the context.
The PNP bios preconfigured it [the modem] and left it laying around in port space, so [in 3.x] the old-style ISA probes found it there. Under 4.0, the ISA code is much more PnP-centric. It was possible [in 3.x] for an ISA probe to find a stray device and then for the PNP device id to match and then fail due to resource conflicts. So, it disables the programmable cards first so this double probing cannot happen. It also means that it needs to know the PnP id's for supported PnP hardware. Making this more user tweakable is on the TODO list.
To get the device working again requires finding its PnP id and adding it to the list that the ISA probes use to identify PnP devices. This is obtained using &man.pnpinfo.8; to probe the device, for example this is the output from &man.pnpinfo.8; for an internal modem: &prompt.root; pnpinfo Checking for Plug-n-Play devices... Card assigned CSN #1 Vendor ID PMC2430 (0x3024a341), Serial Number 0xffffffff PnP Version 1.0, Vendor Version 0 Device Description: Pace 56 Voice Internal Plug & Play Modem Logical Device ID: PMC2430 0x3024a341 #0 Device supports I/O Range Check TAG Start DF I/O Range 0x3f8 .. 0x3f8, alignment 0x8, len 0x8 [16-bit addr] IRQ: 4 - only one type (true/edge) [more TAG lines elided] TAG End DF End Tag Successfully got 31 resources, 1 logical fdevs -- card select # 0x0001 CSN PMC2430 (0x3024a341), Serial Number 0xffffffff Logical device #0 IO: 0x03e8 0x03e8 0x03e8 0x03e8 0x03e8 0x03e8 0x03e8 0x03e8 IRQ 5 0 DMA 4 0 IO range check 0x00 activate 0x01 The information you require is in the Vendor ID line at the start of the output. The hexadecimal number in parentheses (0x3024a341 in this example) is the PnP id and the string immediately before this (PMC2430) is a unique ASCII id. This information needs adding to the file /usr/src/sys/isa/sio.c. You should first make a backup of sio.c just in case things go wrong. You will also need it to make the patch to submit with your PR (you are going to submit a PR, aren't you?) then edit sio.c and search for the line static struct isa_pnp_id sio_ids[] = { then scroll down to find the correct place to add the entry for your device. The entries look like this, and are sorted on the ASCII Vendor ID string which should be included in the comment to the right of the line of code along with all (if it will fit) or part of the Device Description from the output of &man.pnpinfo.8;: {0x0f804f3f, NULL}, /* OZO800f - Zoom 2812 (56k Modem) */ {0x39804f3f, NULL}, /* OZO8039 - Zoom 56k flex */ {0x3024a341, NULL}, /* PMC2430 - Pace 56 Voice Internal Modem */ {0x1000eb49, NULL}, /* ROK0010 - Rockwell ? */ {0x5002734a, NULL}, /* RSS0250 - 5614Jx3(G) Internal Modem */ Add the hexadecimal Vendor ID for your device in the correct place, save the file, rebuild your kernel, and reboot. Your device should now be found as an sio device as it was under FreeBSD 3.x I get the error nlist failed when running, for example, top or systat. The problem is that the application you are trying to run is looking for a specific kernel symbol, but, for whatever reason, cannot find it; this error stems from one of two problems: Your kernel and userland are not synchronized (i.e., you built a new kernel but did not do an installworld, or vice versa), and thus the symbol table is different from what the user application thinks it is. If this is the case, simply complete the upgrade process (see /usr/src/UPDATING for the correct sequence). You are not using /boot/loader to load your kernel, but doing it directly from boot2 (see &man.boot.8;). While there is nothing wrong with bypassing /boot/loader, it generally does a better job of making the kernel symbols available to user applications. Why does it take so long to connect to my computer via &man.ssh.1; or &man.telnet.1;? The symptom: there is a long delay between the time the TCP connection is established and the time when the client software asks for a password (or, in &man.telnet.1;'s case, when a login prompt appears). The problem: more likely than not, the delay is caused by the server software trying to resolve the client's IP address into a hostname. Many servers, including the Telnet and SSH servers that come with FreeBSD, do this in order to, among other things, store the hostname in a log file for future reference by the administrator. The remedy: if the problem occurs whenever you connect from your computer (the client) to any server, the problem is with the client; likewise, if the problem only occurs when someone connects to your computer (the server) the problem is with the server. If the problem is with the client, the only remedy is to fix the DNS so the server can resolve it. If this is on a local network, consider it a server problem and keep reading; conversely, if this is on the global Internet, you will most likely need to contact your ISP and ask them to fix it for you. If the problem is with the server, and this is on a local network, you need to configure the server to be able to resolve address-to-hostname queries for your local address range. See the &man.hosts.5; and &man.named.8; manual pages for more information. If this is on the global Internet, the problem may be that your server's resolver is not functioning correctly. To check, try to look up another host--say, www.yahoo.com. If it doesn't work, that's your problem. Commercial Applications This section is still very sparse, though we're hoping, of course, that companies will add to it! :) The FreeBSD group has no financial interest in any of the companies listed here but simply lists them as a public service (and feels that commercial interest in FreeBSD can have very positive effects on FreeBSD's long-term viability). We encourage commercial software vendors to send their entries here for inclusion. See the Vendors page for a longer list. + + + Where can I get an Office Suite for FreeBSD? + + + + + BSDi + offers a FreeBSD native version of VistaSource + ApplixWare 5. + + ApplixWare is a rich full-featured, commercial + Office Suite for FreeBSD containing a word processor, + spreadsheet, presentation program, vector drawing + package, and other applications. + + + You can purchase ApplixWare for FreeBSD here. + + + + + The Linux version of StarOffice + works flawlessly on FreeBSD. The easiest way to + install the Linux version of StarOffice is through the + FreeBSD + Ports collection. Future versions of the + open-source OpenOffice + suite should work as well. + + + + Where can I get Motif for FreeBSD? Contact Apps2go for the least expensive ELF Motif 2.1.20 distribution for FreeBSD (either i386 or Alpha). There are two distributions, the developement edition and the runtime edition (for much less). These distributions includes: OSF/Motif manager, xmbind, panner, wsm. Development kit with uil, mrm, xm, xmcxx, include and Imake files. Static and dynamic ELF libraries (for use with FreeBSD 3.0 and above). Demonstration applets. Be sure to specify that you want the FreeBSD version of Motif when ordering (don't forget to mention the architecture you want too)! Versions for NetBSD and OpenBSD are also sold by Apps2go. This is currently a FTP only download. More info Apps2go WWW page or Sales or Support email addresses. or phone (817) 431 8775 or +1 817 431-8775 Contact Metro Link for an either ELF or a.out Motif 2.1 distribution for FreeBSD. This distribution includes: OSF/Motif manager, xmbind, panner, wsm. Development kit with uil, mrm, xm, xmcxx, include and Imake files. Static and dynamic libraries (specify ELF for use with FreeBSD 3.0 and later; or a.out for use with FreeBSD 2.2.8 and eariler). Demonstration applets. Preformatted man pages. Be sure to specify that you want the FreeBSD version of Motif when ordering! Versions for Linux are also sold by Metro Link. This is available on either a CDROM or for FTP download. Contact Xi Graphics for an a.out Motif 2.0 distribution for FreeBSD. This distribution includes: OSF/Motif manager, xmbind, panner, wsm. Development kit with uil, mrm, xm, xmcxx, include and Imake files. Static and dynamic libraries (for use with FreeBSD 2.2.8 and eariler). Demonstration applets. Preformatted man pages. Be sure to specify that you want the FreeBSD version of Motif when ordering! Versions for BSDI and Linux are also sold by Xi Graphics. This is currently a 4 diskette set... in the future this will change to a unified CD distribution like their CDE. Where can I get CDE for FreeBSD? Xi Graphics used to sell CDE for FreeBSD, but no longer do. KDE is an open source X11 desktop which is similar to CDE in many respects. You might also like the look and feel of xfce. KDE and xfce are both in the ports system. Are there any commercial high-performance X servers? Yes, Xi Graphics and Metro Link sells Accelerated-X product for FreeBSD and other Intel based systems. The Metro Link offering is a high performance X Server that offers easy configuration using the FreeBSD Package suite of tools, support for multiple concurrent video boards and is distributed in binary form only, in a convienent FTP download. Not to mention the Metro Link offering is available at the very reasonable price of $39. Metro Link also sells both ELF and a.out Motif for FreeBSD (see above). More info Metro Link WWW page or Sales or Support email addresses. or phone (954) 938-0283 or +1 954 938-0283 The Xi Graphics offering is a high performance X Server that offers easy configuration, support for multiple concurrent video boards and is distributed in binary form only, in a unified diskette distribution for FreeBSD and Linux. Xi Graphics also offers a high performance X Server taylored for laptop support. There is a free compatibility demo of version 5.0 available. Xi Graphics also sells Motif and CDE for FreeBSD (see above). More info Xi Graphics WWW page or Sales or Support email addresses. or phone (800) 946 7433 or +1 303 298-7478. Are there any Database systems for FreeBSD? Yes! See the Commercial Vendors section of FreeBSD's Web site. Also see the Databases section of the Ports collection. Can I run Oracle on FreeBSD? Yes. The following pages tell you exactly how to setup Linux-Oracle on FreeBSD: http://www.scc.nl/~marcel/howto-oracle.html http://www.lf.net/lf/pi/oracle/install-linux-oracle-on-freebsd User Applications So, where are all the user applications? Please take a look at the ports page for info on software packages ported to FreeBSD. The list currently tops 3400 and is growing daily, so come back to check often or subscribe to the freebsd-announce mailing list for periodic updates on new entries. Most ports should be available for the 2.2, 3.x and 4.x branches, and many of them should work on 2.1.x systems as well. Each time a FreeBSD release is made, a snapshot of the ports tree at the time of release in also included in the ports/ directory. We also support the concept of a package, essentially no more than a gzipped binary distribution with a little extra intelligence embedded in it for doing whatever custom installation work is required. A package can be installed and uninstalled again easily without having to know the gory details of which files it includes. Use the package installation menu in /stand/sysinstall (under the post-configuration menu item) or invoke the pkg_add(1) command on the specific package files you're interested in installing. Package files can usually be identified by their .tgz suffix and CDROM distribution people will have a packages/All directory on their CD which contains such files. They can also be downloaded over the net for various versions of FreeBSD at the following locations: for 2.2.8-RELEASE/2.2.8-STABLE ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-2.2.8/ for 3.X-RELEASE/3.X-STABLE ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-3-stable/ for 4.X-RELEASE/4-STABLE ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/ for 5.X-CURRENT ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5-current or your nearest local mirror site. Note that all ports may not be available as packages since new ones are constantly being added. It is always a good idea to check back periodically to see which packages are available at the ftp.FreeBSD.org master site. Why is /bin/sh so minimal? Why doesn't FreeBSD use bash or another shell? Because POSIX says that there shall be such a shell. The more complicated answer: many people need to write shell scripts which will be portable across many systems. That's why POSIX specifies the shell and utility commands in great detail. Most scripts are written in Bourne shell, and because several important programming interfaces (&man.make.1;, &man.system.3;, &man.popen.3;, and analogues in higher-level scripting languages like Perl and Tcl) are specified to use the Bourne shell to interpret commands. Because the Bourne shell is so often and widely used, it is important for it to be quick to start, be deterministic in its behavior, and have a small memory footprint. The existing implementation is our best effort at meeting as many of these requirements simultaneously as we can. In order to keep /bin/sh small, we have not provided many of the convenience features that other shells have. That's why the Ports Collection includes more featureful shells like bash, scsh, tcsh, and zsh. (You can compare for yourself the memory utilization of all these shells by looking at the VSZ and RSS columns in a ps -u listing.) Where do I find libc.so.3.0? You are trying to run a package built on 2.2 and later on a 2.1.x system. Please take a look at the previous section and get the correct port/package for your system. I get a message Error: can't find libc.so.4.0 You accidently downloaded packages meant for 4.X and 5.X systems and attempted to install them on your 2.X or 3.X FreeBSD system. Please download the correct version of the packages. ghostscript gives lots of errors with my 386/486SX. You don't have a math co-processor, right? You will need to add the alternative math emulator to your kernel; you do this by adding the following to your kernel config file and it will be compiled in. options GPL_MATH_EMULATE You will need to remove the MATH_EMULATE option when you do this. When I run a SCO/iBCS2 application, it bombs on socksys (FreeBSD 3.0 and older only). You first need to edit the /etc/sysconfig (or /etc/rc.conf) file in the last section to change the following variable to YES: # Set to YES if you want ibcs2 (SCO) emulation loaded at startup ibcs2=NO It will load the ibcs2 kernel module at startup. You'll then need to set up /compat/ibcs2/dev to look like: lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9 Oct 15 22:20 X0R@ -> /dev/null lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 7 Oct 15 22:20 nfsd@ -> socksys -rw-rw-r-- 1 root wheel 0 Oct 28 12:02 null lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9 Oct 15 22:20 socksys@ -> /dev/null crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 41, 1 Oct 15 22:14 spx You just need socksys to go to /dev/null to fake the open & close. The code in -CURRENT will handle the rest. This is much cleaner than the way it was done before. If you want the spx driver for a local socket X connection, define SPX_HACK when you compile the system. How do I configure INN (Internet News) for my machine? After installing the inn package or port, an excellent place to start is Dave Barr's INN Page where you'll find the INN FAQ. What version of Microsoft FrontPage should I get? Use the Port, Luke! A pre-patched version of Apache is available in the ports tree. Does FreeBSD support Java? Yes. Please see http://www.FreeBSD.org/java/. Why can't I build this port on my 3.X-STABLE machine? If you're running a FreeBSD version that lags significantly behind -CURRENT or -STABLE, you may need a ports upgrade kit from http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/. If you are up to date, then someone might have committed a change to the port which works for -CURRENT but which broke the port for -STABLE. Please submit a bug report on this with the send-pr(1) command, since the ports collection is supposed to work for both the -CURRENT and -STABLE branches. Where do I find ld.so? If you want to run some aout applications like Netscape Navigator on an Elf'ened machine such as 3.1-R or later, it would need /usr/libexec/ld.so and some aout libs. They are included in the compat22 distribution. Use /stand/sysinstall or install.sh in the compat22 subdirectory and install it. Also read ERRATAs for 3.1-R and 3.2-R. I updated the sources, now how do I update my installed ports? Unfortunately, there is no easy way to update installed ports. The pkg_version command can be used to generate a script that will update the installed ports with a newer version in the ports tree: &prompt.root; pkg_version > /tmp/myscript The output script must be edited by hand before you use it. Current versions of pkg_version force this by inserting an exit at the beginning of the script. You should save the output of the script, as it will note packages that depend on the one that has been udpated. These may or may not need to be updated as well. The usual case where they need to be updated is that a shared library has changed version numbers, so the ports that used that library need to be rebuilt to use the new version. If your system is up full time, the &man.periodic.8 system can be used to generate a weekly list of ports that might need updating by setting weekly_status_pkg_enable="YES" in /etc/periodic.conf. Kernel Configuration I'd like to customize my kernel. Is it difficult? Not at all! Check out the kernel config section of the Handbook. I recommend making a dated snapshot of your kernel in kernel.YYMMDD after you get it all working, that way if you do something dire the next time you play with your configuration you can boot that kernel instead of having to go all the way back to kernel.GENERIC. This is particularly important if you're now booting off a controller that isn't supported in the GENERIC kernel (yes, personal experience). My kernel compiles fail because _hw_float is missing. Let me guess. You removed npx0 from your kernel configuration file because you don't have a math co-processor, right? Wrong! :-) The npx0 is MANDATORY. Even if you don't have a mathematic co-processor, you must include the npx0 device. Why is my kernel so big (over 10MB)? Chances are, you compiled your kernel in debug mode. Kernels built in debug mode contain many symbols that are used for debugging, thus greatly increasing the size of the kernel. Note that if you running a FreeBSD 3.0 or later system, there will be little or no performance decrease from running a debug kernel, and it is useful to keep one around in case of a system panic. However, if you are running low on disk space, or you simply don't want to run a debug kernel, make sure that both of the following are true: You do not have a line in your kernel configuration file that reads: makeoptions DEBUG=-g You are not running config with the option. Both of the above situations will cause your kernel to be built in debug mode. As long as you make sure you follow the steps above, you can build your kernel normally, and you should notice a fairly large size decrease; most kernels tend to be around 1.5MB to 2MB. Interrupt conflicts with multi-port serial code. Q. When I compile a kernel with multi-port serial code, it tells me that only the first port is probed and the rest skipped due to interrupt conflicts. How do I fix this? A. The problem here is that FreeBSD has code built-in to keep the kernel from getting trashed due to hardware or software conflicts. The way to fix this is to leave out the IRQ settings on all but one port. Here is a example: # # Multiport high-speed serial line - 16550 UARTS # device sio2 at isa? port 0x2a0 tty irq 5 flags 0x501 vector siointr device sio3 at isa? port 0x2a8 tty flags 0x501 vector siointr device sio4 at isa? port 0x2b0 tty flags 0x501 vector siointr device sio5 at isa? port 0x2b8 tty flags 0x501 vector siointr Every kernel I try to build fails to compile; even GENERIC. There are a number of possible causes for this problem. They are, in no particular order: You are not using the new make buildkernel and make installkernel targets, and your source tree is different from the one used to build the currently running system (e.g., you're compiling 4.2-RELEASE on a 4.0-RELEASE system). If you're attempting an upgrade, please read the /usr/src/UPDATING file, paying particular attention to the COMMON ITEMS section at the end. You are using the new make buildkernel and make installkernel targets, but you failed to assert the completion of the make buildworld target. The make buildkernel target relies on files generated by the make buildworld target to complete its job correctly. Even if you are trying to build FreeBSD-STABLE, it is possible that you fetched the source tree at a time when it was either being modified, or broken for other reasons; only releases are absolutly guaranteed to be buildable, although FreeBSD-STABLE builds fine the majority of the time. If you have not already done so, try re-fetching the source tree and see if the problem goes away. Try using a different server in case the one you're using is having problems. System Administration Where are the system start-up configuration files? From 2.0.5R to 2.2.1R, the primary configuration file is /etc/sysconfig. All the options are to be specified in this file and other files such as /etc/rc and /etc/netstart just include it. Look in the /etc/sysconfig file and change the value to match your system. This file is filled with comments to show what to put in there. In post-2.2.1 and 3.0, /etc/sysconfig was renamed to a more self-describing rc.conf file and the syntax cleaned up a bit in the process. /etc/netstart was also renamed to /etc/rc.network so that all files could be copied with a cp /usr/src/etc/rc* /etc command. And, in 3.1 and later, /etc/rc.conf has been moved to /etc/defaults/rc.conf. Do not edit this file! Instead, if there is any entry in /etc/defaults/rc.conf that you want to change, you should copy the line into /etc/rc.conf and change it there. For example, if you wish to start named, the DNS server included with FreeBSD in FreeBSD 3.1 or later, all you need to do is: &prompt.root; echo named_enable="YES" >> /etc/rc.conf To start up local services in FreeBSD 3.1 or later, place shell scripts in the /usr/local/etc/rc.d directory. These shell scripts should be set executable, and end with a .sh. In FreeBSD 3.0 and earlier releases, you should edit the /etc/rc.local file. The /etc/rc.serial is for serial port initialization (e.g. locking the port characteristics, and so on.). The /etc/rc.i386 is for Intel-specifics settings, such as iBCS2 emulation or the PC system console configuration. How do I add a user easily? Use the adduser command. For more complicated usage, the pw command. To remove the user again, use the rmuser command. Once again, pw will work as well. How can I add my new hard disk to my FreeBSD system? See the Disk Formatting Tutorial at www.FreeBSD.org. I have a new removable drive, how do I use it? Whether it's a removable drive like a ZIP or an EZ drive (or even a floppy, if you want to use it that way), or a new hard disk, once it's installed and recognized by the system, and you have your cartridge/floppy/whatever slotted in, things are pretty much the same for all devices. (this section is based on Mark Mayo's ZIP FAQ) If it's a ZIP drive or a floppy , you've already got a DOS filesystem on it, you can use a command like this: &prompt.root; mount -t msdos /dev/fd0c /floppy if it's a floppy, or this: &prompt.root; mount -t msdos /dev/da2s4 /zip for a ZIP disk with the factory configuration. For other disks, see how they're laid out using fdisk or /stand/sysinstall. The rest of the examples will be for a ZIP drive on da2, the third SCSI disk. Unless it's a floppy, or a removable you plan on sharing with other people, it's probably a better idea to stick a BSD file system on it. You'll get long filename support, at least a 2X improvement in performance, and a lot more stability. First, you need to redo the DOS-level partitions/filesystems. You can either use fdisk or /stand/sysinstall, or for a small drive that you don't want to bother with multiple operating system support on, just blow away the whole FAT partition table (slices) and just use the BSD partitioning: &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rda2 count=2 &prompt.root; disklabel -Brw da2 auto You can use disklabel or /stand/sysinstall to create multiple BSD partitions. You'll certainly want to do this if you're adding swap space on a fixed disk, but it's probably irrelevant on a removable drive like a ZIP. Finally, create a new file system, this one's on our ZIP drive using the whole disk: &prompt.root; newfs /dev/rda2c and mount it: &prompt.root; mount /dev/da2c /zip and it's probably a good idea to add a line like this to /etc/fstab so you can just type mount /zip in the future: /dev/da2c /zip ffs rw,noauto 0 0 Why do I keep getting messages like root: not found after editing my crontab file? This is normally caused by editing the system crontab (/etc/crontab) and then using &man.crontab.1; to install it: &prompt.root; crontab /etc/crontab This is not the correct way to do things. The system crontab has a different format to the per-user crontabs which &man.crontab.1; updates (the &man.crontab.5; manual page explains the differences in more detail). If this is what you did, the extra crontab is simply a copy of /etc/crontab in the wrong format it. Delete it with the command: &prompt.root; crontab -r Next time, when you edit /etc/crontab, you should not do anything to inform &man.cron.8; of the changes, since it will notice them automatically. If you want something to be run once per day, week, or month, it's probably better to add shell scripts /usr/local/etc/periodic, and let the &man.periodic.8; command run from the system cron schedule it with the other periodic system tasks. The actual reason for the error is that the system crontab has an extra field, specifying which user to run the command as. In the default system crontab provided with FreeBSD, this is root for all entries. When this crontab is used as the root user's crontab (which is not the same as the system crontab), &man.cron.8; assumes the string root is the first word of the command to execute, but no such command exists. I made a mistake in rc.conf, or another startup file, and now I can't edit it because the filesystem is read-only. What should I do? When you get the prompt to enter the shell pathname, simply press ENTER, and run mount / to re-mount the root filesystem in read/write mode. You may also need to run mount -a -t ufs to mount the filesystem where your favourite editor is defined. If your favourite editor is on a network filesystem, you will need to either configure the network manually before you can mount network filesystems, or use an editor which resides on a local filesystem, such as &man.ed.1;. If you intend to use a full screen editor such as &man.vi.1; or &man.emacs.1;, you may also need to run export TERM=cons25 so that these editors can load the correct data from the &man.termcap.5; database. Once you have performed these steps, you can edit /etc/rc.conf as you usually would to fix the syntax error. The error message displayed immediately after the kernel boot messages should tell you the number of the line in the file which is at fault. How do I mount a secondary DOS partition? The secondary DOS partitions are found after ALL the primary partitions. For example, if you have an E partition as the second DOS partition on the second SCSI drive, you need to create the special files for slice 5 in /dev, then mount /dev/da1s5: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV da1s5 &prompt.root; mount -t msdos /dev/da1s5 /dos/e Can I mount other foreign filesystems under FreeBSD? Digital UNIX UFS CDROMs can be mounted directly on FreeBSD. Mounting disk partitions from Digital UNIX and other systems that support UFS may be more complex, depending on the details of the disk partitioning for the operating system in question. Linux: 2.2 and later have support for ext2fs partitions. See mount_ext2fs for more information. NT: A read-only NTFS driver exists for FreeBSD. For more information, see this tutorial by Mark Ovens at http://ukug.uk.freebsd.org/~mark/ntfs_install.html. Any other information on this subject would be appreciated. How can I use the NT loader to boot FreeBSD? This procedure is slightly different for 2.2.x and 3.x (with the 3-stage boot) systems. The general idea is that you copy the first sector of your native root FreeBSD partition into a file in the DOS/NT partition. Assuming you name that file something like c:\bootsect.bsd (inspired by c:\bootsect.dos), you can then edit the c:\boot.ini file to come up with something like this: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows NT" C:\BOOTSECT.BSD="FreeBSD" C:\="DOS" For 2.2.x systems this procedure assumes that DOS, NT, FreeBSD, or whatever have been installed into their respective fdisk partitions on the same disk. In my case DOS & NT are in the first fdisk partition and FreeBSD is in the second. I also installed FreeBSD to boot from its native partition, not the disk MBR. Mount a DOS-formatted floppy (if you've converted to NTFS) or the FAT partition, under, say, /mnt. &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/rda0a of=/mnt/bootsect.bsd bs=512 count=1 Reboot into DOS or NT. NTFS users copy the bootsect.bsd and/or the bootsect.lnx file from the floppy to C:\. Modify the attributes (permissions) on boot.ini with: C:\> attrib -s -r c:\boot.ini Edit to add the appropriate entries from the example boot.ini above, and restore the attributes: C:\> attrib +s +r c:\boot.ini If FreeBSD is booting from the MBR, restore it with the DOS fdisk command after you reconfigure them to boot from their native partitions. For FreeBSD 3.x systems the procedure is somewhat simpler. If FreeBSD is installed on the same disk as the NT boot partition simply copy /boot/boot1 to C:\BOOTSECT.BSD However, if FreeBSD is installed on a different disk /boot/boot1 will not work, /boot/boot0 is needed. DO NOT SIMPLY COPY /boot/boot0 INSTEAD OF /boot/boot1, YOU WILL OVERWRITE YOUR PARTITION TABLE AND RENDER YOUR COMPUTER UN-BOOTABLE! /boot/boot0 needs to be installed using sysinstall by selecting the FreeBSD boot manager on the screen which asks if you wish to use a boot manager. This is because /boot/boot0 has the partition table area filled with NULL characters but sysinstall copies the partition table before copying /boot/boot0 to the MBR. When the FreeBSD boot manager runs it records the last OS booted by setting the active flag on the partition table entry for that OS and then writes the whole 512-bytes of itself back to the MBR so if you just copy /boot/boot0 to C:\BOOTSECT.BSD then it writes an empty partition table, with the active flag set on one entry, to the MBR. How do I boot FreeBSD and Linux from LILO? If you have FreeBSD and Linux on the same disk, just follow LILO's installation instructions for booting a non-Linux operating system. Very briefly, these are: Boot Linux, and add the following lines to /etc/lilo.conf: other=/dev/hda2 table=/dev/hda label=FreeBSD (the above assumes that your FreeBSD slice is known to Linux as /dev/hda2; tailor to suit your setup). Then, run lilo as root and you should be done. If FreeBSD resides on another disk, you need to add loader=/boot/chain.b to the LILO entry. For example: other=/dev/dab4 table=/dev/dab loader=/boot/chain.b label=FreeBSD In some cases you may need to specify the BIOS drive number to the FreeBSD boot loader to successfully boot off the second disk. For example, if your FreeBSD SCSI disk is probed by BIOS as BIOS disk 1, at the FreeBSD boot loader prompt you need to specify: Boot: 1:da(0,a)/kernel On FreeBSD 2.2.5 and later, you can configure boot(8) to automatically do this for you at boot time. The Linux+FreeBSD mini-HOWTO is a good reference for FreeBSD and Linux interoperability issues. How do I boot FreeBSD and Linux using BootEasy? Install LILO at the start of your Linux boot partition instead of in the Master Boot Record. You can then boot LILO from BootEasy. If you're running Windows-95 and Linux this is recommended anyway, to make it simpler to get Linux booting again if you should need to reinstall Windows95 (which is a Jealous Operating System, and will bear no other Operating Systems in the Master Boot Record). Will a dangerously dedicated disk endanger my health? The installation procedure allows you to chose two different methods in partitioning your harddisk(s). The default way makes it compatible with other operating systems on the same machine, by using fdisk table entries (called slices in FreeBSD), with a FreeBSD slice that employs partitions of its own. Optionally, one can chose to install a boot-selector to switch between the possible operating systems on the disk(s). The alternative uses the entire disk for FreeBSD, and makes no attempt to be compatible with other operating systems. So why it is called dangerous? A disk in this mode doesn't contain what normal PC utilities would consider a valid fdisk table. Depending on how well they have been designed, they might complain at you once they are getting in contact with such a disk, or even worse, they might damage the BSD bootstrap without even asking or notifying you. In addition, the dangerously dedicated disk's layout is known to confuse many BIOSsen, including those from AWARD (eg. as found in HP Netserver and Micronics systems as well as many others) and Symbios/NCR (for the popular 53C8xx range of SCSI controllers). This isn't a complete list, there are more. Symptoms of this confusion include the read error message printed by the FreeBSD bootstrap when it can't find itself, as well as system lockups when booting. Why have this mode at all then? It only saves a few kbytes of disk space, and it can cause real problems for a new installation. Dangerously dedicated mode's origins lie in a desire to avoid one of the most common problems plaguing new FreeBSD installers - matching the BIOS geometry numbers for a disk to the disk itself. Geometry is an outdated concept, but one still at the heart of the PC's BIOS and its interaction with disks. When the FreeBSD installer creates slices, it has to record the location of these slices on the disk in a fashion that corresponds with the way the BIOS expects to find them. If it gets it wrong, you won't be able to boot. Dangerously dedicated mode tries to work around this by making the problem simpler. In some cases, it gets it right. But it's meant to be used as a last-ditch alternative - there are better ways to solve the problem 99 times out of 100. So, how do you avoid the need for DD mode when you're installing? Start by making a note of the geometry that your BIOS claims to be using for your disks. You can arrange to have the kernel print this as it boots by specifying at the boot: prompt, or using boot -v in the loader. Just before the installer starts, the kernel will print a list of BIOS geometries. Don't panic - wait for the installer to start and then use scrollback to read the numbers. Typically the BIOS disk units will be in the same order that FreeBSD lists your disks, first IDE, then SCSI. When you're slicing up your disk, check that the disk geometry displayed in the FDISK screen is correct (ie. it matches the BIOS numbers); if it's wrong, use the g key to fix it. You may have to do this if there's absolutely nothing on the disk, or if the disk has been moved from another system. Note that this is only an issue with the disk that you're going to boot from; FreeBSD will sort itself out just fine with any other disks you may have. Once you've got the BIOS and FreeBSD agreeing about the geometry of the disk, your problems are almost guaranteed to be over, and with no need for DD mode at all. If, however, you are still greeted with the dreaded read error message when you try to boot, it's time to cross your fingers and go for it - there's nothing left to lose. To return a dangerously dedicated disk for normal PC use, there are basically two options. The first is, you write enough NULL bytes over the MBR to make any subsequent installation believe this to be a blank disk. You can do this for example with &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rda0 count=15 Alternatively, the undocumented DOS feature C:\> fdisk /mbr will to install a new master boot record as well, thus clobbering the BSD bootstrap. How can I add more swap space? The best way is to increase the size of your swap partition, or take advantage of this convenient excuse to add another disk. The general rule of thumb is to have around 2x the swap space as you have main memory. However, if you have a very small amount of main memory you may want to configure swap beyond that. It is also a good idea to configure sufficient swap relative to anticipated future memory upgrades so you do not have to futz with your swap configuration later. Adding swap onto a separate disk makes things faster than simply adding swap onto the same disk. As an example, if you are compiling source located on one disk, and the swap is on another disk, this is much faster than both swap and compile on the same disk. This is true for SCSI disks specifically. When you have several disks, configuring a swap partition on each one is usually beneficial, even if you wind up putting swap on a work disk. Typically, each fast disk in your system should have some swap configured. FreeBSD supports up to 4 interleaved swap devices by default. When configuring multiple swap partitions you generally want to make them all about the same size, but people sometimes make their primary swap parition larger in order to accomodate a kernel core dump. Your primary swap partition must be at least as large as main memory in order to be able to accomodate a kernel core. IDE drives are not able to allow access to both drives on the same channel at the same time (FreeBSD doesn't support mode 4, so all IDE disk I/O is programmed). I would still suggest putting your swap on a separate drive however. The drives are so cheap, it is not worth worrying about. Swapping over NFS is only recommended if you do not have a local disk to swap to. Swapping over NFS is slow and inefficient in FreeBSD releases prior to 4.x, but reasonably fast in releases greater or equal to 4.0. Even so, it will be limited to the network bandwidth available and puts an additional burden on the NFS server. Here is an example for 64Mb vn-swap (/usr/swap0, though of course you can use any name that you want). Make sure your kernel was built with the line pseudo-device vn 1 #Vnode driver (turns a file into a device) in your config-file. The GENERIC kernel already contains this. create a vn-device &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV vn0 create a swapfile (/usr/swap0) &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/usr/swap0 bs=1024k count=64 set proper permissions on (/usr/swap0) &prompt.root; chmod 0600 /usr/swap0 enable the swap file in /etc/rc.conf swapfile="/usr/swap0" # Set to name of swapfile if aux swapfile desired. reboot the machine To enable the swap file immediately, type &prompt.root; vnconfig -ce /dev/vn0c /usr/swap0 swap I'm having problems setting up my printer. Please have a look at the Handbook entry on printing. It should cover most of your problem. See the Handbook entry on printing. The keyboard mappings are wrong for my system. The kbdcontrol program has an option to load a keyboard map file. Under /usr/share/syscons/keymaps are a number of map files. Choose the one relevant to your system and load it. &prompt.root; kbdcontrol -l uk.iso Both the /usr/share/syscons/keymaps and the .kbd extension are assumed by kbdcontrol. This can be configured in /etc/sysconfig (or rc.conf). See the appropriate comments in this file. In 2.0.5R and later, everything related to text fonts, keyboard mapping is in /usr/share/examples/syscons. The following mappings are currently supported: Belgian ISO-8859-1 Brazilian 275 keyboard Codepage 850 Brazilian 275 keyboard ISO-8859-1 Danish Codepage 865 Danish ISO-8859-1 French ISO-8859-1 German Codepage 850 German ISO-8859-1 Italian ISO-8859-1 Japanese 106 Japanese 106x Latin American Norwegian ISO-8859-1 Polish ISO-8859-2 (programmer's) Russian Codepage 866 (alternative) Russian koi8-r (shift) Russian koi8-r Spanish ISO-8859-1 Swedish Codepage 850 Swedish ISO-8859-1 Swiss-German ISO-8859-1 United Kingdom Codepage 850 United Kingdom ISO-8859-1 United States of America ISO-8859-1 United States of America dvorak United States of America dvorakx I get messages like: unknown: <PNP0303> can't assign resources on boot These indicate Plug-and-Play devices that the current kernel doesn't have drivers for. They're harmless. If you dislike these messages, the FreeBSD Project will happily accept driver contributions via send-pr. I can't get user quotas to work properly. Don't turn on quotas on /, Put the quota file on the file system that the quotas are to be enforced on. ie: Filesystem Quota file /usr /usr/admin/quotas /home /home/admin/quotas … … What's inappropriate about my ccd? The symptom of this is: &prompt.root; ccdconfig -C ccdconfig: ioctl (CCDIOCSET): /dev/ccd0c: Inappropriate file type or format This usually happens when you are trying to concatenate the c partitions, which default to type unused. The ccd driver requires the underlying partition type to be FS_BSDFFS. Edit the disklabel of the disks you are trying to concatenate and change the types of partitions to 4.2BSD. Why can't I edit the disklabel on my ccd? The symptom of this is: &prompt.root; disklabel ccd0 (it prints something sensible here, so let's try to edit it) &prompt.root; disklabel -e ccd0 (edit, save, quit) disklabel: ioctl DIOCWDINFO: No disk label on disk; use "disklabel -r" to install initial label This is because the disklabel returned by ccd is actually a fake one that is not really on the disk. You can solve this problem by writing it back explicitly, as in: &prompt.root; disklabel ccd0 > /tmp/disklabel.tmp &prompt.root; disklabel -Rr ccd0 /tmp/disklabel.tmp &prompt.root; disklabel -e ccd0 (this will work now) Does FreeBSD support System V IPC primitives? Yes, FreeBSD supports System V-style IPC. This includes shared memory, messages and semaphores. You need to add the following lines to your kernel config to enable them. options SYSVSHM options SYSVSHM # enable shared memory options SYSVSEM # enable for semaphores options SYSVMSG # enable for messaging In FreeBSD 3.2 and later, these options are already part of the GENERIC kernel, which meansthey should already be compiled into your system. Recompile and install your kernel. How do I use sendmail for mail delivery with UUCP? The sendmail configuration that ships with FreeBSD is suited for sites that connect directly to the Internet. Sites that wish to exchange their mail via UUCP must install another sendmail configuration file. Tweaking /etc/sendmail.cf manually is considered something for purists. Sendmail version 8 comes with a new approach of generating config files via some m4 preprocessing, where the actual hand-crafted configuration is on a higher abstraction level. You should use the configuration files under /usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail/cf If you didn't install your system with full sources, the sendmail config stuff has been broken out into a separate source distribution tarball just for you. Assuming you've got your CD-ROM mounted, do: &prompt.root; cd /cdrom/src &prompt.root; cat scontrib.?? | tar xzf - -C /usr/src contrib/sendmail Don't panic, this is only a few hundred kilobytes in size. The file README in the cf directory can serve as a basic introduction to m4 configuration. For UUCP delivery, you are best advised to use the mailertable feature. This constitutes a database that sendmail can use to base its routing decision upon. First, you have to create your .mc file. The directory /usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail/cf/cf is the home of these files. Look around, there are already a few examples. Assuming you have named your file foo.mc, all you need to do in order to convert it into a valid sendmail.cf is: &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail/cf/cf &prompt.root; make foo.cf &prompt.root; cp foo.cf /etc/sendmail.cf A typical .mc file might look like: include(`../m4/cf.m4') VERSIONID(`Your version number') OSTYPE(bsd4.4) FEATURE(nodns) FEATURE(nocanonify) FEATURE(mailertable) define(`UUCP_RELAY', your.uucp.relay) define(`UUCP_MAX_SIZE', 200000) MAILER(local) MAILER(smtp) MAILER(uucp) Cw your.alias.host.name Cw youruucpnodename.UUCP The nodns and nocanonify features will prevent any usage of the DNS during mail delivery. The UUCP_RELAY clause is needed for bizarre reasons, don't ask. Simply put an Internet hostname there that is able to handle .UUCP pseudo-domain addresses; most likely, you will enter the mail relay of your ISP there. Once you've got this, you need this file called /etc/mailertable. A typical example of this gender again: # # makemap hash /etc/mailertable.db < /etc/mailertable # horus.interface-business.de uucp-dom:horus .interface-business.de uucp-dom:if-bus interface-business.de uucp-dom:if-bus .heep.sax.de smtp8:%1 horus.UUCP uucp-dom:horus if-bus.UUCP uucp-dom:if-bus . uucp-dom: As you can see, this is part of a real-life file. The first three lines handle special cases where domain-addressed mail should not be sent out to the default route, but instead to some UUCP neighbor in order to shortcut the delivery path. The next line handles mail to the local Ethernet domain that can be delivered using SMTP. Finally, the UUCP neighbors are mentioned in the .UUCP pseudo-domain notation, to allow for a uucp-neighbor !recipient override of the default rules. The last line is always a single dot, matching everything else, with UUCP delivery to a UUCP neighbor that serves as your universal mail gateway to the world. All of the node names behind the uucp-dom: keyword must be valid UUCP neighbors, as you can verify using the command uuname. As a reminder that this file needs to be converted into a DBM database file before being usable, the command line to accomplish this is best placed as a comment at the top of the mailertable. You always have to execute this command each time you change your mailertable. Final hint: if you are uncertain whether some particular mail routing would work, remember the option to sendmail. It starts sendmail in address test mode; simply enter 0 , followed by the address you wish to test for the mail routing. The last line tells you the used internal mail agent, the destination host this agent will be called with, and the (possibly translated) address. Leave this mode by typing Control-D. &prompt.user; sendmail -bt ADDRESS TEST MODE (ruleset 3 NOT automatically invoked) Enter <ruleset> <address> > 0 foo@interface-business.de rewrite: ruleset 0 input: foo @ interface-business . de ... rewrite: ruleset 0 returns: $# uucp-dom $@ if-bus $: foo \ < @ interface-business . de > > ^D How do I set up mail with a dialup connection to the 'net? If you've got a statically assigned IP number, you should not need to adjust anything from the default. Set your host name up as your assigned internet name and sendmail will do the rest. If you've got a dynamically assigned IP number and use a dialup ppp connection to the internet, you will probably be given a mailbox on your ISPs mail server. Lets assume your ISPs domain is myISP.com, and that your user name is user. Lets also assume you've called your machine bsd.home and that your ISP has told you that you may use relay.myISP.com as a mail relay. In order to retrieve mail from your mailbox, you'll need to install a retrieval agent. Fetchmail is a good choice as it supports many different protocols. Usually, POP3 will be provided by your ISP. If you've chosen to use user-ppp, you can automatically fetch your mail when a connection to the 'net is established with the following entry in /etc/ppp/ppp.linkup: MYADDR: !bg su user -c fetchmail If you are using sendmail (as shown below) to deliver mail to non-local accounts, put the command !bg su user -c "sendmail -q" after the above shown entry. This forces sendmail to process your mailqueue as soon as the connection to the 'net is established. I'm assuming that you have an account for user on bsd.home. In the home directory of user on bsd.home, create a .fetchmailrc file: poll myISP.com protocol pop3 fetchall pass MySecret Needless to say, this file should not be readable by anyone except user as it contains the password MySecret. In order to send mail with the correct from: header, you must tell sendmail to use user@myISP.com rather than user@bsd.home. You may also wish to tell sendmail to send all mail via relay.myISP.com, allowing quicker mail transmission. The following .mc file should suffice: VERSIONID(`bsd.home.mc version 1.0') OSTYPE(bsd4.4)dnl FEATURE(nouucp)dnl MAILER(local)dnl MAILER(smtp)dnl Cwlocalhost Cwbsd.home MASQUERADE_AS(`myISP.com')dnl FEATURE(allmasquerade)dnl FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)dnl FEATURE(nocanonify)dnl FEATURE(nodns)dnl define(`SMART_HOST', `relay.myISP.com') Dmbsd.home define(`confDOMAIN_NAME',`bsd.home')dnl define(`confDELIVERY_MODE',`deferred')dnl Refer to the previous section for details of how to turn this .mc file into a sendmail.cf file. Also, don't forget to restart sendmail after updating sendmail.cf. What's this UID 0 toor account? Have I been compromised? Don't worry. toor is an alternative superuser account (toor is root spelt backwards). Previously it was created when the &man.bash.1; shell was installed but now it is created by default. It is intended to be used with a non-standard shell so you don't have to change root's default shell. This is important as shells which aren't part of the base distribution (for example a shell installed from ports or packages) are likely be to be installed in /usr/local/bin which, by default, resides on a different filesystem. If root's shell is located in /usr/local/bin and /usr (or whatever filesystem contains /usr/local/bin) isn't mounted for some reason, root won't be able to log in to fix a problem (although if you reboot into single user mode you'll be prompted for the path to a shell). Some people use toor for day-to-day root tasks with a non-standard shell, leaving root, with a standard shell, for single user mode or emergencies. By default you can't log in using toor as it doesn't have a password, so log in as root and set a password for toor if you want to use it. Eek! I forgot the root password! Don't Panic! Simply restart the system, type boot -s at the Boot: prompt (just -s for FreeBSD releases before 3.2) to enter Single User mode. At the question about the shell to use, hit ENTER. You'll be dropped to a &prompt.root; prompt. Enter mount -u / to remount your root filesystem read/write, then run mount -a to remount all the filesystems. Run passwd root to change the root password then run exit to continue booting. How do I keep Control-Alt-Delete from rebooting the system? If you are using syscons (the default console driver) in FreeBSD 2.2.7-RELEASE or later, build and install a new kernel with the line options SC_DISABLE_REBOOT in the configuration file. If you use the PCVT console driver in FreeBSD 2.2.5-RELEASE or later, use the following kernel configuration line instead: options PCVT_CTRL_ALT_DEL For older versions of FreeBSD, edit the keymap you are using for the console and replace the boot keywords with nop. The default keymap is /usr/share/syscons/keymaps/us.iso.kbd. You may have to instruct /etc/rc.conf to load this keymap explicitly for the change to take effect. Of course if you are using an alternate keymap for your country, you should edit that one instead. How do I reformat DOS text files to UNIX ones? Simply use this perl command: &prompt.user; perl -i.bak -npe 's/\r\n/\n/g' file ... file is the file(s) to process. The modification is done in-place, with the original file stored with a .bak extension. Alternatively you can use the tr command: &prompt.user; tr -d '\r' < dos-text-file > unix-file dos-text-file is the file containing DOS text while unix-file will contain the converted output. This can be quite a bit faster than using perl. How do I kill processes by name? Use killall. Why is su bugging me about not being in root's ACL? The error comes from the Kerberos distributed authentication system. The problem isn't fatal but annoying. You can either run su with the -K option, or uninstall Kerberos as described in the next question. How do I uninstall Kerberos? To remove Kerberos from the system, reinstall the bin distribution for the release you are running. If you have the CDROM, you can mount the cd (we'll assume on /cdrom) and run &prompt.root; cd /cdrom/bin &prompt.root; ./install.sh Alternately, you can remove all "MAKE_KERBEROS" options from /etc/make.conf and rebuild world. How do I add pseudoterminals to the system? If you have lots of telnet, ssh, X, or screen users, you'll probably run out of pseudoterminals. Here's how to add more: Build and install a new kernel with the line pseudo-device pty 256 in the configuration file. Run the commands &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV pty{1,2,3,4,5,6,7} to make 256 device nodes for the new terminals. Edit /etc/ttys and add lines for each of the 256 terminals. They should match the form of the existing entries, i.e. they look like ttyqc none network The order of the letter designations is tty[pqrsPQRS][0-9a-v], using a regular expression. Reboot the system with the new kernel and you're ready to go. I can't create the snd0 device! There is no snd device. The name is used as a shorthand for the various devices that make up the FreeBSD sound driver, such as mixer, sequencer, and dsp. To create these devices you should &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV snd0 How do I re-read /etc/rc.conf and re-start /etc/rc without a reboot? Go into single user mode and than back to multi user mode. On the console do: &prompt.root; shutdown now (Note: without -r or -h) &prompt.root; return &prompt.root; exit What is a sandbox? Sandbox is a security term. It can mean two things: A process which is placed inside a set of virtual walls that are designed to prevent someone who breaks into the process from being able to break into the wider system. The process is said to be able to play inside the walls. That is, nothing the process does in regards to executing code is supposed to be able to breech the walls so you do not have to do a detailed audit of its code to be able to say certain things about its security. The walls might be a userid, for example. This is the definition used in the security and named man pages. Take the ntalk service, for example (see /etc/inetd.conf). This service used to run as userid root. Now it runs as userid tty. The tty user is a sandbox designed to make it more difficult for someone who has successfully hacked into the system via ntalk from being able to hack beyond that user id. A process which is placed inside a simulation of the machine. This is more hard-core. Basically it means that someone who is able to break into the process may believe that he can break into the wider machine but is, in fact, only breaking into a simulation of that machine and not modifying any real data. The most common way to accomplish this is to build a simulated environment in a subdirectory and then run the processes in that directory chroot'd (i.e. / for that process is this directory, not the real / of the system). Another common use is to mount an underlying filesystem read-only and then create a filesystem layer on top of it that gives a process a seemingly writeable view into that filesystem. The process may believe it is able to write to those files, but only the process sees the effects - other processes in the system do not, necessarily. An attempt is made to make this sort of sandbox so transparent that the user (or hacker) does not realize that he is sitting in it. UNIX implements two core sanboxes. One is at the process level, and one is at the userid level. Every UNIX process is completely firewalled off from every other UNIX process. One process can not modify the address space of another. This is unlike Windows where a process can easily overwrite the address space of any other, leading to a crash. A UNIX process is owned by a patricular userid. If the userid is not the root user, it serves to firewall the process off from processes owned by other users. The userid is also used to firewall off on-disk data. What is securelevel? The securelevel is a security mechanism implemented in the kernel. Basically, when the securelevel is positive, the kernel restricts certain tasks; not even the superuser (i.e., root) is allowed to do them. At the time of this writing, the securelevel mechanism is capable of, among other things, limiting the ability to, unset certain file flags, such as schg (the system immutable flag), write to kernel memory via /dev/mem and /dev/kmem, load kernel modules, and alter &man.ipfirewall.4; rules. To check the status of the securelevel on a running system, simply execute the following command: &prompt.root; sysctl kern.securelevel The output will contain the name of the &man.sysctl.8; variable (in this case, kern.securelevel) and a number. The latter is the current value of the securelevel. If it is positive (i.e., greater than 0), at least some of the securelevel's protections are enabled. You cannot lower the securelevel of a running system; being able to do that would defeat its purpose. If you need to do a task that requires that the securelevel be non-positive (e.g., an installworld or changing the date), you will have to change the securelevel setting in /etc/rc.conf (you want to look for the kern_securelevel and kern_securelevel_enable variables) and reboot. For more information on securelevel and the specific things all the levels do, please consult the &man.init.8; manual page. Securelevel is not a silver bullet; it has many known deficiencies. More often than not, it provides a false sense of security. One of its biggest problems is that in order for it to be at all effective, all files used in the boot process up until the securelevel is set must be protected. If an attacker can get the system to execute their code prior to the securelevel being set (which happens quite late in the boot process since some things the system must do at start-up cannot be done at an elevated securelevel), its protections are invalidated. While this task of protecting all files used in the boot process is not technically impossible, if it is achieved, system maintenance will become a nightmare since one would have to take the system down, at least to single-user mode, to modify a configuration file. This point and others are often discussed on the mailing lists, particuarly freebsd-security. Please search the archives here for an extensive discussion. Some people are hopeful that securelevel will soon go away in favor of a more fine-grained mechanism, but things are still hazy in this respect. Consider yourself warned. How do I let ordinary users mount floppies, CDROMs and other removable media? Ordinary users can be permitted to mount devices. Here is how: As root set the sysctl variable vfs.usermount to 1. &prompt.root; sysctl -w vfs.usermount=1 As root assign the appropriate permissions to the block device associated with the removable media. For example, to allow users to mount the first floppy drive, use: &prompt.root; chmod 666 /dev/fd0 To allow users in the group operator to mount the cdrom drive, use: &prompt.root; chgrp operator /dev/cd0c &prompt.root; chmod 640 /dev/cd0c Finally, add the line vfs.usermount=1 to the file /etc/sysctl.conf so that it is reset at system boot time. All users can now mount the floppy /dev/fd0 onto a directory that they own: &prompt.user; mkdir ~/my-mount-point &prompt.user; mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 ~/my-mount-point Users in group operator can now mount the cdrom /dev/cd0c onto a directory that they own: &prompt.user; mkdir ~/my-mount-point &prompt.user; mount -t msdos /dev/cd0c ~/my-mount-point Unmounting the device is simple: &prompt.user; umount ~/my-mount-point Enabling vfs.usermount, however, has negative security implications. A better way to access MSDOS formatted media is to use the mtools package in the ports collection. How do I move my system over to my huge new disk? The best way is to reinstall the OS on the new disk, then move the user data over. This is highly recommended if you've been tracking -stable for more than one release, or have updated a release instead of installing a new one. You can install booteasy on both disks with &man.boot0cfg.8;, and dual boot them until you are happy with the new configuration. Skip the next paragraph to find out how to move the data after doing this. Should you decide not to do a fresh install, you need to partition and label the new disk with either /stand/sysinstall, or &man.fdisk.8; and &man.disklabel.8;. You should also install booteasy on both disks with &man.boot0cfg.8;, so that you can dual boot to the old or new system after the copying is done. See the formatting-media tutorial for details on this process. Now you've got the new disk set up, and are ready to move the data. Unfortunately, you can't just blindly copy the data. Things like device files (in /dev) and symbolic links tend to screw that up. You need to use tools that understand these things, which means &man.dump.8; and &man.tar.1;. I recommend doing the data moves in single user mode, but it's not required. You should never use anything but &man.dump.8; and &man.restore.8; to move the root file system. The &man.tar.1; command may work - then again, it may not. You should also use &man.dump.8; and &man.restore.8; if you are moving a single partition to another empty partition. The sequence of steps to use dump to move a partitions data to a new partition is: newfs the new partition. mount it on a temporary mount point. cd to that directory. dump the old partition, piping output to the new one. For example, if you are going to move root to /dev/ad1s1a, with /mnt as the temporary mount point, it's: &prompt.root; newfs /dev/ad1s1a &prompt.root; mount /dev/ad1s1a &prompt.root; cd /mnt &prompt.root; dump 0uaf - / | restore xf - If you are going to rearrange your partitions - say, splitting one into two, or combing two into one, you may find yourself needing to move everything under a subdirectory to a new location. Since &man.dump.8; works with file systems, it can't do this. So you use &man.tar.1;. The general command to move /old to /new for &man.tar.1; is: &prompt.root; (cd /old; tar cf - .) | (cd /new; tar xpf -) If /old has file systems mounted on that, and you don't want to move that data or unmount them, you just add the 'l' flag to the first &man.tar.1;: &prompt.root; (cd /old; tar clf - .) | (cd /new; tar xpf -). You might prefer cpio(1), pax(1) or cpdup (in ports/sysutils/cpdup) to tar. I tried to update my system to the latest -STABLE, but got -RC or -BETA! What's going on? Short answer: it's just a name. RC stands for Release Candidate. It signifies that a release is imminent. In FreeBSD, -BETA is typically synonymous with the code freeze before a release. Long answer: FreeBSD derives its releases from one of two places. Major, dot-zero, releases, such as 3.0-RELEASE and 4.0-RELEASE, are branched from the head of the development stream, commonly referred to as -CURRENT. Minor releases, such as 3.1-RELEASE or 4.2-RELEASE, are snapshots of the active -STABLE branch. When a release is about to be made, the branch from which it will be derived from has to undergo a certain process. Part of this process is a code freeze. When a code freeze is initiated, the name of the branch is changed to reflect that it's about to become a release. For example, if the branch used to be called 4.0-STABLE, its name will be changed to 4.1-BETA to signify the code freeze and signify that extra pre-release testing should be happening. Bug fixes can still be committed to be part of the release. When the source code is in shape for the release the name will be chagned to 4.1-RC to signify that a release is about to be made from it. Once in the RC stage, only the most critical bugs found can be fixed. Once the release, 4.1-RELEASE in this example, has been made, the branch will be renamed to 4.1-STABLE. I tried to install a new kernel, and the chflags failed. How do I get around this? Short answer: You're probably at security level greater than 0. Reboot directly to single user mode to install the kernel. Long answer: FreeBSD disallows changing system flags at security levels greater than 0. You can check your security level with the command: &prompt.root; sysctl kern.securelevel You cannot lower the security level; you have to boot to single mode to install the kernel, or change the security in /etc/rc.conf then reboot. See the &man.init.8; man page for details on securelevel, and see /etc/defaults/rc.conf and the &man.rc.conf.5; man page for more information on rc.conf. I can't change the time on my system by more than one second! How do I get around this? Short answer: You're probably at security level greater than 1. Reboot directly to single user mode to change the date. Long answer: FreeBSD disallows changing the time by more that one second at security levels greater than 1. You can check your security level with the command: &prompt.root; sysctl kern.securelevel You cannot lower the security level; you have to boot to single mode to change the date, or change the security level in /etc/rc.conf then reboot. See the &man.init.8; man page for details on securelevel, and see /etc/defaults/rc.conf and the &man.rc.conf.5; man page for more information on rc.conf. There is a memory leak in &man.rpc.statd.8;! It is using 256 Mbytes of memory! No, there is no memory leak, and it's not using 256 Mbytes of memory. It simply likes to (i.e., always does) map an obscene amount of memory into its address space for convenience. There is nothing terribly wrong with this from a technical standpoint; it just throws off things like &man.top.1; and &man.ps.1;. &man.rpc.statd.8; maps its status file (resident on /var) into its address space; to save worrying about remapping it later when it needs to grow, it maps it with a generious size. This is very evident from the source code, where one can see that the length argument to &man.mmap.2; is 0x10000000, or one sixteenth of the address space on an IA32, or exactly 256MB. Why can't I unset the schg file flag? You're running at an elevated (i.e., greater than 0) securelevel. Lower the securelevel and try again. For more information, see the FAQ entry on securelevel and the &man.init.8; manual page. The X Window System and Virtual Consoles I want to run X, how do I go about it? The easiest way is to simply specify that you want to run X during the installation process. Then read and follow the documentation on the xf86config tool, which assists you in configuring XFree86(tm) for your particular graphics card/mouse/etc. You may also wish to investigate the Xaccel server. See the section on Xi Graphics or Metro Link for more details. I tried to run X, but I get an KDENABIO failed (Operation not permitted) error when I type startx. What do I do now? Your system is running at a raised securelevel, isn't it? It is, indeed, impossible to start X at a raised securelevel. To see why, look at the &man.init.8; man page. So the question is what else you should do instead, and you basically have two choices: set your securelevel back down to zero (usually from /etc/rc.conf), or run &man.xdm.1; at boot time (before the securelevel is raised). See for more information about running &man.xdm.1; at boot time. Why doesn't my mouse work with X? If you are using syscons (the default console driver), you can configure FreeBSD to support a mouse pointer on each virtual screen. In order to avoid conflicting with X, syscons supports a virtual device called /dev/sysmouse. All mouse events received from the real mouse device are written to the sysmouse device via moused. If you wish to use your mouse on one or more virtual consoles, and use X, see and set up moused. Then edit /etc/XF86Config and make sure you have the following lines. Section Pointer Protocol "SysMouse" Device "/dev/sysmouse" ..... The above example is for XFree86 3.3.2 or later. For earlier versions, the Protocol should be MouseSystems. Some people prefer to use /dev/mouse under X. To make this work, /dev/mouse should be linked to /dev/sysmouse: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; rm -f mouse &prompt.root; ln -s sysmouse mouse My mouse has a fancy wheel. Can I use it in X? Yes. But you need to customize X client programs. See Colas Nahaboo's web page (http://www.inria.fr/koala/colas/mouse-wheel-scroll/) . If you want to use the imwheel program, just follow these simple steps. Translate the Wheel Events The imwheel program works by translating mouse button 4 and mouse button 5 events into key events. Thus, you have to get the mouse driver to translate mouse wheel events to button 4 and 5 events. There are two ways of doing this, the first way is to have &man.moused.8; do the translation. The second way is for the X server itself to do the event translation. Using &man.moused.8; to Translate Wheel Events To have &man.moused.8; perform the event translations, simply add to the command line used to start &man.moused.8;. For example, if you normally start &man.moused.8; via moused -p /dev/psm0 you would start it by entering moused -p /dev/psm0 -z 4 instead. If you start &man.moused.8; automatically during bootup via /etc/rc.conf, you can simply add to the moused_flags variable in /etc/rc.conf. You now need to tell X that you have a 5 button mouse. To do this, simply add the line Buttons 5 to the Pointer section of /etc/XF86Config. For example, you might have the following Pointer section in /etc/XF86Config. <quote>Pointer</quote> Section for Wheeled Mouse in XFree86 3.3.x series XF86Config with moused Translation Section "Pointer" Protocol "SysMouse" Device "/dev/sysmouse" Buttons 5 EndSection <quote>InputDevice</quote> Section for Wheeled Mouse in XFree86 4.x series XF86Config with automatic protocol recognition and button mapping Translation Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse1" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/psm0" Option "Buttons" "5" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection <quote>.emacs</quote> example for naive page scrolling with Wheeled Mouse ;; wheel mouse (global-set-key [mouse-4] 'scroll-down) (global-set-key [mouse-5] 'scroll-up) Using Your X Server to Translate the Wheel Events If you aren't running &man.moused.8;, or if you don't want &man.moused.8; to translate your wheel events, you can have the X server do the event translation instead. This requires a couple of modifications to your /etc/XF86Config file. First, you need to choose the proper protocol for your mouse. Most wheeled mice use the IntelliMouse protocol. However, XFree86 does support other protocols, such as MouseManPlusPS/2 for the Logitech MouseMan+ mice. Once you have chosen the protocol you will use, you need to add a Protocol line to the Pointer section. Secondly, you need to tell the X server to remap wheel scroll events to mouse buttons 4 and 5. This is done with the ZAxisMapping option. For example, if you aren't using &man.moused.8;, and you have an IntelliMouse attached to the PS/2 mouse port you would use the following in /etc/XF86Config. <quote>Pointer</quote> Section for Wheeled Mouse in <filename>XF86Config</filename> with X Server Translation Section "Pointer" Protocol "IntelliMouse" Device "/dev/psm0" ZAxisMapping 4 5 EndSection Install imwheel Next, install imwheel from the Ports collection. It can be found in the x11 category. This program will map the wheel events from your mouse into keyboard events. For example, it might send Page Up to a program when you scroll the wheel forwards. Imwheel uses a configuration file to map the wheel events to keypresses so that it can send different keys to different applications. The default imwheel configuration file is installed in /usr/X11R6/etc/imwheelrc. You can copy it to ~/.imwheelrc and then edit it if you wish to customize imwheel's configuration. The format of the configuration file is documented in &man.imwheel.1;. Configure Emacs to Work with Imwheel (optional) If you use emacs or Xemacs, then you need to add a small section to your ~/.emacs file. For emacs, add the following: <application>Emacs</application> Configuration for <application>Imwheel</application> ;;; For imwheel (setq imwheel-scroll-interval 3) (defun imwheel-scroll-down-some-lines () (interactive) (scroll-down imwheel-scroll-interval)) (defun imwheel-scroll-up-some-lines () (interactive) (scroll-up imwheel-scroll-interval)) (global-set-key [?\M-\C-\)] 'imwheel-scroll-up-some-lines) (global-set-key [?\M-\C-\(] 'imwheel-scroll-down-some-lines) ;;; end imwheel section For Xemacs, add the following to your ~/.emacs file instead: <application>Xemacs</application> Configuration for <application>Imwheel</application> ;;; For imwheel (setq imwheel-scroll-interval 3) (defun imwheel-scroll-down-some-lines () (interactive) (scroll-down imwheel-scroll-interval)) (defun imwheel-scroll-up-some-lines () (interactive) (scroll-up imwheel-scroll-interval)) (define-key global-map [(control meta \))] 'imwheel-scroll-up-some-lines) (define-key global-map [(control meta \()] 'imwheel-scroll-down-some-lines) ;;; end imwheel section Run Imwheel You can just type imwheel in an xterm to start it up once it is installed. It will background itself and take effect immediately. If you want to always use imwheel, simply add it to your .xinitrc or .xsession file. You can safely ignore any warnings imwheel displays about PID files. Those warnings only apply to the Linux version of imwheel. X Window menus and dialog boxes don't work right! Try turning off the Num Lock key. If your Num Lock key is on by default at boot-time, you may add the following line in the Keyboard section of the XF86Config file. # Let the server do the NumLock processing. This should only be # required when using pre-R6 clients ServerNumLock What is a virtual console and how do I make more? Virtual consoles, put simply, enable you to have several simultaneous sessions on the same machine without doing anything complicated like setting up a network or running X. When the system starts, it will display a login prompt on the monitor after displaying all the boot messages. You can then type in your login name and password and start working (or playing!) on the first virtual console. At some point, you will probably wish to start another session, perhaps to look at documentation for a program you are running or to read your mail while waiting for an FTP transfer to finish. Just do Alt-F2 (hold down the Alt key and press the F2 key), and you will find a login prompt waiting for you on the second virtual console! When you want to go back to the original session, do Alt-F1. The default FreeBSD installation has three virtual consoles enabled (8 starting with 3.3-RELEASE), and Alt-F1, Alt-F2, and Alt-F3 will switch between these virtual consoles. To enable more of them, edit /etc/ttys and add entries for ttyv4 to ttyvc after the comment on Virtual terminals: # Edit the existing entry for ttyv3 in /etc/ttys and change # "off" to "on". ttyv3 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyv4 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyv5 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyv6 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyv7 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyv8 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyv9 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyva "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyvb "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure Use as many or as few as you want. The more virtual terminals you have, the more resources that are used; this can be important if you have 8MB RAM or less. You may also want to change the secure to insecure. If you want to run an X server you must leave at least one virtual terminal unused (or turned off) for it to use. That is to say that if you want to have a login prompt pop up for all twelve of your Alt-function keys, you're out of luck - you can only do this for eleven of them if you also want to run an X server on the same machine. The easiest way to disable a console is by turning it off. For example, if you had the full 12 terminal allocation mentioned above and you wanted to run X, you would change settings for virtual terminal 12 from: ttyvb "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure to: ttyvb "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure If your keyboard has only ten function keys, you would end up with: ttyv9 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure ttyva "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure ttyvb "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure (You could also just delete these lines.) Once you have edited /etc/ttys, the next step is to make sure that you have enough virtualterminal devices. The easiest way to do this is: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV vty12 Next, the easiest (and cleanest) way to activate the virtual consoles is to reboot. However, if you really don't want to reboot, you can just shut down the X Window system and execute (as root): &prompt.root; kill -HUP 1 It's imperative that you completely shut down X Window if it is running, before running this command. If you don't, your system will probably appear to hang/lock up after executing the kill command. How do I access the virtual consoles from X? Use Ctrl Alt Fn to switch back to a virtual console. Ctrl Alt F1 would return you to the first virtual console. Once you are back to a text console, you can then use Alt Fn as normal to move between them. To return to the X session, you must switch to the virtual console running X. If you invoked X from the command line, (e.g., using startx) then the X session will attach to the next unused virtual console, not the text console from which it was invoked. If you have eight active virtual terminals then X will be running on the ninth, and you would use Alt F9 to return. How do I start XDM on boot? There are two schools of thought on how to start xdm. One school starts xdm from /etc/ttys using the supplied example, while the other simply runs xdm from rc.local or from a X.sh script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d. Both are equally valid, and one may work in situations where the other doesn't. In both cases the result is the same: X will popup a graphical login: prompt. The ttys method has the advantage of documenting which vty X will start on and passing the responsibility of restarting the X server on logout to init. The rc.local method makes it easy to kill xdm if there is a problem starting the X server. If loaded from rc.local, xdm should be started without any arguments (i.e., as a daemon). xdm must start AFTER getty runs, or else getty and xdm will conflict, locking out the console. The best way around this is to have the script sleep 10 seconds or so then launch xdm. If you are to start xdm from /etc/ttys, there still is a chance of conflict between xdm and getty. One way to avoid this is to add the vt number in the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers file. :0 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X vt4 The above example will direct the X server to run in /dev/ttyv3. Note the number is offset by one. The X server counts the vty from one, whereas the FreeBSD kernel numbers the vty from zero. When I run xconsole, I get Couldn't open console. If you start X with startx, the permissions on /dev/console will not get changed, resulting in things like xterm -C and xconsolenot working. This is because of the way console permissions are set by default. On a multi-user system, one doesn't necessarily want just any user to be able to write on the system console. For users who are logging directly onto a machine with a VTY, the fbtab file exists to solve such problems. In a nutshell, make sure an uncommented line of the form /dev/ttyv0 0600 /dev/console is in /etc/fbtab and it will ensure that whomever logs in on /dev/ttyv0 will own the console. I used to run XFree86 as a regular user, but now when I start it it says I must be root! All X servers need to be run as root in order to get direct access to your video hardware. Older versions of XFree86 (<= 3.3.6) installed all bundled servers to be automatically run as root (setuid to root). This is obviously a security hazard because X servers are large, complicated programs. Newer versions of XFree86 do not install the servers setuid to root for just this reason. Obviously, running an X server as the root user is not acceptable, nor a good idea security-wise. There are two ways to be able to use X as a regular user. The first is to use xdm or another display manager (e.g., kdm); the second is to use the Xwrapper. xdm is a daemon that handles graphical logins. It is usually started at boot time, and is responsible for authenticating users and starting their sessions; it is essentially the graphical counterpart of getty and login. For more information on xdm see the XFree86 documentation, and the the FAQ entry on it. Xwrapper is the X server wrapper; it is a small utility to enable one to manually run an X server while maintaining reasonable safety. It performs some sanity checks on the command line arguments given, and if they pass, runs the appropriate X server. If you do not want to run a display manger for whatever reason, this is for you. If you have installed the complete ports collection, you can find the port in /usr/ports/x11/wrapper. My PS/2 mouse doesn't behave properly under X. Your mouse and the mouse driver may have somewhat become out of synchronization. In versions 2.2.5 and earlier, switching away from X to a virtual terminal and getting back to X again may make them re-synchronized. If the problem occurs often, you may add the following option in your kernel configuration file and recompile it. options PSM_CHECKSYNC See the section on building a kernel if you've no experience with building kernels. With this option, there should be less chance of synchronization problem between the mouse and the driver. If, however, you still see the problem, click any mouse button while holding the mouse still to re-synchronize the mouse and the driver. Note that unfortunately this option may not work with all the systems and voids the tap feature of the ALPS GlidePoint device attached to the PS/2 mouse port. In versions 2.2.6 and later, synchronization check is done in a slightly better way and is standard in the PS/2 mouse driver. It should even work with GlidePoint. (As the check code has become a standard feature, PSM_CHECKSYNC option is not available in these versions.) However, in rare case the driver may erroneously report synchronization problem and you may see the kernel message: psmintr: out of sync (xxxx != yyyy) and find your mouse doesn't seem to work properly. If this happens, disable the synchronization check code by setting the driver flags for the PS/2 mouse driver to 0x100. Enter UserConfig by giving the option at the boot prompt: boot: -c Then, in the UserConfig command line, type: UserConfig> flags psm0 0x100 UserConfig> quit My PS/2 mouse from MouseSystems doesn't seem to work. There have been some reports that certain model of PS/2 mouse from MouseSystems works only if it is put into the high resolution mode. Otherwise, the mouse cursor may jump to the upper-left corner of the screen every so often. Unfortunately there is no workaround for versions 2.0.X and 2.1.X. In versions 2.2 through 2.2.5, apply the following patch to /sys/i386/isa/psm.c and rebuild the kernel. See the section on building a kernel if you've no experience with building kernels. @@ -766,6 +766,8 @@ if (verbose >= 2) log(LOG_DEBUG, "psm%d: SET_DEFAULTS return code:%04x\n", unit, i); + set_mouse_resolution(sc->kbdc, PSMD_RES_HIGH); + #if 0 set_mouse_scaling(sc->kbdc); /* 1:1 scaling */ set_mouse_mode(sc->kbdc); /* stream mode */ In versions 2.2.6 or later, specify the flags 0x04 to the PS/2 mouse driver to put the mouse into the high resolution mode. Enter UserConfig by giving the option at the boot prompt: boot: -c Then, in the UserConfig command line, type: UserConfig> flags psm0 0x04 UserConfig> quit See the previous section for another possible cause of mouse problems. When building an X app, imake can't find Imake.tmpl. Where is it? Imake.tmpl is part of the Imake package, a standard X application building tool. Imake.tmpl, as well as several header files that are required to build X apps, is contained in the X prog distribution. You can install this from sysinstall or manually from the X distribution files. How do I reverse the mouse buttons? Run the command xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1" from your .xinitrc or .xsession. How do I install a splash screen and where do I find them? Just prior to the release of FreeBSD 3.1, a new feature was added to allow the display of splash screens during the boot messages. The splash screens currently must be a 256 color bitmap (*.BMP) or ZSoft PCX (*.PCX) file. In addition, they must have a resolution of 320x200 or less to work on standard VGA adapters. If you compile VESA support into your kernel, then you can use larger bitmaps up to 1024x768. Note that VESA support requires the VM86 kernel option to be compiled into the kernel. The actual VESA support can either be compiled directly into the kernel with the VESA kernel config option or by loading the VESA kld module during bootup. To use a splash screen, you need to modify the startup files that control the boot process for FreeBSD. The files for this changed prior to the release of FreeBSD 3.2, so there are now two ways of loading a splash screen: FreeBSD 3.1 The first step is to find a bitmap version of your splash screen. Release 3.1 only supports Windows bitmap splash screens. Once you've found your splash screen of choice copy it to /boot/splash.bmp. Next, you need to have a /boot/loader.rc file that contains the following lines: load kernel load -t splash_image_data /boot/splash.bmp load splash_bmp autoboot FreeBSD 3.2+ In addition to adding support for PCX splash screens, FreeBSD 3.2 includes a nicer way of configuring the boot process. If you wish, you can use the method listed above for FreeBSD 3.1. If you do and you want to use PCX, replace splash_bmp with splash_pcx. If, on the other hand, you want to use the newer boot configuration, you need to create a /boot/loader.rc file that contains the following lines: include /boot/loader.4th start and a /boot/loader.conf that contains the following: splash_bmp_load="YES" bitmap_load="YES" This assumes you are using /boot/splash.bmp for your splash screen. If you'd rather use a PCX file, copy it to /boot/splash.pcx, create a /boot/loader.rc as instructed above, and create a /boot/loader.conf that contains: splash_pcx_load="YES" bitmap_load="YES" bitmap_name="/boot/splash.pcx" Now all you need is a splash screen. For that you can surf on over to the gallery at http://www.baldwin.cx/splash/. Can I use the Windows(tm) keys on my keyboard in X? Yes. All you need to do is use &man.xmodmap.1; to define what function you wish them to perform. Assuming all Windows(tm) keyboards are standard then the keycodes for the 3 keys are 115 - Windows(tm) key, between the left-hand Ctrl and Alt keys 116 - Windows(tm) key, to the right of the Alt-Gr key 117 - Menu key, to the left of the right-hand Ctrl key To have the left Windows(tm) key print a comma, try this. &prompt.root; xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = comma" You will probably have to re-start your window manager to see the result. To have the Windows(tm) key-mappings enabled automatically everytime you start X either put the xmodmap commands in your ~/.xinitrc file or, preferably, create a file ~/.xmodmaprc and include the xmodmap options, one per line, then add the line xmodmap $HOME/.xmodmaprc to your ~/.xinitrc. For example, I have mapped the 3 keys to be F13, F14, and F15 respectively. This makes it easy to map them to useful functions within applications or your window manager. To do this put the following in ~/.xmodmaprc. keycode 115 = F13 keycode 116 = F14 keycode 117 = F15 I use fvwm2 and have mapped the keys so that F13 iconifies (or de-iconifies) the window the cursor is in, F14 brings the window the cursor is in to the front or, if it is already at the front, pushes it to the back, and F15 pops up the main Workplace (application) menu even if the cursor is not on the desktop, which is useful if you don't have any part of the desktop visible (and the logo on the key matches its functionality). The entries in my ~/.fvwmrc which map the keys this way are: Key F13 FTIWS A Iconify Key F14 FTIWS A RaiseLower Key F15 A A Menu Workplace Nop Networking Where can I get information on diskless booting? Diskless booting means that the FreeBSD box is booted over a network, and reads the necessary files from a server instead of its hard disk. For full details, please read the Handbook entry on diskless booting Can a FreeBSD box be used as a dedicated network router? Internet standards and good engineering practice prohibit us from providing packet forwarding by default in FreeBSD. You can however enable this feature by changing the following variable to YES in rc.conf: gateway_enable=YES # Set to YES if this host will be a gateway This option will put the sysctl variable net.inet.ip.forwarding to 1. In most cases, you will also need to run a routing process to tell other systems on your network about your router; FreeBSD comes with the standard BSD routing daemon routed, or for more complex situations you may want to try GaTeD (available from http://www.gated.org/ ) which supports FreeBSD as of 3_5Alpha7. It is our duty to warn you that, even when FreeBSD is configured in this way, it does not completely comply with the Internet standard requirements for routers; however, it comes close enough for ordinary usage. Can I connect my Win95 box to the Internet via FreeBSD? Typically, people who ask this question have two PC's at home, one with FreeBSD and one with Win95; the idea is to use the FreeBSD box to connect to the Internet and then be able to access the Internet from the Windows95 box through the FreeBSD box. This is really just a special case of the previous question. ... and the answer is yes! In FreeBSD 3.x, user-mode ppp contains a option. If you run ppp with the , set gateway_enable to YES in /etc/rc.conf, and configure your Windows machine correctly, this should work fine. More detailed information about setting this up can be found in the Pedantic PPP Primer by Steve Sims. If you are using kernel-mode ppp, or have an Ethernet connection to the Internet, you will have to use natd. Please look at the natd section of this FAQ. Why does recompiling the latest BIND from ISC fail? There is a conflict between the cdefs.h file in the distribution and the one shipped with FreeBSD. Just remove compat/include/sys/cdefs.h. Does FreeBSD support SLIP and PPP? Yes. See the manual pages for &man.slattach.8;, &man.sliplogin.8;, &man.ppp.8;, and &man.pppd.8;. &man.ppp.8; and &man.pppd.8; provide support for both incoming and outgoing connections, while &man.sliplogin.8; deals exlusively with incoming connections, and &man.slattach.8; deals exclusively with outgoing connections. For more information on how to use these, please see the Handbook chapter on PPP and SLIP. If you only have access to the Internet through a shell account, you may want to have a look at the slirp package. It can provide you with (limited) access to services such as ftp and http direct from your local machine. Does FreeBSD support NAT or Masquerading If you have a local subnet (one or more local machines), but have been allocated only a single IP number from your Internet provider (or even if you receive a dynamic IP number), you may want to look at the natd program. natd allows you to connect an entire subnet to the internet using only a single IP number. The ppp program has similar functionality built in via the switch. The alias library is used in both cases. I can't create a /dev/ed0 device! In the Berkeley networking framework, network interfaces are only directly accessible by kernel code. Please see the /etc/rc.network file and the manual pages for the various network programs mentioned there for more information. If this leaves you totally confused, then you should pick up a book describing network administration on another BSD-related operating system; with few significant exceptions, administering networking on FreeBSD is basically the same as on SunOS 4.0 or Ultrix. How can I setup Ethernet aliases? Add netmask 0xffffffff to your ifconfig command-line like the following: &prompt.root; ifconfig ed0 alias 204.141.95.2 netmask 0xffffffff How do I get my 3C503 to use the other network port? If you want to use the other ports, you'll have to specify an additional parameter on the ifconfig command line. The default port is link0. To use the AUI port instead of the BNC one, use link2. These flags should be specified using the ifconfig_* variables in /etc/rc.conf. I'm having problems with NFS to/from FreeBSD. Certain PC network cards are better than others (to put it mildly) and can sometimes cause problems with network intensive applications like NFS. See the Handbook entry on NFS for more information on this topic. Why can't I NFS-mount from a Linux box? Some versions of the Linux NFS code only accept mount requests from a privileged port; try &prompt.root; mount -o -P linuxbox:/blah /mnt Why can't I NFS-mount from a Sun box? Sun workstations running SunOS 4.X only accept mount requests from a privileged port; try &prompt.root; mount -o -P sunbox:/blah /mnt Why does mountd keep telling me it can't change attributes and that I have a bad exports list on my FreeBSD NFS server? The most frequent problem is not understanding this passage from the &man.exports.5 manual page correctly:
Each line in the file (other than comment lines that begin with a #) specifies the mount point(s) and export flags within one local server filesystem for one or more hosts. A host may be specified only once for each local filesystem on the server and there may be only one default entry for each server filesystem that applies to all other hosts.
This is made more clear by an example of a common mistake. If everything above /usr is part of one filesystem (there are no mounts above /usr) the following exports list is not valid: /usr/src client /usr/ports client There are two lines specifying properties for one filesystem, /usr, exported to the same host, client. The correct format is: /usr/src /usr/ports client To rephrase the passage from the manual page, the properties of one filesystem exported to a given host (world-wide exports are treated like another unique host) must all occur on one line. And yes, this does cause limitiation in how you can export filesystems without ugly workarounds, but for most people, this is not an issue. The following is an example of a valid export list, where /usr and /exports are local filesystems: # Export src and ports to client01 and client02, but only # client01 has root privileges on it /usr/src /usr/ports -maproot=0 client01 /usr/src /usr/ports client02 # The "client" machines have root and can mount anywhere # up /exports. The world can mount /exports/obj read-only /exports -alldirs -maproot=0 client01 client02 /exports/obj -ro I'm having problems talking PPP to NeXTStep machines. Try disabling the TCP extensions in /etc/rc.conf by changing the following variable to NO: tcp_extensions=NO Xylogic's Annex boxes are also broken in this regard and you must use the above change to connect thru them. How do I enable IP multicast support? Multicast host operations are fully supported in FreeBSD 2.0 and later by default. If you want your box to run as a multicast router, you will need to recompile your kernel with the MROUTING option and run mrouted. FreeBSD 2.2 and later will start mrouted at boot time if the flag mrouted_enable is set to "YES" in /etc/rc.conf. MBONE tools are available in their own ports category, mbone. If you are looking for the conference tools vic and vat, look there! For more information, see the Mbone Information Web. Which network cards are based on the DEC PCI chipset? Here is a list compiled by Glen Foster, with some more modern additions: Vendor Model ---------------------------------------------- ASUS PCI-L101-TB Accton ENI1203 Cogent EM960PCI Compex ENET32-PCI D-Link DE-530 Dayna DP1203, DP2100 DEC DE435, DE450 Danpex EN-9400P3 JCIS Condor JC1260 Linksys EtherPCI Mylex LNP101 SMC EtherPower 10/100 (Model 9332) SMC EtherPower (Model 8432) TopWare TE-3500P Znyx (2.2.x) ZX312, ZX314, ZX342, ZX345, ZX346, ZX348 (3.x) ZX345Q, ZX346Q, ZX348Q, ZX412Q, ZX414, ZX442, ZX444, ZX474, ZX478, ZX212, ZX214 (10mbps/hd) Why do I have to use the FQDN for hosts on my site? You will probably find that the host is actually in a different domain; for example, if you are in foo.bar.edu and you wish to reach a host called mumble in the bar.edu domain, you will have to refer to it by the fully-qualified domain name, mumble.bar.edu, instead of just mumble. Traditionally, this was allowed by BSD BIND resolvers. However the current version of bind that ships with FreeBSD no longer provides default abbreviations for non-fully qualified domain names other than the domain you are in. So an unqualified host mumble must either be found as mumble.foo.bar.edu, or it will be searched for in the root domain. This is different from the previous behavior, where the search continued across mumble.bar.edu, and mumble.edu. Have a look at RFC 1535 for why this was considered bad practice, or even a security hole. As a good workaround, you can place the line search foo.bar.edu bar.edu instead of the previous domain foo.bar.edu into your /etc/resolv.conf file. However, make sure that the search order does not go beyond the boundary between local and public administration, as RFC 1535 calls it. Permission denied for all networking operations. If you have compiled your kernel with the IPFIREWALL option, you need to be aware that the default policy as of 2.1.7R (this actually changed during 2.1-STABLE development) is to deny all packets that are not explicitly allowed. If you had unintentionally misconfigured your system for firewalling, you can restore network operability by typing the following while logged in as root: &prompt.root; ipfw add 65534 allow all from any to any You can also set firewall_type="open" in /etc/rc.conf. For further information on configuring a FreeBSD firewall, see the Handbook section. How much overhead does IPFW incur? The answer to this depends mostly on your rule set and processor speed. For most applications dealing with ethernet and small rule sets, the answer is, negligible. For those of you that need actual measurements to satisfy your curiosity, read on. The following measurements were made using 2.2.5-STABLE on a 486-66. IPFW was modified to measure the time spent within the ip_fw_chk routine, displaying the results to the console every 1000 packets. Two rule sets, each with 1000 rules were tested. The first set was designed to demonstrate a worst case scenario by repeating the rule: &prompt.root; ipfw add deny tcp from any to any 55555 This demonstrates worst case by causing most of IPFW's packet check routine to be executed before finally deciding that the packet does not match the rule (by virtue of the port number). Following the 999th iteration of this rule was an allow ip from any to any. The second set of rules were designed to abort the rule check quickly: &prompt.root; ipfw add deny ip from 1.2.3.4 to 1.2.3.4 The nonmatching source IP address for the above rule causes these rules to be skipped very quickly. As before, the 1000th rule was an allow ip from any to any. The per-packet processing overhead in the former case was approximately 2.703ms/packet, or roughly 2.7 microseconds per rule. Thus the theoretical packet processing limit with these rules is around 370 packets per second. Assuming 10Mbps ethernet and a ~1500 byte packet size, we would only be able to achieve a 55.5% bandwidth utilization. For the latter case each packet was processed in approximately 1.172ms, or roughly 1.2 microseconds per rule. The theoretical packet processing limit here would be about 853 packets per second, which could consume 10Mbps ethernet bandwidth. The excessive number of rules tested and the nature of those rules do not provide a real-world scenario -- they were used only to generate the timing information presented here. Here are a few things to keep in mind when building an efficient rule set: Place an established rule early on to handle the majority of TCP traffic. Don't put any allow tcp statements before this rule. Place heavily triggered rules earlier in the rule set than those rarely used (without changing the permissiveness of the firewall, of course). You can see which rules are used most often by examining the packet counting statistics with ipfw -a l. Why is my &man.ipfw.8; fwd rule to redirect a service to another machine not working? Possibly because you want to do network address translation (NAT) and not just forward packets. A fwd rule does exactly what it says; it forwards packets. It does not actually change the data inside the packet. Say we have a rule like: 01000 fwd 10.0.0.1 from any to foo 21 When a packet with a destination address of foo arrives at the machine with this rule, the packet is forwarded to 10.0.0.1, but it still has the destination address of foo! The destination address of the packet is not changed to 10.0.0.1. Most machines would probably drop a packet that they receive with a destination address that is not their own. Therefore, using a fwd rule does not often work the way the user expects. This behavior is a feature and not a bug. See the FAQ about redirecting services, the &man.natd.8; manual, or one of the several port redirecting utilities in the ports collection for a correct way to do this. How can I redirect service requests from one machine to another? You can redirect FTP (and other service) request with the socket package, available in the ports tree in category sysutils. Simply replace the service's commandline to call socket instead, like so: ftp stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/local/bin/socket socket ftp.foo.com ftp where ftp.foo.com and ftp are the host and port to redirect to, respectively. Where can I get a bandwidth management tool? There are two bandwidth management tools available for FreeBSD. ALTQ is available for free; Bandwidth Manager from Emerging Technologies is a commercial product. Why do I get /dev/bpf0: device not configured? The Berkeley Packet Filter (bpf) driver needs to be enabled before running programs that utilize it. Add this to your kernel config file and build a new kernel: pseudo-device bpfilter # Berkeley Packet Filter Secondly, after rebooting you will have to create the device node. This can be accomplished by a change to the /dev directory, followed by the execution of: &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV bpf0 Please see the handbook's entry on device nodes for more information on creating devices. How do I mount a disk from a Windows machine that's on my network, like smbmount in Linux? Use the sharity light package in the ports collection. What are these messages about icmp-response bandwidth limit 300/200 pps in my log files? This is the kernel telling you that some activity is provoking it to send more ICMP or TCP reset (RST) responses than it thinks it should. ICMP responses are often generated as a result of attempted connections to unused UDP ports. TCP resets are generated as a result of attempted connections to unopened TCP ports. Among others, these are the kinds of activities which may cause these messages: Brute-force denial of service (DoS) attacks (as opposed to single-packet attacks which exploit a specific vulnerability). Port scans which attempt to connect to a large number of ports (as opposed to only trying a few well-known ports). The first number in the message tells you how many packets the kernel would have sent if the limit wasn't in place, and the second number tells you the limit. You can control the limit using the net.inet.icmp.icmplim sysctl variable like this, where 300 is the limit in packets per second: &prompt.root; sysctl -w net.inet.icmp.icmplim=300 If you don't want to see messages about this in your log files, but you still want the kernel to do response limiting, you can use the net.inet.icmp.icmplim_output sysctl variable to disable the output like this: &prompt.root; sysctl -w net.inet.icmp.icmplim_output=0 Finally, if you want to disable response limiting, you can set the net.inet.icmp.icmplim sysctl variable (see above for an example) to 0. Disabling response limiting is discouraged for the reasons listed above. PPP I can't make ppp work. What am I doing wrong ? You should first read the ppp man page and the ppp section of the handbook. Enable logging with the command set log Phase Chat Connect Carrier lcp ipcp ccp command This command may be typed at the ppp command prompt or it may be entered in the /etc/ppp/ppp.conf configuration file (the start of the default section is the best place to put it). Make sure that /etc/syslog.conf contains the lines !ppp *.* /var/log/ppp.log and that the file /var/log/ppp.log exists. You can now find out a lot about what's going on from the log file. Don't worry if it doesn't all make sense. If you need to get help from someone, it may make sense to them. If your version of ppp doesn't understand the set log command, you should download the latest version. It will build on FreeBSD version 2.1.5 and higher. Ppp just hangs when I run it This is usually because your hostname won't resolve. The best way to fix this is to make sure that /etc/hosts is consoluted by your resolver first by editing /etc/host.conf and putting the hosts line first. Then, simply put an entry in /etc/hosts for your local machine. If you have no local network, change your localhost line: 127.0.0.1 foo.bar.com foo localhost Otherwise, simply add another entry for your host. Consult the relevant man pages for more details. You should be able to successfully ping -c1 `hostname` when you're done. Ppp won't dial in -auto mode First, check that you've got a default route. By running netstat -rn, you should see two entries like this: Destination Gateway Flags Refs Use Netif Expire default 10.0.0.2 UGSc 0 0 tun0 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.1 UH 0 0 tun0 This is assuming that you've used the addresses from the handbook, the man page or from the ppp.conf.sample file. If you haven't got a default route, it may be because you're running an old version of ppp that doesn't understand the word HISADDR in the ppp.conf file. If your version of ppp is from before FreeBSD 2.2.5, change the add 0 0 HISADDR line to one saying add 0 0 10.0.0.2 Another reason for the default route line being missing is that you have mistakenly set up a default router in your /etc/rc.conf file (this file was called /etc/sysconfig prior to release 2.2.2), and you have omitted the line saying delete ALL from ppp.conf. If this is the case, go back to the Final system configuration section of the handbook. What does No route to host mean This error is usually due to a missing MYADDR: delete ALL add 0 0 HISADDR section in your /etc/ppp/ppp.linkup file. This is only necessary if you have a dynamic IP address or don't know the address of your gateway. If you're using interactive mode, you can type the following after entering packet mode (packet mode is indicated by the capitalized PPP in the prompt): delete ALL add 0 0 HISADDR Refer to the PPP and Dynamic IP addresses section of the handbook for further details. My connection drops after about 3 minutes The default ppp timeout is 3 minutes. This can be adjusted with the line set timeout NNN where NNN is the number of seconds of inactivity before the connection is closed. If NNN is zero, the connection is never closed due to a timeout. It is possible to put this command in the ppp.conf file, or to type it at the prompt in interactive mode. It is also possible to adjust it on the fly while the line is active by connecting to ppps server socket using telnet or pppctl. Refer to the ppp man page for further details. My connection drops under heavy load If you have Link Quality Reporting (LQR) configured, it is possible that too many LQR packets are lost between your machine and the peer. Ppp deduces that the line must therefore be bad, and disconnects. Prior to FreeBSD version 2.2.5, LQR was enabled by default. It is now disabled by default. LQR can be disabled with the line disable lqr My connection drops after a random amount of time Sometimes, on a noisy phone line or even on a line with call waiting enabled, your modem may hang up because it thinks (incorrectly) that it lost carrier. There's a setting on most modems for determining how tolerant it should be to temporary losses of carrier. On a USR Sportster for example, this is measured by the S10 register in tenths of a second. To make your modem more forgiving, you could add the following send-expect sequence to your dial string: set dial "...... ATS10=10 OK ......" Refer to your modem manual for details. My connection hangs after a random amount of time Many people experience hung connections with no apparent explaination. The first thing to establish is which side of the link is hung. If you are using an external modem, you can simply try using ping to see if the TD light is flashing when you transmit data. If it flashes (and the RD light doesn't), the problem is with the remote end. If TD doesn't flash, the problem is local. With an internal modem, you'll need to use the set server command in your ppp.conf file. When the hang occurs, connect to ppp using pppctl. If your network connection suddenly revives (ppp was revived due to the activity on the diagnostic socket) or if you can't connect (assuming the set socket command succeeded at startup time), the problem is local. If you can connect and things are still hung, enable local async logging with set log local async and use ping from another window or terminal to make use of the link. The async logging will show you the data being transmitted and received on the link. If data is going out and not coming back, the problem is remote. Having established whether the problem is local or remote, you now have two possibilities: The remote end isn't responding There's very little you can do about this. Most ISPs will refuse to help if you're not running a Microsoft OS. You can enable lqr in your ppp.conf file, allowing ppp to detect the remote failure and hang up, but this detection is relatively slow and therefore not that useful. You may want to avoid telling your ISP that you're running user-ppp.... First, try disabling all local compression by adding the following to your configuration: disable pred1 deflate deflate24 protocomp acfcomp shortseq vj deny pred1 deflate deflate24 protocomp acfcomp shortseq vj Then reconnect to ensure that this makes no difference. If things improve or if the problem is solved completely, determine which setting makes the difference through trial and error. This will provide good amunition when you contact your ISP (although it may make it apparent that you're not running a Microsoft product). Before contacting your ISP, enable async logging locally and wait until the connection hangs again. This may use up quite a bit of disk space. The last data read from the port may be of interest. It is usually ascii data, and may even describe the problem (Memory fault, core dumped ?). If your ISP is helpful, they should be able to enable logging on their end, then when the next link drop occurs, they may be able to tell you why their side is having a problem. Feel free to send the details to &a.brian;, or even to ask your ISP to contact me directly. Ppp is hung Your best bet here is to rebuild ppp by adding CFLAGS+=-g and STRIP= to the end of the Makefile, then doing a make clean && make && make install. When ppp hangs, find the ppp process id with ps ajxww | fgrep ppp and run gdb ppp PID. From the gdb prompt, you can then use bt to get a stack trace. Send the results to brian@Awfulhak.org. Nothing happens after the Login OK! message Prior to FreeBSD version 2.2.5, once the link was established, ppp would wait for the peer to initiate the Line Control Protocol (LCP). Many ISPs will not initiate negotiations and expect the client to do so. To force ppp to initiate the LCP, use the following line: set openmode active Note: It usually does no harm if both sides initiate negotiation, so openmode is now active by default. However, the next section explains when it does do some harm. I keep seeing errors about magic being the same Occasionally, just after connecting, you may see messages in the log that say magic is the same. Sometimes, these messages are harmless, and sometimes one side or the other exits. Most ppp implementations cannot survive this problem, and even if the link seems to come up, you'll see repeated configure requests and configure acknowledgements in the log file until ppp eventually gives up and closes the connection. This normally happens on server machines with slow disks that are spawning a getty on the port, and executing ppp from a login script or program after login. I've also heard reports of it happening consistently when using slirp. The reason is that in the time taken between getty exiting and ppp starting, the client-side ppp starts sending Line Control Protocol (LCP) packets. Because ECHO is still switched on for the port on the server, the client ppp sees these packets reflect back. One part of the LCP negotiation is to establish a magic number for each side of the link so that reflections can be detected. The protocol says that when the peer tries to negotiate the same magic number, a NAK should be sent and a new magic number should be chosen. During the period that the server port has ECHO turned on, the client ppp sends LCP packets, sees the same magic in the reflected packet and NAKs it. It also sees the NAK reflect (which also means ppp must change its magic). This produces a potentially enormous number of magic number changes, all of which are happily piling into the server's tty buffer. As soon as ppp starts on the server, it's flooded with magic number changes and almost immediately decides it's tried enough to negotiate LCP and gives up. Meanwhile, the client, who no longer sees the reflections, becomes happy just in time to see a hangup from the server. This can be avoided by allowing the peer to start negotiating with the following line in your ppp.conf file: set openmode passive This tells ppp to wait for the server to initiate LCP negotiations. Some servers however may never initiate negotiations. If this is the case, you can do something like: set openmode active 3 This tells ppp to be passive for 3 seconds, and then to start sending LCP requests. If the peer starts sending requests during this period, ppp will immediately respond rather than waiting for the full 3 second period. LCP negotiations continue 'till the connection is closed There is currently an implementation mis-feature in ppp where it doesn't associate LCP, CCP & IPCP responses with their original requests. As a result, if one ppp implementation is more than 6 seconds slower than the other side, the other side will send two additional LCP configuration requests. This is fatal. Consider two implementations, A and B. A starts sending LCP requests immediately after connecting and B takes 7 seconds to start. When B starts, A has sent 3 LCP REQs. We're assuming the line has ECHO switched off, otherwise we'd see magic number problems as described in the previous section. B sends a REQ, then an ACK to the first of A's REQs. This results in A entering the OPENED state and sending and ACK (the first) back to B. In the meantime, B sends back two more ACKs in response to the two additional REQs sent by A before B started up. B then receives the first ACK from A and enters the OPENED state. A receives the second ACK from B and goes back to the REQ-SENT state, sending another (forth) REQ as per the RFC. It then receives the third ACK and enters the OPENED state. In the meantime, B receives the forth REQ from A, resulting in it reverting to the ACK-SENT state and sending another (second) REQ and (forth) ACK as per the RFC. A gets the REQ, goes into REQ-SENT and sends another REQ. It immediately receives the following ACK and enters OPENED. This goes on 'till one side figures out that they're getting nowhere and gives up. The best way to avoid this is to configure one side to be passive - that is, make one side wait for the other to start negotiating. This can be done with the set openmode passive command. Care should be taken with this option. You should also use the set stopped N command to limit the amount of time that ppp waits for the peer to begin negotiations. Alternatively, the set openmode active N command (where N is the number of seconds to wait before starting negotiations) can be used. Check the manual page for details. Ppp locks up shortly after connecting Prior to version 2.2.5 of FreeBSD, it was possible that your link was disabled shortly after connection due to ppp mis-handling Predictor1 compression negotiation. This would only happen if both sides tried to negotiate different Compression Control Protocols (CCP). This problem is now corrected, but if you're still running an old version of ppp, the problem can be circumvented with the line disable pred1 Ppp locks up when I shell out to test it When you execute the shell or ! command, ppp executes a shell (or if you've passed any arguements, ppp will execute those arguements). Ppp will wait for the command to complete before continuing. If you attempt to use the ppp link while running the command, the link will appear to have frozen. This is because ppp is waiting for the command to complete. If you wish to execute commands like this, use the !bg command instead. This will execute the given command in the background, and ppp can continue to service the link. Ppp over a null-modem cable never exits There is no way for ppp to automatically determine that a direct connection has been dropped. This is due to the lines that are used in a null-modem serial cable. When using this sort of connection, LQR should always be enabled with the line enable lqr LQR is accepted by default if negotiated by the peer. Why does ppp dial for no reason in -auto mode If ppp is dialing unexpectedly, you must determine the cause, and set up Dial filters (dfilters) to prevent such dialing. To determine the cause, use the following line: set log +tcp/ip This will log all traffic through the connection. The next time the line comes up unexpectedly, you will see the reason logged with a convenient timestamp next to it. You can now disable dialing under these circumstances. Usually, this sort of problem arises due to DNS lookups. To prevent DNS lookups from establishing a connection (this will not prevent ppp from passing the packets through an established connection), use the following: set dfilter 1 deny udp src eq 53 set dfilter 2 deny udp dst eq 53 set dfilter 3 permit 0/0 0/0 This is not always suitable, as it will effectively break your demand-dial capabilities - most programs will need a DNS lookup before doing any other network related things. In the DNS case, you should try to determine what is actually trying to resolve a host name. A lot of the time, sendmail is the culprit. You should make sure that you tell sendmail not to do any DNS lookups in its configuration file. See the section on Mail Configuration for details on how to create your own configuration file and what should go into it. You may also want to add the following line to your .mc file: define(`confDELIVERY_MODE', `d')dnl This will make sendmail queue everything until the queue is run (usually, sendmail is invoked with , telling it to run the queue every 30 minutes) or until a sendmail -q is done (perhaps from your ppp.linkup file). What do these CCP errors mean I keep seeing the following errors in my log file: CCP: CcpSendConfigReq CCP: Received Terminate Ack (1) state = Req-Sent (6) This is because ppp is trying to negotiate Predictor1 compression, and the peer does not want to negotiate any compression at all. The messages are harmless, but if you wish to remove them, you can disable Predictor1 compression locally too: disable pred1 Ppp locks up during file transfers with IO errors Under FreeBSD 2.2.2 and before, there was a bug in the tun driver that prevents incoming packets of a size larger than the tun interface's MTU size. Receipt of a packet greater than the MTU size results in an IO error being logged via syslogd. The ppp specification says that an MRU of 1500 should always be accepted as a minimum, despite any LCP negotiations, therefore it is possible that should you decrease the MTU to less than 1500, your ISP will transmit packets of 1500 regardless, and you will tickle this non-feature - locking up your link. The problem can be circumvented by never setting an MTU of less than 1500 under FreeBSD 2.2.2 or before. Why doesn't ppp log my connection speed? In order to log all lines of your modem conversation, you must enable the following: set log +connect This will make ppp log everything up until the last requested expect string. If you wish to see your connect speed and are using PAP or CHAP (and therefore don't have anything to chat after the CONNECT in the dial script - no set login script), you must make sure that you instruct ppp to expect the whole CONNECT line, something like this: set dial "ABORT BUSY ABORT NO\\sCARRIER TIMEOUT 4 \ \"\" ATZ OK-ATZ-OK ATDT\\T TIMEOUT 60 CONNECT \\c \\n" Here, we get our CONNECT, send nothing, then expect a line-feed, forcing ppp to read the whole CONNECT response. Ppp ignores the \ character in my chat script Ppp parses each line in your config files so that it can interpret strings such as set phone "123 456 789" correctly (and realize that the number is actually only one argument. In order to specify a " character, you must escape it using a backslash (\). When the chat interpreter parses each argument, it re-interprets the argument in order to find any special escape sequences such as \P or \T (see the man page). As a result of this double-parsing, you must remember to use the correct number of escapes. If you wish to actually send a \ character to (say) your modem, you'd need something like: set dial "\"\" ATZ OK-ATZ-OK AT\\\\X OK" resulting in the following sequence: ATZ OK AT\X OK or set phone 1234567 set dial "\"\" ATZ OK ATDT\\T" resulting in the following sequence: ATZ OK ATDT1234567 Ppp gets a seg-fault, but I see no ppp.core file Ppp (or any other program for that matter) should never dump core. Because ppp runs with an effective user id of 0, the operating system will not write ppps core image to disk before terminating it. If, however ppp is actually termating due to a segmentation violation or some other signal that normally causes core to be dumped, and you're sure you're using the latest version (see the start of this section), then you should do the following: &prompt.user; tar xfz ppp-*.src.tar.gz &prompt.user; cd ppp*/ppp &prompt.user; echo STRIP= >>Makefile &prompt.user; echo CFLAGS+=-g >>Makefile &prompt.user; make clean all &prompt.user; su &prompt.root; make install &prompt.root; chmod 555 /usr/sbin/ppp You will now have a debuggable version of ppp installed. You will have to be root to run ppp as all of its privileges have been revoked. When you start ppp, take a careful note of what your current directory was at the time. Now, if and when ppp receives the segmentation violation, it will dump a core file called ppp.core. You should then do the following: &prompt.user; su &prompt.root; gdb /usr/sbin/ppp ppp.core (gdb) bt ..... (gdb) f 0 .... (gdb) i args .... (gdb) l ..... All of this information should be given alongside your question, making it possible to diagnose the problem. If you're familiar with gdb, you may wish to find out some other bits and pieces such as what actually caused the dump and the addresses & values of the relevant variables. The process that forces a dial in auto mode never connects This was a known problem with ppp set up to negotiate a dynamic local IP number with the peer in auto mode. It is fixed in the latest version - search the man page for iface. The problem was that when that initial program calls connect(2), the IP number of the tun interface is assigned to the socket endpoint. The kernel creates the first outgoing packet and writes it to the tun device. Ppp then reads the packet and establishes a connection. If, as a result of ppps dynamic IP assignment, the interface address is changed, the original socket endpoint will be invalid. Any subsequent packets sent to the peer will usually be dropped. Even if they aren't, any responses will not route back to the originating machine as the IP number is no longer owned by that machine. There are several theoretical ways to approach this problem. It would be nicest if the peer would re-assign the same IP number if possible :-) The current version of ppp does this, but most other implementations don't. The easiest method from our side would be to never change the tun interface IP number, but instead to change all outgoing packets so that the source IP number is changed from the interface IP to the negotiated IP on the fly. This is essentially what the iface-alias option in the latest version of ppp is doing (with the help of libalias(3) and ppp's switch) - it's maintaining all previous interface addresses and NATing them to the last negotiated address. Another alternative (and probably the most reliable) would be to implement a system call that changes all bound sockets from one IP to another. Ppp would use this call to modify the sockets of all existing programs when a new IP number is negotiated. The same system call could be used by dhcp clients when they are forced to re-bind() their sockets. Yet another possibility is to allow an interface to be brought up without an IP number. Outgoing packets would be given an IP number of 255.255.255.255 up until the first SIOCAIFADDR ioctl is done. This would result in fully binding the socket. It would be up to ppp to change the source IP number, but only if it's set to 255.255.255.255, and only the IP number and IP checksum would need to change. This, however is a bit of a hack as the kernel would be sending bad packets to an improperly configured interface, on the assumption that some other mechanism is capable of fixing things retrospectively. Why don't most games work with the -nat switch The reason games and the like don't work when libalias is in use is that the machine on the outside will try to open a connection or send (unsolicited) UDP packets to the machine on the inside. The NAT software doesn't know that it should send these packets to the interior machine. To make things work, make sure that the only thing running is the software that you're having problems with, then either run tcpdump on the tun interface of the gateway or enable ppp tcp/ip logging (set log +tcp/ip) on the gateway. When you start the offending software, you should see packets passing through the gateway machine. When something comes back from the outside, it'll be dropped (that's the problem). Note the port number of these packets then shut down the offending software. Do this a few times to see if the port numbers are consistent. If they are, then the following line in the relevant section of /etc/ppp/ppp.conf will make the software functional: nat port proto internalmachine:port port where proto is either tcp or udp, internalmachine is the machine that you want the packets to be sent to and port is the destination port number of the packets. You won't be able to use the software on other machines without changing the above command, and running the software on two internal machines at the same time is out of the question - after all, the outside world is seeing your entire internal network as being just a single machine. If the port numbers aren't consistent, there are three more options: 1) Submit support in libalias. Examples of special cases can be found in /usr/src/lib/libalias/alias_*.c (alias_ftp.c is a good prototype). This usually involves reading certain recognised outgoing packets, identifying the instruction that tells the outside machine to initiate a connection back to the internal machine on a specific (random) port and setting up a route in the alias table so that the subsequent packets know where to go. This is the most difficult solution, but it is the best and will make the software work with multiple machines. 2) Use a proxy. The application may support socks5 for example, or (as in the cvsup case) may have a passive option that avoids ever requesting that the peer open connections back to the local machine. 3) Redirect everything to the internal machine using nat addr. This is the sledge-hammer approach. Has anybody made a list of useful port numbers ? Not yet, but this is intended to grow into such a list (if any interest is shown). In each example, internal should be replaced with the IP number of the machine playing the game. Asheron's Call nat port udp internal :65000 65000 Manually change the port number within the game to 65000. If you've got a number of machines that you wish to play on assign a unique port number for each (i.e. 65001, 65002, etc) and add a nat port line for each one. Half Life nat port udp internal:27005 27015 PCAnywhere 8.0 nat port udp internal:5632 5632 nat port tcp internal:5631 5631 Quake nat port udp internal:6112 6112 Alternatively, you may want to take a look at www.battle.net for Quake proxy support. Quake 2 nat port udp internal:27901 27910 Red Alert nat port udp internal:8675 8675 nat port udp internal:5009 5009 What are FCS errors ? FCS stands for Frame Check Sequence. Each ppp packet has a checksum attached to ensure that the data being received is the data being sent. If the FCS of an incoming packet is incorrect, the packet is dropped and the HDLC FCS count is increased. The HDLC error values can be displayed using the show hdlc command. If your link is bad (or if your serial driver is dropping packets), you will see the occasional FCS error. This is not usually worth worrying about although it does slow down the compression protocols substantially. If you have an external modem, make sure your cable is properly shielded from interference - this may eradicate the problem. If your link freezes as soon as you've connected and you see a large number of FCS errors, this may be because your link is not 8 bit clean. Make sure your modem is not using software flow control (XON/XOFF). If your datalink must use software flow control, use the command set accmap 0x000a0000 to tell ppp to escape the ^Q and ^S characters. Another reason for seeing too many FCS errors may be that the remote end has stopped talking PPP. You may want to enable async logging at this point to determine if the incoming data is actually a login or shell prompt. If you have a shell prompt at the remote end, it's possible to terminate ppp without dropping the line by using the close lcp command (a following term command will reconnect you to the shell on the remote machine. If nothing in your log file indicates why the link might have been terminated, you should ask the remote administrator (your ISP?) why the session was terminated. Why do MacOS and Windows 98 connections freeze when running PPPoE on the gateway Thanks to Michael Wozniak mwozniak@netcom.ca for figuring this out and Dan Flemming danflemming@mac.com for the Mac solution: This is due to what's called a Black Hole router. MacOS and Windows 98 (and maybe other Microsoft OSs) send TCP packets with a requested segment size too big to fit into a PPPoE frame (MTU is 1500 by default for ethernet) and have the don't fragment bit set (default of TCP) and the Telco router is not sending ICMP must fragment back to the www site you are trying to load. (Alternatively, the router is sending the ICMP packet correctly, but the firewall at the www site is dropping it.) When the www server is sending you frames that don't fit into the PPPoE pipe the Telco router drops them on the floor and your page doesn't load (some pages/graphics do as they are smaller than a MSS.) This seems to be the default of most Telco PPPoE configurations (if only they knew how to program a router... sigh...) One fix is to use regedit on your 95/98 boxes to add the following registry entry... HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Class\NetTrans\0000\MaxMTU It should be a string with a value 1450 (more accurately it should be 1464 to fit TCP packets into a PPPoE frame perfectly but the 1450 gives you a margin of error for other IP protocols you may encounter). This registry key is reported to have moved to Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\ID for adapter\MTU in Windows 2000. Refer to Microsoft Knowledge Base documents Q158474 - Windows TCPIP Registry Entries and Q120642 - TCPIP & NBT Configuration Parameters for Windows NT for more information on changing Windoze MTU to work with a FreeBSD/NAT/PPPoE router. Unfortunately, MacOS does not provide an interface for changing TCP/IP settings. However, there is commercial software available, such as OTAdvancedTuner (OT for OpenTransport, the MacOS TCP/IP stack) by Sustainable Softworks, that will allow users to customize TCP/IP settings. MacOS NAT users should select ip_interface_MTU from the drop-down menu, enter 1450 instead of 1500 in the box, click the box next to Save as Auto Configure, and click Make Active. The latest version of ppp (2.3 or greater) has an enable tcpmssfixup command that will automatically adjust the MSS to an appropriate value. This facility is enabled by default. If you're stuck with an older version of ppp, you may want to look at the tcpmssd port. None of this helps - I'm desperate ! If all else fails, send as much information as you can, including your config files, how you're starting ppp, the relevant parts of your log file and the output of the netstat -rn command (before and after connecting) to the freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org mailing list or the comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc news group, and someone should point you in the right direction. Where can I find a free FreeBSD account? While FreeBSD does not provide open access to any of their servers, others do provide open access Unix systems. The charge varies and limited services may be available. Arbornet, Inc, also known as M-Net, has been providing open access to Unix systems since 1983. Starting on an Altos running System III, the site switched to BSD/OS in 1991. In June of 2000, the site switched again to FreeBSD. M-Net can be accessed via telnet and SSH and provides basic access to the entire FreeBSD software suite. However, network access is limited to members and patrons who donate to the system, which is run as a non-proft organization. M-Net also provides an bulletin board system and interactive chat. Grex provides a site very similar to M-Net including the same bulletin board and interactive chat software. However, the machine is a Sun 4M and is running SunOS Serial Communications This section answers common questions about serial communications with FreeBSD. PPP and SLIP are covered in the section. How do I tell if FreeBSD found my serial ports? As the FreeBSD kernel boots, it will probe for the serial ports in your system for which the kernel was configured. You can either watch your system closely for the messages it prints or run the command &prompt.user; dmesg | grep sio after your system's up and running. Here's some example output from the above command: sio0 at 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 on isa sio0: type 16550A sio1 at 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on isa sio1: type 16550A This shows two serial ports. The first is on irq 4, is using port address 0x3f8, and has a 16550A-type UART chip. The second uses the same kind of chip but is on irq 3 and is at port address 0x2f8. Internal modem cards are treated just like serial ports---except that they always have a modem attached to the port. The GENERIC kernel includes support for two serial ports using the same irq and port address settings in the above example. If these settings aren't right for your system, or if you've added modem cards or have more serial ports than your kernel is configured for, just reconfigure your kernel. See section about building a kernel for more details. How do I tell if FreeBSD found my modem cards? Refer to the answer to the previous question. I just upgraded to 2.0.5 and my tty0X are missing! Don't worry, they have been merged with the ttydX devices. You'll have to change any old configuration files you have, though. How do I access the serial ports on FreeBSD? The third serial port, sio2 (known as COM3 in DOS), is on /dev/cuaa2 for dial-out devices, and on /dev/ttyd2 for dial-in devices. What's the difference between these two classes of devices? You use ttydX for dial-ins. When opening /dev/ttydX in blocking mode, a process will wait for the corresponding cuaaX device to become inactive, and then wait for the carrier detect line to go active. When you open the cuaaX device, it makes sure the serial port isn't already in use by the ttydX device. If the port's available, it steals it from the ttydX device. Also, the cuaXX device doesn't care about carrier detect. With this scheme and an auto-answer modem, you can have remote users log in and you can still dialout with the same modem and the system will take care of all the conflicts. How do I enable support for a multiport serial card? Again, the section on kernel configuration provides information about configuring your kernel. For a multiport serial card, place an sio line for each serial port on the card in the kernel configuration file. But place the irq and vector specifiers on only one of the entries. All of the ports on the card should share one irq. For consistency, use the last serial port to specify the irq. Also, specify the COM_MULTIPORT option. The following example is for an AST 4-port serial card on irq 7: options "COM_MULTIPORT" device sio4 at isa? port 0x2a0 tty flags 0x781 device sio5 at isa? port 0x2a8 tty flags 0x781 device sio6 at isa? port 0x2b0 tty flags 0x781 device sio7 at isa? port 0x2b8 tty flags 0x781 irq 7 vector siointr The flags indicate that the master port has minor number 7 (0x700), diagnostics enabled during probe (0x080), and all the ports share an irq (0x001). Can FreeBSD handle multiport serial cards sharing irqs? Not yet. You'll have to use a different irq for each card. Can I set the default serial parameters for a port? The ttydX (or cuaaX) device is the regular device you'll want to open for your applications. When a process opens the device, it'll have a default set of terminal I/O settings. You can see these settings with the command &prompt.root; stty -a -f /dev/ttyd1 When you change the settings to this device, the settings are in effect until the device is closed. When it's reopened, it goes back to the default set. To make changes to the default set, you can open and adjust the settings of the initial state device. For example, to turn on CLOCAL mode, 8 bits, and XON/XOFF flow control by default for ttyd5, do: &prompt.root; stty -f /dev/ttyid5 clocal cs8 ixon ixoff A good place to do this is in /etc/rc.serial. Now, an application will have these settings by default when it opens ttyd5. It can still change these settings to its liking, though. You can also prevent certain settings from being changed by an application by making adjustments to the lock state device. For example, to lock the speed of ttyd5 to 57600 bps, do &prompt.root; stty -f /dev/ttyld5 57600 Now, an application that opens ttyd5 and tries to change the speed of the port will be stuck with 57600 bps. Naturally, you should make the initial state and lock state devices writable only by root. The MAKEDEV script does NOT do this when it creates the device entries. How can I enable dialup logins on my modem? So you want to become an Internet service provider, eh? First, you'll need one or more modems that can auto-answer. Your modem will need to assert carrier-detect when it detects a carrier and not assert it all the time. It will need to hang up the phone and reset itself when the data terminal ready (DTR) line goes from on to off. It should probably use RTS/CTS flow control or no local flow control at all. Finally, it must use a constant speed between the computer and itself, but (to be nice to your callers) it should negotiate a speed between itself and the remote modem. For many Hayes command-set--compatible modems, this command will make these settings and store them in nonvolatile memory: AT &C1 &D3 &K3 &Q6 S0=1 &W See the section on sending AT commands below for information on how to make these settings without resorting to an MS-DOS terminal program. Next, make an entry in /etc/ttys for the modem. This file lists all the ports on which the operating system will await logins. Add a line that looks something like this: ttyd1 "/usr/libexec/getty std.57600" dialup on insecure This line indicates that the second serial port (/dev/ttyd1) has a modem connected running at 57600 bps and no parity (std.57600, which comes from the file /etc/gettytab). The terminal type for this port is dialup. The port is on and is insecure---meaning root logins on the port aren't allowed. For dialin ports like this one, use the ttydX entry. It's common practice to use dialup as the terminal type. Many users set up in their .profile or .login files a prompt for the actual terminal type if the starting type is dialup. The example shows the port as insecure. To become root on this port, you have to login as a regular user, then su to become root. If you use secure then root can login in directly. After making modifications to /etc/ttys, you need to send a hangup or HUP signal to the init process: &prompt.root; kill -HUP 1 This forces the init process to reread /etc/ttys. The init process will then start getty processes on all on ports. You can find out if logins are available for your port by typing &prompt.user; ps -ax | grep '[t]tyd1' You should see something like: 747 ?? I 0:00.04 /usr/libexec/getty std.57600 ttyd1 How can I connect a dumb terminal to my FreeBSD box? If you're using another computer as a terminal into your FreeBSD system, get a null modem cable to go between the two serial ports. If you're using an actual terminal, see its accompanying instructions. Then, modify /etc/ttys, like above. For example, if you're hooking up a WYSE-50 terminal to the fifth serial port, use an entry like this: ttyd4 "/usr/libexec/getty std.38400" wyse50 on secure This example shows that the port on /dev/ttyd4 has a wyse50 terminal connected at 38400 bps with no parity (std.38400 from /etc/gettytab) and root logins are allowed (secure). Why can't I run tip or cu? On your system, the programs tip and cu are probably executable only by uucp and group dialer. You can use the group dialer to control who has access to your modem or remote systems. Just add yourself to group dialer. Alternatively, you can let everyone on your system run tip and cu by typing: &prompt.root; chmod 4511 /usr/bin/cu &prompt.root; chmod 4511 /usr/bin/tip My stock Hayes modem isn't supported---what can I do? Actually, the man page for tip is out of date. There is a generic Hayes dialer already built in. Just use at=hayes in your /etc/remote file. The Hayes driver isn't smart enough to recognize some of the advanced features of newer modems---messages like BUSY, NO DIALTONE, or CONNECT 115200 will just confuse it. You should turn those messages off when you use tip (using ATX0&W). Also, the dial timeout for tip is 60 seconds. Your modem should use something less, or else tip will think there's a communication problem. Try ATS7=45&W. Actually, as shipped tip doesn't yet support it fully. The solution is to edit the file tipconf.h in the directory /usr/src/usr.bin/tip/tip. Obviously you need the source distribution to do this. Edit the line #define HAYES 0 to #define HAYES 1. Then make and make install. Everything works nicely after that. How am I expected to enter these AT commands? Make what's called a direct entry in your /etc/remote file. For example, if your modem's hooked up to the first serial port, /dev/cuaa0, then put in the following line: cuaa0:dv=/dev/cuaa0:br#19200:pa=none Use the highest bps rate your modem supports in the br capability. Then, type tip cuaa0 and you'll be connected to your modem. If there is no /dev/cuaa0 on your system, do this: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV cuaa0 Or use cu as root with the following command: &prompt.root; cu -lline -sspeed with line being the serial port (e.g. /dev/cuaa0) and speed being the speed (e.g.57600). When you are done entering the AT commands hit ~. to exit. The <@> sign for the pn capability doesn't work! The <@> sign in the phone number capability tells tip to look in /etc/phones for a phone number. But the <@> sign is also a special character in capability files like /etc/remote. Escape it with a backslash: pn=\@ How can I dial a phone number on the command line? Put what's called a generic entry in your /etc/remote file. For example: tip115200|Dial any phone number at 115200 bps:\ :dv=/dev/cuaa0:br#115200:at=hayes:pa=none:du: tip57600|Dial any phone number at 57600 bps:\ :dv=/dev/cuaa0:br#57600:at=hayes:pa=none:du: Then you can do something like tip -115200 5551234. If you prefer cu over tip, use a generic cu entry: cu115200|Use cu to dial any number at 115200bps:\ :dv=/dev/cuaa1:br#57600:at=hayes:pa=none:du: and type cu 5551234 -s 115200. Do I have to type in the bps rate every time I do that? Put in an entry for tip1200 or cu1200, but go ahead and use whatever bps rate is appropriate with the br capability. tip thinks a good default is 1200 bps which is why it looks for a tip1200 entry. You don't have to use 1200 bps, though. I access a number of hosts through a terminal server. Rather than waiting until you're connected and typing CONNECT host each time, use tip's cm capability. For example, these entries in /etc/remote: pain|pain.deep13.com|Forrester's machine:\ :cm=CONNECT pain\n:tc=deep13: muffin|muffin.deep13.com|Frank's machine:\ :cm=CONNECT muffin\n:tc=deep13: deep13:Gizmonics Institute terminal server:\ :dv=/dev/cuaa2:br#38400:at=hayes:du:pa=none:pn=5551234: will let you type tip pain or tip muffin to connect to the hosts pain or muffin; and tip deep13 to get to the terminal server. Can tip try more than one line for each site? This is often a problem where a university has several modem lines and several thousand students trying to use them... Make an entry for your university in /etc/remote and use <\@> for the pn capability: big-university:\ :pn=\@:tc=dialout dialout:\ :dv=/dev/cuaa3:br#9600:at=courier:du:pa=none: Then, list the phone numbers for the university in /etc/phones: big-university 5551111 big-university 5551112 big-university 5551113 big-university 5551114 tip will try each one in the listed order, then give up. If you want to keep retrying, run tip in a while loop. Why do I have to hit CTRL+P twice to send CTRL+P once? CTRL+P is the default force character, used to tell tip that the next character is literal data. You can set the force character to any other character with the ~s escape, which means set a variable. Type ~sforce=single-char followed by a newline. single-char is any single character. If you leave out single-char, then the force character is the nul character, which you can get by typing CTRL+2 or CTRL+SPACE. A pretty good value for single-char is SHIFT+CTRL+6, which I've seen only used on some terminal servers. You can have the force character be whatever you want by specifying the following in your $HOME/.tiprc file: force=single-char Suddenly everything I type is in UPPER CASE?? You must've pressed CTRL+A, tip raise character, specially designed for people with broken caps-lock keys. Use ~s as above and set the variable raisechar to something reasonable. In fact, you can set it to the same as the force character, if you never expect to use either of these features. Here's a sample .tiprc file perfect for Emacs users who need to type CTRL+2 and CTRL+A a lot: force=^^ raisechar=^^ The ^^ is SHIFT+CTRL+6. How can I do file transfers with tip? If you're talking to another UNIX system, you can send and receive files with ~p (put) and ~t (take). These commands run cat and echo on the remote system to accept and send files. The syntax is: ~p <local-file> [<remote-file>] ~t <remote-file> [<local-file>] There's no error checking, so you probably should use another protocol, like zmodem. How can I run zmodem with tip? First, install one of the zmodem programs from the ports collection (such as one of the two from the comms category, lrzsz and rzsz). To receive files, start the sending program on the remote end. Then, press enter and type ~C rz (or ~C lrz if you installed lrzsz) to begin receiving them locally. To send files, start the receiving program on the remote end. Then, press enter and type ~C sz files (or ~C lsz files) to send them to the remote system. FreeBSD can't seem to find my serial ports, even when the settings are correct. Motherboards and cards with Acer UARTs do not probe properly under the FreeBSD sio probe. Obtain a patch from www.lemis.com to fix your problem. Miscellaneous Questions FreeBSD uses far more swap space than Linux. Why? FreeBSD only appears to use more swap than Linux. In actual fact, it does not. The main difference between FreeBSD and Linux in this regard is that FreeBSD will proactively move entirely idle, unused pages of main memory into swap in order to make more main memory available for active use. Linux tends to only move pages to swap as a last resort. The perceived heavier use of swap is balanced by the more efficient use of main memory. Note that while FreeBSD is proactive in this regard, it does not arbitrarily decide to swap pages when the system is truely idle. Thus you will not find your system all paged out when you get up in the morning after leaving it idle overnight. Why does &man.top.1; show very little free memory even when I have very few programs running? The simple answer is that free memory is wasted memory. Any memory that your programs don't actively allocate is used within the FreeBSD kernel as disk cache. The values shown by &man.top.1; labelled as Inact, Cache, and Buf are all cached data at different aging levels. This cached data means the system does not have to access a slow disk again for data it has accessed recently, thus increasing overall performance. In general, a low value shown for Free memory in &man.top.1; is good, provided it is not very low. Why use (what are) a.out and ELF executable formats? To understand why FreeBSD uses the ELF format, you must first know a little about the 3 currently dominant executable formats for UNIX: Prior to FreeBSD 3.x, FreeBSD used the a.out format. a.out The oldest and classic unix object format. It uses a short and compact header with a magic number at the beginning that's often used to characterize the format (see a.out(5) for more details). It contains three loaded segments: .text, .data, and .bss plus a symbol table and a string table. COFF The SVR3 object format. The header now comprises a section table, so you can have more than just .text, .data, and .bss sections. ELF The successor to COFF, featuring Multiple sections and 32-bit or 64-bit possible values. One major drawback: ELF was also designed with the assumption that there would be only one ABI per system architecture. That assumption is actually quite incorrect, and not even in the commercial SYSV world (which has at least three ABIs: SVR4, Solaris, SCO) does it hold true. FreeBSD tries to work around this problem somewhat by providing a utility for branding a known ELF executable with information about the ABI it's compliant with. See the man page for brandelf for more information. FreeBSD comes from the classic camp and has traditionally used the a.out format, a technology tried and proven through many generations of BSD releases. Though it has also been possible for some time to build and run native ELF binaries (and kernels) on a FreeBSD system, FreeBSD initially resisted the push to switch to ELF as the default format. Why? Well, when the Linux camp made their painful transition to ELF, it was not so much to flee the a.out executable format as it was their inflexible jump-table based shared library mechanism, which made the construction of shared libraries very difficult for vendors and developers alike. Since the ELF tools available offered a solution to the shared library problem and were generally seen as the way forward anyway, the migration cost was accepted as necessary and the transition made. In FreeBSD's case, our shared library mechanism is based more closely on Sun's SunOS-style shared library mechanism and, as such, is very easy to use. However, starting with 3.0, FreeBSD officially supports ELF binaries as the default format. Even though the a.out executable format has served us well, the GNU people, who author the compiler tools we use, have dropped support for the a.out format. This has forced us to maintain a divergent version of the compler and linker, and has kept us from reaping the benefits of the latest GNU development efforts. Also the demands of ISO-C++, notably contstructors and destructors, has also led to native ELF support in future FreeBSD releases. Yes, but why are there so many different formats? Back in the dim, dark past, there was simple hardware. This simple hardware supported a simple, small system. a.out was completely adequate for the job of representing binaries on this simple system (a PDP-11). As people ported unix from this simple system, they retained the a.out format because it was sufficient for the early ports of unix to architectures like the Motorola 68k, VAXen, etc. Then some bright hardware engineer decided that if he could force software to do some sleazy tricks, then he'd be able to shave a few gates off the design and allow his CPU core to run faster. While it was made to work with this new kind of hardware (known these days as RISC), a.out was ill-suited for this hardware, so many formats were developed to get to a better performance from this hardware than the limited, simple a.out format could offer. Things like COFF, ECOFF, and a few obscure others were invented and their limitations explored before things seemed to settle on ELF. In addition, program sizes were getting huge and disks (and physical memory) were still relatively small so the concept of a shared library was born. The VM system also became more sophisticated. While each one of these advancements was done using the a.out format, its usefulness was stretched more and more with each new feature. In addition, people wanted to dynamically load things at run time, or to junk parts of their program after the init code had run to save in core memory and/or swap space. Languages became more sophistocated and people wanted code called before main automatically. Lots of hacks were done to the a.out format to allow all of these things to happen, and they basically worked for a time. In time, a.out wasn't up to handling all these problems without an ever increasing overhead in code and complexity. While ELF solved many of these problems, it would be painful to switch from the system that basically worked. So ELF had to wait until it was more painful to remain with a.out than it was to migrate to ELF. However, as time passed, the build tools that FreeBSD derived their build tools from (the assembler and loader especially) evolved in two parallel trees. The FreeBSD tree added shared libraries and fixed some bugs. The GNU folks that originally write these programs rewrote them and added simpler support for building cross compilers, plugging in different formats at will, etc. Since many people wanted to build cross compilers targeting FreeBSD, they were out of luck since the older sources that FreeBSD had for as and ld weren't up to the task. The new gnu tools chain (binutils) does support cross compiling, ELF, shared libraries, C++ extnensions, etc. In addition, many vendors are releasing ELF binaries, and it is a good thing for FreeBSD to run them. And if it is running ELF binaries, why bother having a.out any more? It is a tired old horse that has proven useful for a long time, but it is time to turn him out to pasture for his long, faithful years of service. ELF is more expressive than a.out and will allow more extensibility in the base system. The ELF tools are better maintained, and offer cross compilation support, which is important to many people. ELF may be a little slower than a.out, but trying to measure it can be difficult. There are also numerous details that are different between the two in how they map pages, handle init code, etc. None of these are very important, but they are differences. In time support for a.out will be moved out of the GENERIC kernel, and eventually removed from the kernel once the need to run legacy a.out programs is past. Why won't chmod change the permissions on symlinks? Symlinks do not have permissions, and by default, &man.chmod.1; will not follow symlinks to change the permissions on the target file. So if you have a file, foo, and a symlink to that file, bar, then this command will always succeed. &prompt.user; chmod g-w bar However, the permissions on foo will not have changed. You have to use either or together with the option to make this work. See the chmod and symlink man pages for more info. The option does a RECURSIVE chmod. Be careful about specifying directories or symlinks to directories to chmod. If you want to change the permissions of a directory referenced by a symlink, use chmod without any options and follow the symlink with a trailing slash (/). For example, if foo is a symlink to directory bar, and you want to change the permissions of foo (actually bar), you would do something like: &prompt.user; chmod 555 foo/ With the trailing slash, chmod will follow the symlink, foo, to change the permissions of the directory, bar. Why are login names still restricted to 8 characters? You'd think it'd be easy enough to change UT_NAMESIZE and rebuild the whole world, and everything would just work. Unfortunately there are often scads of applications and utilities (including system tools) that have hard-coded small numbers (not always 8 or 9, but oddball ones like 15 and 20) in structures and buffers. Not only will this get you log files which are trashed (due to variable-length records getting written when fixed records were expected), but it can break Sun's NIS clients and potentially cause other problems in interacting with other UNIX systems. In FreeBSD 3.0 and later, the maximum name length has been increased to 16 characters and those various utilities with hard-coded name sizes have been found and fixed. The fact that this touched so many areas of the system is why, in fact, the change was not made until 3.0. If you're absolutely confident in your ability to find and fix these sorts of problems for yourself when and if they pop up, you can increase the login name length in earlier releases by editing /usr/include/utmp.h and changing UT_NAMESIZE accordingly. You must also update MAXLOGNAME in /usr/include/sys/param.h to match the UT_NAMESIZE change. Finally, if you build from sources, don't forget that /usr/include is updated each time! Change the appropriate files in /usr/src/.. instead. Can I run DOS binaries under FreeBSD? Yes, starting with version 3.0 you can using BSDI's doscmd DOS emulation which has been integrated and enhanced. Send mail to The FreeBSD emulation discussion list if you're interested in joining this ongoing effort! For pre-3.0 systems, there is a neat utility called pcemu in the ports collection which emulates an 8088 and enough BIOS services to run DOS text mode applications. It requires the X Window System (provided as XFree86). What is sup, and how do I use it? SUP stands for Software Update Protocol, and was developed by CMU for keeping their development trees in sync. We used it to keep remote sites in sync with our central development sources. SUP is not bandwidth friendly, and has been retired. The current recommended method to keep your sources up to date is Handbook entry on CVSup How cool is FreeBSD? Q. Has anyone done any temperature testing while running FreeBSD? I know Linux runs cooler than dos, but have never seen a mention of FreeBSD. It seems to run really hot. A. No, but we have done numerous taste tests on blindfolded volunteers who have also had 250 micrograms of LSD-25 administered beforehand. 35% of the volunteers said that FreeBSD tasted sort of orange, whereas Linux tasted like purple haze. Neither group mentioned any particular variances in temperature that I can remember. We eventually had to throw the results of this survey out entirely anyway when we found that too many volunteers were wandering out of the room during the tests, thus skewing the results. I think most of the volunteers are at Apple now, working on their new scratch and sniff GUI. It's a funny old business we're in! Seriously, both FreeBSD and Linux use the HLT (halt) instruction when the system is idle thus lowering its energy consumption and therefore the heat it generates. Also if you have APM (advanced power management) configured, then FreeBSD can also put the CPU into a low power mode. Who's scratching in my memory banks?? Q. Is there anything odd that FreeBSD does when compiling the kernel which would cause the memory to make a scratchy sound? When compiling (and for a brief moment after recognizing the floppy drive upon startup, as well), a strange scratchy sound emanates from what appears to be the memory banks. A. Yes! You'll see frequent references to daemons in the BSD documentation, and what most people don't know is that this refers to genuine, non-corporeal entities that now possess your computer. The scratchy sound coming from your memory is actually high-pitched whispering exchanged among the daemons as they best decide how to deal with various system administration tasks. If the noise gets to you, a good fdisk /mbr from DOS will get rid of them, but don't be surprised if they react adversely and try to stop you. In fact, if at any point during the exercise you hear the satanic voice of Bill Gates coming from the built-in speaker, take off running and don't ever look back! Freed from the counterbalancing influence of the BSD daemons, the twin demons of DOS and Windows are often able to re-assert total control over your machine to the eternal damnation of your soul. Given a choice, I think I'd prefer to get used to the scratchy noises, myself! What does MFC mean? MFC is an acronym for Merged From -CURRENT. It's used in the CVS logs to denote when a change was migrated from the CURRENT to the STABLE branches. What does BSD mean? It stands for something in a secret language that only members can know. It doesn't translate literally but its ok to tell you that BSD's translation is something between, Formula-1 Racing Team, Penguins are tasty snacks, and We have a better sense of humor than Linux. :-) Seriously, BSD is an acronym for Berkeley Software Distribution, which is the name the Berkeley CSRG (Computer Systems Research Group) chose for their Unix distribution way back when. What is a repo-copy? A repo-copy (which is a short form of repository copy) refers to the direct copying of files within the CVS repository. Without a repo-copy, if a file needed to be copied or moved to another place in the repository, the committer would run cvs add to put the file in its new location, and then cvs rm on the old file if the old copy was being removed. The disadvantage of this method is that the history (i.e. the entries in the CVS logs) of the file would not be copied to the new location. As the FreeBSD Project considers this history very useful, a repository copy is often used instead. This is a process where one of the repository meisters will copy the files directly within the repository, rather than using the cvs program. Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? The really, really short answer is that you shouldn't. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed doesn't mean you should stop others from building one just because you don't like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change. The longer and more complete answer is that after a very long argument about whether &man.sleep.1; should take fractional second arguments, &a.phk; posted a long message entitled A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass.... The appropriate portions of that message are quoted below.
&a.phk; on freebsd-hackers, October 2, 1999 What is it about this bike shed? Some of you have asked me. It's a long story, or rather it's an old story, but it is quite short actually. C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a book in the early 1960'ies, called Parkinson's Law, which contains a lot of insight into the dynamics of management. [snip a bit of commentary on the book] In the specific example involving the bike shed, the other vital component is an atomic power-plant, I guess that illustrates the age of the book. Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions. Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books. A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here. In Denmark we call it setting your fingerprint. It is about personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and say There! I did that. It is a strong trait in politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just think about footsteps in wet cement.
How many FreeBSD hackers does it take to change a lightbulb? One thousand, one hundred and seventy-two: Twenty-three to complain to -CURRENT about the lights being out; Four to claim that it is a configuration problem, and that such matters really belong on -questions; Three to submit PRs about it, one of which is misfiled under doc and consists only of "it's dark"; One to commit an untested lightbulb which breaks buildworld, then back it out five minutes later; Eight to flame the PR originators for not including patches in their PRs; Five to complain about buildworld being broken; Thirty-one to answer that it works for them, and they must have cvsupped at a bad time; One to post a patch for a new lightbulb to -hackers; One to complain that he had patches for this three years ago, but when he sent them to -CURRENT they were just ignored, and he has had bad experiences with the PR system; besides, the proposed new lightbulb is non-reflexive; Thirty-seven to scream that lightbulbs do not belong in the base system, that committers have no right to do things like this without consulting the Community, and WHAT IS -CORE DOING ABOUT IT!? Two hundred to complain about the color of the bicycle shed; Three to point out that the patch breaks style(9); Seventeen to complain that the proposed new lightbulb is under GPL; Five hundred and eighty-six to engage in a flame war about the comparative advantages of the GPL, the BSD license, the MIT license, the NPL, and the personal hygiene of unnamed FSF founders; Seven to move various portions of the thread to -chat and -advocacy; One to commit the suggested lightbulb, even though it shines dimmer than the old one; Two to back it out with a furious flame of a commit message, arguing that FreeBSD is better off in the dark than with a dim lightbulb; Forty-six to argue vociferously about the backing out of the dim lightbulb and demanding a statement from -core; Eleven to request a smaller lightbulb so it will fit their Tamagotchi if we ever decide to port FreeBSD to that platform; Seventy-three to complain about the SNR on -hackers and -chat and unsubscribe in protest; Thirteen to post "unsubscribe", "How do I unsubscribe?", or "Please remove me from the list", followed by the usual footer; One to commit a working lightbulb while everybody is too busy flaming everybody else to notice; Thirty-one to point out that the new lightbulb would shine 0.364% brighter if compiled with TenDRA (although it will have to be reshaped into a cube), and that FreeBSD should therefore switch to TenDRA instead of EGCS; One to complain that the new lightbulb lacks fairings; Nine (including the PR originators) to ask "what is MFC?"; Fifty-seven to complain about the lights being out two weeks after the bulb has been changed. &a.nik; adds: I was laughing quite hard at this. And then I thought, "Hang on, shouldn't there be '1 to document it.' in that list somewhere?" And then I was enlightened :-) This entry is Copyright (c) 1999 &a.des;. Please do not reproduce without attribution. For serious FreeBSD hackers only What are SNAPs and RELEASEs? There are currently three active/semi-active branches in the FreeBSD CVS Repository (the RELENG_2 branch is probably only changed twice a year, which is why there are only three active branches of development): RELENG_2_2 AKA 2.2-STABLE RELENG_3 AKA 3.X-STABLE RELENG_4 AKA 4-STABLE HEAD AKA -CURRENT AKA 5.0-CURRENT HEAD is not an actual branch tag, like the other two; it's simply a symbolic constant for the current, non-branched development stream which we simply refer to as -CURRENT. Right now, -CURRENT is the 5.0 development stream and the 4-STABLE branch, RELENG_4, forked off from -CURRENT in Mar 2000. The 2.2-STABLE branch, RELENG_2_2, departed -CURRENT in November 1996, and has pretty much been retired. How do I make my own custom release? To make a release you need to do three things: First, you need to be running a kernel with the vn driver configured in. Add this to your kernel config file and build a new kernel: pseudo-device vn #Vnode driver (turns a file into a device) Second, you have to have the whole CVS repository at hand. To get this you can use CVSUP but in your supfile set the release name to cvs and remove any tag or date fields: *default prefix=/home/ncvs *default base=/a *default host=cvsup.FreeBSD.org *default release=cvs *default delete compress use-rel-suffix ## Main Source Tree src-all src-eBones src-secure # Other stuff ports-all www doc-all Then run cvsup -g supfile to suck all the good bits onto your box... Finally, you need a chunk of empty space to build into. Let's say it's in /some/big/filesystem, and from the example above you've got the CVS repository in /home/ncvs: &prompt.root; setenv CVSROOT /home/ncvs # or export CVSROOT=/home/ncvs &prompt.root; cd /usr/src &prompt.root; make buildworld &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/release &prompt.root; make release BUILDNAME=3.0-MY-SNAP CHROOTDIR=/some/big/filesystem/release
Please note that you do not need to build world if you already have a populated /usr/obj.
An entire release will be built in /some/big/filesystem/release and you will have a full FTP-type installation in /some/big/filesystem/release/R/ftp when you're done. If you want to build your SNAP along some other branch than -CURRENT, you can also add RELEASETAG=SOMETAG to the make release command line above, e.g. RELEASETAG=RELENG_2_2 would build an up-to-the- minute 2.2-STABLE snapshot. How do I create customized installation disks? The entire process of creating installation disks and source and binary archives is automated by various targets in /usr/src/release/Makefile. The information there should be enough to get you started. However, it should be said that this involves doing a make world and will therefore take up a lot of time and disk space. make world clobbers my existing installed binaries. Yes, this is the general idea; as its name might suggest, make world rebuilds every system binary from scratch, so you can be certain of having a clean and consistent environment at the end (which is why it takes so long). If the environment variable DESTDIR is defined while running make world or make install, the newly-created binaries will be deposited in a directory tree identical to the installed one, rooted at ${DESTDIR}. Some random combination of shared libraries modifications and program rebuilds can cause this to fail in make world however. When my system boots, it says (bus speed defaulted). The Adaptec 1542 SCSI host adapters allow the user to configure their bus access speed in software. Previous versions of the 1542 driver tried to determine the fastest usable speed and set the adapter to that. We found that this breaks some users' systems, so you now have to define the TUNE_1542 kernel configuration option in order to have this take place. Using it on those systems where it works may make your disks run faster, but on those systems where it doesn't, your data could be corrupted. Can I follow current with limited Internet access? Yes, you can do this without downloading the whole source tree by using the CTM facility. How did you split the distribution into 240k files? Newer BSD based systems have a option to split that allows them to split files on arbitrary byte boundaries. Here is an example from /usr/src/Makefile. bin-tarball: (cd ${DISTDIR}; \ tar cf - . \ gzip --no-name -9 -c | \ split -b 240640 - \ ${RELEASEDIR}/tarballs/bindist/bin_tgz.) I've written a kernel extension, who do I send it to? Please take a look at The Handbook entry on how to submit code. And thanks for the thought! How are Plug N Play ISA cards detected and initialized? By: Frank Durda IV In a nutshell, there a few I/O ports that all of the PnP boards respond to when the host asks if anyone is out there. So when the PnP probe routine starts, he asks if there are any PnP boards present, and all the PnP boards respond with their model # to a I/O read of the same port, so the probe routine gets a wired-OR yes to that question. At least one bit will be on in that reply. Then the probe code is able to cause boards with board model IDs (assigned by Microsoft/Intel) lower than X to go off-line. It then looks to see if any boards are still responding to the query. If the answer was 0, then there are no boards with IDs above X. Now probe asks if there are any boards below X. If so, probe knows there are boards with a model numbers below X. Probe then asks for boards greater than X-(limit/4) to go off-line. If repeats the query. By repeating this semi-binary search of IDs-in-range enough times, the probing code will eventually identify all PnP boards present in a given machine with a number of iterations that is much lower than what 2^64 would take. The IDs are two 32-bit fields (hence 2ˆ64) + 8 bit checksum. The first 32 bits are a vendor identifier. They never come out and say it, but it appears to be assumed that different types of boards from the same vendor could have different 32-bit vendor ids. The idea of needing 32 bits just for unique manufacturers is a bit excessive. The lower 32 bits are a serial #, ethernet address, something that makes this one board unique. The vendor must never produce a second board that has the same lower 32 bits unless the upper 32 bits are also different. So you can have multiple boards of the same type in the machine and the full 64 bits will still be unique. The 32 bit groups can never be all zero. This allows the wired-OR to show non-zero bits during the initial binary search. Once the system has identified all the board IDs present, it will reactivate each board, one at a time (via the same I/O ports), and find out what resources the given board needs, what interrupt choices are available, etc. A scan is made over all the boards to collect this information. This info is then combined with info from any ECU files on the hard disk or wired into the MLB BIOS. The ECU and BIOS PnP support for hardware on the MLB is usually synthetic, and the peripherals don't really do genuine PnP. However by examining the BIOS info plus the ECU info, the probe routines can cause the devices that are PnP to avoid those devices the probe code cannot relocate. Then the PnP devices are visited once more and given their I/O, DMA, IRQ and Memory-map address assignments. The devices will then appear at those locations and remain there until the next reboot, although there is nothing that says you can't move them around whenever you want. There is a lot of oversimplification above, but you should get the general idea. Microsoft took over some of the primary printer status ports to do PnP, on the logic that no boards decoded those addresses for the opposing I/O cycles. I found a genuine IBM printer board that did decode writes of the status port during the early PnP proposal review period, but MS said tough. So they do a write to the printer status port for setting addresses, plus that use that address + 0x800, and a third I/O port for reading that can be located anywhere between 0x200 and 0x3ff. Does FreeBSD support architectures other than the x86? Several groups of people have expressed interest in working on multi-architecture ports for FreeBSD and the FreeBSD/AXP (ALPHA) port is one such effort which has been quite successful, now available at ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/alpha. The ALPHA port currently runs on a growing number of ALPHA machine types, among them the AlphaStation, AXPpci, PC164, Miata and Multia models. For status information, please join the freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.org mailing list. Interest has also been expressed in a port of FreeBSD to the SPARC architecture, join the freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.org mailing list if you are interested in joining that project. Most recent additions to the list of upcoming plaforms are IA-64 and PowerPC, join the freebsd-ia64@FreeBSD.org or/and freebsd-ppc@FreeBSD.org mailing lists for more information. For general discussion on new architectures, join the freebsd-platforms@FreeBSD.org mailing list. I need a major number for a device driver I've written. This depends on whether or not you plan on making the driver publicly available. If you do, then please send us a copy of the driver source code, plus the appropriate modifications to files.i386, a sample configuration file entry, and the appropriate MAKEDEV code to create any special files your device uses. If you do not, or are unable to because of licensing restrictions, then character major number 32 and block major number 8 have been reserved specifically for this purpose; please use them. In any case, we'd appreciate hearing about your driver on freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org. Alternative layout policies for directories In answer to the question of alternative layout policies for directories, the scheme that is currently in use is unchanged from what I wrote in 1983. I wrote that policy for the original fast filesystem, and never revisited it. It works well at keeping cylinder groups from filling up. As several of you have noted, it works poorly for find. Most filesystems are created from archives that were created by a depth first search (aka ftw). These directories end up being striped across the cylinder groups thus creating a worst possible senario for future depth first searches. If one knew the total number of directories to be created, the solution would be to create (total / fs_ncg) per cylinder group before moving on. Obviously, one would have to create some heuristic to guess at this number. Even using a small fixed number like say 10 would make an order of magnitude improvement. To differentiate restores from normal operation (when the current algorithm is probably more sensible), you could use the clustering of up to 10 if they were all done within a ten second window. Anyway, my conclusion is that this is an area ripe for experimentation. Kirk McKusick, September 1998 Making the most of a kernel panic [This section was extracted from a mail written by &a.wpaul; on the freebsd-current mailing list by &a.des;, who fixed a few typos and added the bracketed comments] From: Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> Subject: Re: the fs fun never stops To: ben@rosengart.com Date: Sun, 20 Sep 1998 15:22:50 -0400 (EDT) Cc: current@FreeBSD.org [<ben@rosengart.com> posted the following panic message] > Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode > fault virtual address = 0x40 > fault code = supervisor read, page not present > instruction pointer = 0x8:0xf014a7e5 ^^^^^^^^^^ > stack pointer = 0x10:0xf4ed6f24 > frame pointer = 0x10:0xf4ed6f28 > code segment = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b > = DPL 0, pres 1, def32 1, gran 1 > processor eflags = interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL = 0 > current process = 80 (mount) > interrupt mask = > trap number = 12 > panic: page fault [When] you see a message like this, it's not enough to just reproduce it and send it in. The instruction pointer value that I highlighted up there is important; unfortunately, it's also configuration dependent. In other words, the value varies depending on the exact kernel image that you're using. If you're using a GENERIC kernel image from one of the snapshots, then it's possible for somebody else to track down the offending function, but if you're running a custom kernel then only you can tell us where the fault occured. What you should do is this: Write down the instruction pointer value. Note that the 0x8: part at the begining is not significant in this case: it's the 0xf0xxxxxx part that we want. When the system reboots, do the following: &prompt.user; nm -n /kernel.that.caused.the.panic | grep f0xxxxxx where f0xxxxxx is the instruction pointer value. The odds are you will not get an exact match since the symbols in the kernel symbol table are for the entry points of functions and the instruction pointer address will be somewhere inside a function, not at the start. If you don't get an exact match, omit the last digit from the instruction pointer value and try again, i.e.: &prompt.user; nm -n /kernel.that.caused.the.panic | grep f0xxxxx If that doesn't yield any results, chop off another digit. Repeat until you get some sort of output. The result will be a possible list of functions which caused the panic. This is a less than exact mechanism for tracking down the point of failure, but it's better than nothing. I see people constantly show panic messages like this but rarely do I see someone take the time to match up the instruction pointer with a function in the kernel symbol table. The best way to track down the cause of a panic is by capturing a crash dump, then using gdb(1) to to a stack trace on the crash dump. Of course, this depends on gdb(1) in -CURRENT working correctly, which I can't guarantee (I recall somebody saying that the new ELF-ized gdb(1) didn't handle kernel crash dumps correctly: somebody should check this before 3.0 goes out of beta or there'll be a lot of red faces after the CDs ship). In any case, the method I normally use is this: Set up a kernel config file, optionally adding options DDB if you think you need the kernel debugger for something. (I use this mainly for setting beakpoints if I suspect an infinite loop condition of some kind.) Use config -g KERNELCONFIG to set up the build directory. cd /sys/compile/ KERNELCONFIG; make Wait for kernel to finish compiling. make install reboot The &man.make.1; process will have built two kernels. kernel and kernel.debug. kernel was installed as /kernel, while kernel.debug can be used as the source of debugging symbols for gdb(1). To make sure you capture a crash dump, you need edit /etc/rc.conf and set dumpdev to point to your swap partition. This will cause the rc(8) scripts to use the dumpon(8) command to enable crash dumps. You can also run dumpon(8) manually. After a panic, the crash dump can be recovered using savecore(8); if dumpdev is set in /etc/rc.conf, the rc(8) scripts will run savecore(8) automatically and put the crash dump in /var/crash. FreeBSD crash dumps are usually the same size as the physical RAM size of your machine. That is, if you have 64MB of RAM, you will get a 64MB crash dump. Therefore you must make sure there's enough space in /var/crash to hold the dump. Alternatively, you run savecore(8) manually and have it recover the crash dump to another directory where you have more room. It's possible to limit the size of the crash dump by using options MAXMEM=(foo) to set the amount of memory the kernel will use to something a little more sensible. For example, if you have 128MB of RAM, you can limit the kernel's memory usage to 16MB so that your crash dump size will be 16MB instead of 128MB. Once you have recovered the crash dump, you can get a stack trace with gdb(1) as follows: &prompt.user; gdb -k /sys/compile/KERNELCONFIG/kernel.debug /var/crash/vmcore.0 (gdb) where Note that there may be several screens worth of information; ideally you should use script(1) to capture all of them. Using the unstripped kernel image with all the debug symbols should show the exact line of kernel source code where the panic occured. Usually you have to read the stack trace from the bottom up in order to trace the exact sequence of events that lead to the crash. You can also use gdb(1) to print out the contents of various variables or structures in order to examine the system state at the time of the crash. Now, if you're really insane and have a second computer, you can also configure gdb(1) to do remote debugging such that you can use gdb(1) on one system to debug the kernel on another system, including setting breakpoints, single-stepping through the kernel code, just like you can do with a normal user-mode program. I haven't played with this yet as I don't often have the chance to set up two machines side by side for debugging purposes. [Bill adds: "I forgot to mention one thing: if you have DDB enabled and the kernel drops into the debugger, you can force a panic (and a crash dump) just by typing 'panic' at the ddb prompt. It may stop in the debugger again during the panic phase. If it does, type 'continue' and it will finish the crash dump." -ed] dlsym() stopped working for ELF executables! The ELF toolchain does not, by default, make the symbols defined in an executable visible to the dynamic linker. Consequently dlsym() searches on handles obtained from calls to dlopen(NULL, flags) will fail to find such symbols. If you want to search, using dlsym(), for symbols present in the main executable of a process, you need to link the executable using the option to the ELF linker. Increasing or reducing the kernel address space By default, the kernel address space is 256 MB on FreeBSD 3.x and 1 GB on FreeBSD 4.x. If you run a network-intensive server (e.g. a large FTP or HTTP server), you might find that 256 MB is not enough. So how do you increase the address space? There are two aspects to this. First, you need to tell the kernel to reserve a larger portion of the address space for itself. Second, since the kernel is loaded at the top of the address space, you need to lower the load address so it doesn't bump its head against the ceiling. The first goal is achieved by increasing the value of NKPDE in src/sys/i386/include/pmap.h. Here's what it looks like for a 1 GB address space: #ifndef NKPDE #ifdef SMP #define NKPDE 254 /* addressable number of page tables/pde's */ #else #define NKPDE 255 /* addressable number of page tables/pde's */ #endif /* SMP */ #endif To find the correct value of NKPDE, divide the desired address space size (in megabytes) by four, then subtract one for UP and two for SMP. To achieve the second goal, you need to compute the correct load address: simply subtract the address space size (in bytes) from 0x100100000; the result is 0xc0100000 for a 1 GB address space. Set LOAD_ADDRESS in src/sys/i386/conf/Makefile.i386 to that value; then set the location counter in the beginning of the section listing in src/sys/i386/conf/kernel.script to the same value, as follows: OUTPUT_FORMAT("elf32-i386", "elf32-i386", "elf32-i386") OUTPUT_ARCH(i386) ENTRY(btext) SEARCH_DIR(/usr/lib); SEARCH_DIR(/usr/obj/elf/home/src/tmp/usr/i386-unknown-freebsdelf/lib); SECTIONS { /* Read-only sections, merged into text segment: */ . = 0xc0100000 + SIZEOF_HEADERS; .interp : { *(.interp) } Then reconfig and rebuild your kernel. You will probably have problems with ps(1), top(1) and the like; make world should take care of it (or a manual rebuild of libkvm, ps and top after copying the patched pmap.h to /usr/include/vm/. NOTE: the size of the kernel address space must be a multiple of four megabytes. [&a.dg; adds: I think the kernel address space needs to be a power of two, but I'm not certain about that. The old(er) boot code used to monkey with the high order address bits and I think expected at least 256MB granularity.] Acknowledgments
FreeBSD Core Team If you see a problem with this FAQ, or wish to submit an entry, please mail the &a.faq;. We appreciate your feedback, and cannot make this a better FAQ without your help!
&a.jkh; Occasional fits of FAQ-reshuffling and updating. &a.dwhite; Services above and beyond the call of duty on freebsd-questions &a.joerg; Services above and beyond the call of duty on Usenet &a.wollman; Networking and formatting Jim Lowe Multicast information &a.pds; FreeBSD FAQ typing machine slavey The FreeBSD Team Kvetching, moaning, submitting data And to any others we've forgotten, apologies and heartfelt thanks! diff --git a/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml b/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml index 434c8767a3..92720541ad 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml @@ -1,12119 +1,12157 @@ %man; %authors; %bookinfo; ]> Frequently Asked Questions for FreeBSD 2.X, 3.X and 4.X The FreeBSD Documentation Project - $FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml,v 1.167 2001/04/09 00:33:45 dd Exp $ + $FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq/book.sgml,v 1.168 2001/04/10 17:14:48 jim Exp $ 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 The FreeBSD Documentation Project &bookinfo.legalnotice; This is the FAQ for FreeBSD versions 2.X, 3.X, and 4.X. All entries are assumed to be relevant to FreeBSD 2.0.5 and later, unless otherwise noted. Any entries with a <XXX> are under construction. If you are interested in helping with this project, send email to the FreeBSD documentation project mailing list freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org. The latest version of this document is always available from the FreeBSD World Wide Web server. It may also be downloaded as one large HTML file with HTTP or as plain text, postscript, PDF, etc. from the FreeBSD FTP server. You may also want to Search the FAQ. Preface Welcome to the FreeBSD 2.X-4.X FAQ! As is usual with Usenet FAQs, this document aims to cover the most frequently asked questions concerning the FreeBSD operating system (and of course answer them!). Although originally intended to reduce bandwidth and avoid the same old questions being asked over and over again, FAQs have become recognized as valuable information resources. Every effort has been made to make this FAQ as informative as possible; if you have any suggestions as to how it may be improved, please feel free to mail them to the &a.faq;. What is FreeBSD? Briefly, FreeBSD is a UN*X-like operating system for the i386 and Alpha/AXP platforms based on U.C. Berkeley's 4.4BSD-Lite release, with some 4.4BSD-Lite2 enhancements. It is also based indirectly on William Jolitz's port of U.C. Berkeley's Net/2 to the i386, known as 386BSD, though very little of the 386BSD code remains. A fuller description of what FreeBSD is and how it can work for you may be found on the FreeBSD home page. FreeBSD is used by companies, Internet Service Providers, researchers, computer professionals, students and home users all over the world in their work, education and recreation. See some of them in the FreeBSD Gallery. For more detailed information on FreeBSD, please see the FreeBSD Handbook. What are the goals of FreeBSD? The goals of the FreeBSD Project are to provide software that may be used for any purpose and without strings attached. Many of us have a significant investment in the code (and project) and would certainly not mind a little financial compensation now and then, but we're definitely not prepared to insist on it. We believe that our first and foremost mission is to provide code to any and all comers, and for whatever purpose, so that the code gets the widest possible use and provides the widest possible benefit. This is, we believe, one of the most fundamental goals of Free Software and one that we enthusiastically support. That code in our source tree which falls under the GNU General Public License (GPL) or GNU Library General Public License (LGPL) comes with slightly more strings attached, though at least on the side of enforced access rather than the usual opposite. Due to the additional complexities that can evolve in the commercial use of GPL software, we do, however, endeavor to replace such software with submissions under the more relaxed BSD copyright whenever possible. Why is it called FreeBSD? It may be used free of charge, even by commercial users. Full source for the operating system is freely available, and the minimum possible restrictions have been placed upon its use, distribution and incorporation into other work (commercial or non-commercial). Anyone who has an improvement and/or bug fix is free to submit their code and have it added to the source tree (subject to one or two obvious provisos). For those of our readers whose first language is not English, it may be worth pointing out that the word free is being used in two ways here, one meaning at no cost, the other meaning you can do whatever you like. Apart from one or two things you cannot do with the FreeBSD code, for example pretending you wrote it, you really can do whatever you like with it. What is the latest version of FreeBSD? Version 4.2 is the latest STABLE version; it was released in November, 2000. This is also the latest RELEASE version. Briefly explained, -STABLE is aimed at the ISP or other corporate user who wants stability and a low change count over the wizzy new features of the latest -CURRENT snapshot. Releases can come from either branch, but you should only use -CURRENT if you're sure that you're prepared for its increased volatility (relative to -STABLE, that is). Releases are only made every few months. While many people stay more up-to-date with the FreeBSD sources (see the questions on FreeBSD-CURRENT and FreeBSD-STABLE) than that, doing so is more of a commitment, as the sources are a moving target. What is FreeBSD-CURRENT? FreeBSD-CURRENT is the development version of the operating system, which will in due course become 5.0-RELEASE. As such, it is really only of interest to developers working on the system and die-hard hobbyists. See the relevant section in the handbook for details on running -CURRENT. If you are not familiar with the operating system or are not capable of identifying the difference between a real problem and a temporary problem, you should not use FreeBSD-CURRENT. This branch sometimes evolves quite quickly and can be un-buildable for a number of days at a time. People that use FreeBSD-CURRENT are expected to be able to analyze any problems and only report them if they are deemed to be mistakes rather than glitches. Questions such as make world produces some error about groups on the -CURRENT mailing list are sometimes treated with contempt. Every day, snapshot releases are made based on the current state of the -CURRENT and -STABLE branches. Nowadays, distributions of the occasional snapshot are now being made available. The goals behind each snapshot release are: To test the latest version of the installation software. To give people who would like to run -CURRENT or -STABLE but who don't have the time and/or bandwidth to follow it on a day-to-day basis an easy way of bootstrapping it onto their systems. To preserve a fixed reference point for the code in question, just in case we break something really badly later. (Although CVS normally prevents anything horrible like this happening :) To ensure that any new features in need of testing have the greatest possible number of potential testers. No claims are made that any -CURRENT snapshot can be considered production quality for any purpose. If you want to run a stable and fully tested system, you will have to stick to full releases, or use the -STABLE snaphosts. Snapshot releases are directly available from ftp://current.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ for 5.0-CURRENT and releng4.FreeBSD.org for 4-STABLE snapshots. 3-STABLE snapshots are not being produced at the time of this writing (May 2000). Snapshots are generated, on the average, once a day for all actively developed branches. What is the FreeBSD-STABLE concept? Back when FreeBSD 2.0.5 was released, we decided to branch FreeBSD development into two parts. One branch was named -STABLE, with the intention that only well-tested bug fixes and small incremental enhancements would be made to it (for Internet Service Providers and other commercial enterprises for whom sudden shifts or experimental features are quite undesirable). The other branch was -CURRENT, which essentially has been one unbroken line leading towards 5.0-RELEASE (and beyond) since 2.0 was released. If a little ASCII art would help, this is how it looks: 2.0 | | | [2.1-STABLE] *BRANCH* 2.0.5 -> 2.1 -> 2.1.5 -> 2.1.6 -> 2.1.7.1 [2.1-STABLE ends] | (Mar 1997) | | | [2.2-STABLE] *BRANCH* 2.2.1 -> 2.2.2-RELEASE -> 2.2.5 -> 2.2.6 -> 2.2.7 -> 2.2.8 [end] | (Mar 1997) (Oct 97) (Apr 98) (Jul 98) (Dec 98) | | 3.0-SNAPs (started Q1 1997) | | 3.0-RELEASE (Oct 1998) | | [3.0-STABLE] *BRANCH* 3.1-RELEASE (Feb 1999) -> 3.2 -> 3.3 -> 3.4 -> 3.5 -> 3.5.1 | (May 1999) (Sep 1999) (Dec 1999) (June 2000) (July 2000) | | [4.0-STABLE] *BRANCH* 4.0 (Mar 2000) -> 4.1 -> 4.1.1 -> 4.2 -> ... future 4.x releases ... | | (July 2000) (Sep 2000) (Nov 2000) \|/ + [5.0-CURRENT continues] The -CURRENT branch is slowly progressing towards 5.0 and beyond, the previous 2.2-STABLE branch having been retired with the release of 2.2.8. 3-STABLE replaced it, with 3.5.1 (the final 3.X release) being released in July 2000. In May 2000 (even though 3.5 came after that), the 3-STABLE branch was more or less replaced by the 4-STABLE branch. 4.2-RELEASE was released in November 2000. 4-STABLE is the actively developed -STABLE branch, although some bugfixes (mostly security-related) are still being committed to 3-STABLE. It is expected that the 3.X branch will be officially obsoleted some time in summer 2000. 5.0-CURRENT is now the current branch, with the no release date planed. When are FreeBSD releases made? As a general principle, the FreeBSD core team only release a new version of FreeBSD when they believe that there are sufficient new features and/or bug fixes to justify one, and are satisfied that the changes made have settled down sufficiently to avoid compromising the stability of the release. Many users regard this caution as one of the best things about FreeBSD, although it can be a little frustrating when waiting for all the latest goodies to become available... Releases are made about every 4 months on average. For people needing (or wanting) a little more excitement, binary snapshots are made every day... see above. Is FreeBSD only available for PCs ? Since 3.x, FreeBSD has run on the DEC Alpha as well as the x86 architecture. Some interest has also been expressed in a SPARC, PowerPC and IA64 ports. If your machine has a different architecture and you need something right now, we suggest you look at NetBSD or OpenBSD. Who is responsible for FreeBSD? The key decisions concerning the FreeBSD project, such as the overall direction of the project and who is allowed to add code to the source tree, are made by a core team of 9 people. There is a much larger team of more than 200 committers who are authorized to make changes directly to the FreeBSD source tree. However, most non-trivial changes are discussed in advance in the mailing lists, and there are no restrictions on who may take part in the discussion. Where can I get FreeBSD? Every significant release of FreeBSD is available via anonymous ftp from the FreeBSD FTP site: For the current 3.X-STABLE release, 3.5.1-RELEASE, see the 3.5.1-RELEASE directory. The current 4-STABLE release, 4.2-RELEASE can be found in the 4.2-RELEASE directory. 4.X snapshots are usually made once a day. 5.0 Snapshot releases are made once a day for the -CURRENT branch, these being of service purely to bleeding-edge testers and developers. FreeBSD is also available via CDROM, from the following place(s):
BSDi 4041 Pike Lane, Suite F Concord, CA 94520 USA Orders: +1 800 786-9907 Questions: +1 925 674-0783 FAX: +1 925 674-0821 email: BSDi Orders address WWW: BSDi Home page
In Australia, you may find it at:
Advanced Multimedia Distributors Factory 1/1 Ovata Drive Tullamarine, Melbourne Victoria Australia Voice: +61 3 9338 6777 CDROM Support BBS 17 Irvine St Peppermint Grove, WA 6011 Voice: +61 9 385-3793 Fax: +61 9 385-2360
And in the UK:
The Public Domain & Shareware Library Winscombe House, Beacon Rd Crowborough Sussex. TN6 1UL Voice: +44 1892 663-298 Fax: +44 1892 667-473
 Where do I find info on the FreeBSD mailing lists? You can find full information in the Handbook entry on mailing-lists. Where do I find the FreeBSD Y2K info? You can find full information in the FreeBSD Y2K page. What FreeBSD news groups are available? You can find full information in the Handbook entry on newsgroups. Are there FreeBSD IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels? Yes, most major IRC networks host a FreeBSD chat channel: Channel #FreeBSD on EFNet is a FreeBSD forum, but don't go there for tech support or to try and get folks there to help you avoid the pain of reading man pages or doing your own research. It is a chat channel, first and foremost, and topics there are just as likely to involve sex, sports or nuclear weapons as they are FreeBSD. You Have Been Warned! Available at server irc.chat.org. Channel #FreeBSDhelp on EFNet is a channel dedicated to helping FreeBSD users. They are much more sympathetic to questions then #FreeBSD is. Channel #FreeBSD on DALNET is available at irc.dal.net in the US and irc.eu.dal.net in Europe. Channel #FreeBSD on UNDERNET is available at us.undernet.org in the US and eu.undernet.org in Europe. Since it is a help channel, be prepared to read the documents you are referred to. Channel #FreeBSD on HybNet. This channel is a help channel. A list of servers can be found on the HybNet web site. Each of these channels are distinct and are not connected to each other. Their chat styles also differ, so you may need to try each to find one suited to your chat style. As with *all* types of IRC traffic, if you're easily offended or can't deal with lots of young people (and more than a few older ones) doing the verbal equivalent of jello wrestling, don't even bother with it. Books on FreeBSD There is a FreeBSD Documentation Project which you may contact (or even better, join) at the freebsd-doc mailing list: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org. This list is for discussion of the FreeBSD documentation. For actual questions about FreeBSD, there is the freebsd-questions mailing list: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org. A FreeBSD handbook is available, and can be found as: the FreeBSD Handbook. Note that this is a work in progress; some parts may be incomplete or out-of-date. The definitive printed guide on FreeBSD is The Complete FreeBSD, written by Greg Lehey and published by BSDi (formerly Walnut Creek CDROM) Books. Now in its third edition, the book contains 773 pages of install & system administration guidance, program setup help, and manual pages. The book (and current FreeBSD release) can be ordered from BSDi, CheapBytes, or at your favorite bookstore. The ISBN is 1-57176-246-9 (this may not be unique). Since FreeBSD is based upon Berkeley 4.4BSD-Lite, most of the 4.4BSD manuals are applicable to FreeBSD. O'Reilly and Associates publishes the following manuals: 4.4BSD System Manager's Manual By Computer Systems Research Group, UC Berkeley 1st Edition June 1994, 804 pages ISBN: 1-56592-080-5 4.4BSD User's Reference Manual By Computer Systems Research Group, UC Berkeley 1st Edition June 1994, 905 pages ISBN: 1-56592-075-9 4.4BSD User's Supplementary Documents By Computer Systems Research Group, UC Berkeley 1st Edition July 1994, 712 pages ISBN: 1-56592-076-7 4.4BSD Programmer's Reference Manual By Computer Systems Research Group, UC Berkeley 1st Edition June 1994, 886 pages ISBN: 1-56592-078-3 4.4BSD Programmer's Supplementary Documents By Computer Systems Research Group, UC Berkeley 1st Edition July 1994, 596 pages ISBN: 1-56592-079-1 A description of these can be found via WWW as: 4.4BSD books description. Due to poor sales, however, these manuals may be hard to get a hold of. For a more in-depth look at the 4.4BSD kernel organization, you can't go wrong with: McKusick, Marshall Kirk, Keith Bostic, Michael J Karels, and John Quarterman. The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System. Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley, 1996. ISBN 0-201-54979-4 A good book on system administration is: Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Scott Seebass & Trent R. Hein, Unix System Administration Handbook, Prentice-Hall, 1995 ISBN: 0-13-151051-7 Make sure you get the second edition, with a red cover, instead of the first edition. This book covers the basics, as well as TCP/IP, DNS, NFS, SLIP/PPP, sendmail, INN/NNTP, printing, etc.. It's expensive (approx. US$45-$55), but worth it. It also includes a CDROM with the sources for various tools; most of these, however, are also on the FreeBSD 2.2.6R CDROM (and the FreeBSD CDROM often has newer versions). How do I access your Problem Report database? The Problem Report database of all user change requests may be queried (or submitted to) by using our web-based PR submission and query interfaces. The send-pr(1) command can also be used to submit problem reports and change requests via electronic mail. Is the documentation available in other formats, such as plain text (ASCII), or Postscript? Yes. The documentation is available in a number of different formats and compression schemes on the FreeBSD FTP site, in the /pub/FreeBSD/doc/ directory. The documentation is categorised in a number of different ways. These include: The document's name, such as faq, or handbook. The document's language and encoding. These are based on the locale names you will find under /usr/share/locale on your FreeBSD system. The current languages and encodings that we have for documentation are as follows: Name Meaning en_US.ISO_8859-1 US English de_DE.ISO_8859-1 German es_ES.ISO_8859-1 Spanish fr_FR.ISO_8859-1 French ja_JP.eucJP Japanese (EUC encoding) ru_RU.KOI8-R Russian (KOI8-R encoding) zh_TW.Big5 Chinese (Big5 encoding) Some documents may not be available in all languages. The document's format. We produce the documentation in a number of different output formats to try and make it as flexible as possible. The current formats are; Format Meaning html-split A collection of small, linked, HTML files. html One large HTML file containing the entire document pdb Palm Pilot database format, for use with the iSilo reader. pdf Adobe's Portable Document Format ps Postscript rtf Microsoft's Rich Text Format Page numbers are not automatically updated when loading this format in to Word. Press CTRL+A, CTRL+END, F9 after loading the document, to update the page numbers. txt Plain text The compression and packaging scheme. There are three of these currently in use. Where the format is html-split, the files are bundled up using &man.tar.1;. The resulting .tar file is then compressed using the compression schemes detailed in the next point. All the other formats generate one file, called book.format (i.e., book.pdb, book.html, and so on). These files are then compressed using three compression schemes. Scheme Description zip The Zip format. If you want to uncompress this on FreeBSD you will need to install the archivers/unzip port first. gz The GNU Zip format. Use &man.gunzip.1; to uncompress these files, which is part of FreeBSD. bz2 The BZip2 format. Less widespread than the others, but generally gives smaller files. Install the archivers/bzip2 port to uncompress these files. So the Postscript version of the Handbook, compressed using BZip2 will be stored in a file called book.sgml.bz2 in the handbook/ directory. The formatted documentation is also available as a FreeBSD package, of which more later. After choosing the format and compression mechanism that you want to download, you must then decide whether or not you want to download the document as a FreeBSD package. The advantage of downloading and installing the package is that the documentation can then be managed using the normal FreeBSD package management comments, such as &man.pkg.add.1; and &man.pkg.delete.1;. If you decide to download and install the package then you must know the filename to download. The documentation-as-packages files are stored in a directory called packages. Each package file looks like document-name.lang.encoding.format.tgz. For example, the FAQ, in English, formatted as PDF, is in the package called faq.en_US.ISO_8859-1.pdf.tgz. Knowing this, you can use the following command to install the English PDF FAQ package. &prompt.root; pkg_add ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/packages/faq.en_US.ISO_8859-1.pdf.tgz Having done that, you can use &man.pkg.info.1; to determine where the file has been installed. &prompt.root; pkg_info -f faq.en_US.ISO_8859-1.pdf Information for faq.en_US.ISO_8859-1.pdf: Packing list: Package name: faq.en_US.ISO_8859-1.pdf CWD to /usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq File: book.pdf CWD to . File: +COMMENT (ignored) File: +DESC (ignored) As you can see, book.pdf will have been installed in to /usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq. If you do not want to use the packages then you will have to download the compressed files yourself, uncompress them, and then copy the appropriate documents in to place. For example, the split HTML version of the FAQ, compressed using &man.gzip.1;, can be found in the en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq/book.html-split.tar.gz file. To download and uncompress that file you would have to do this. &prompt.root; fetch ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/faq/book.html-split.tar.gz &prompt.root; gzip -d book.html-split.tar.gz &prompt.root; tar xvf book.html-split.tar You will be left with a collection of .html files. The main one is called index.html, which will contain the table of contents, introductory material, and links to the other parts of the document. You can then copy or move these to their final location as necessary. I'd like to become a FreeBSD Web mirror! Certainly! There are multiple ways to mirror the Web pages. Using CVSup: You can retrieve the formatted files using CVSup, and connecting to a CVSup server. To retrieve the webpages, please look at the example supfile, which can be found in /usr/share/examples/cvsup/www-supfile. Using ftp mirror: You can download the FTP server's copy of the web site sources using your favorite ftp mirror tool. Keep in mind that you have to build these sources before publishing them. Simply start at ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/www. I'd like to translate the documentation into Friesian. Well, we can't pay, but we might arrange a free CD or T-shirt and a Contributor's Handbook entry if you submit a translation of the documentation. Before you begin translating please contact the freebsd-doc mailing list at freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org; you may find somebody to help with the translation effort. You may also find out there is already a team translating the docs into your chosen language, who surely wouldn't turn down your help. Other sources of information. The following newsgroups contain pertinent discussion for FreeBSD users: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.announce (moderated) comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc comp.unix.bsd.misc Web resources: The FreeBSD Home Page. If you have a laptop, be sure and see Tatsumi Hosokawa's Mobile Computing page in Japan. For information on SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing), please see the SMP support page. For information on FreeBSD multimedia applications, please see the multimedia page. If you're interested specifically in the Bt848 video capture chip, then follow that link. The FreeBSD handbook also has a fairly complete bibliography section which is worth reading if you're looking for actual books to buy. Installation Which file do I download to get FreeBSD? Prior to release 3.1, you only needed one floppy image to install FreeBSD, namely floppies/boot.flp. However, since release 3.1 the Project has added base support for a wide variety of hardware which needed more space, and thus for 3.x and 4.x we now use two floppy images, namely floppies/kernel.flp and floppies/mfsroot.flp. These images need to be copied onto floppies by tools like fdimage or &man.dd.1;. If you need to download the distributions yourself (for a DOS filesystem install, for instance), below are some recommendations for distributions to grab: bin/ manpages/ compat*/ doc/ src/ssys.* Full instructions on this procedure and a little bit more about installation issues in general can be found in the Handbook entry on installing FreeBSD. Help! The boot floppy image will not fit on a single floppy! A 3.5 inch (1.44MB) floppy can accomodate 1474560 bytes of data. The boot image is exactly 1474560 bytes in size. Common mistakes when preparing the boot floppy are: Not downloading the floppy image in binary mode when using FTP. Some FTP clients default their transfer mode to ascii and attempt to change any end-of-line characters received to match the conventions used by the client's system. This will almost invariably corrupt the boot image. Check the size of the downloaded boot image: if it is not exactly that on the server, then the download process is suspect. To workaround: type binary at the FTP command prompt after getting connected to the server and before starting the download of the image. Using the DOS copy command (or equivalent GUI tool) to transfer the boot image to floppy. Programs like copy will not work as the boot image has been created to be booted into directly. The image has the complete content of the floppy, track for track, and is not meant to be placed on the floppy as a regular file. You have to transfer it to the floppy raw, using the low-level tools (e.g. fdimage or rawrite) described in the installation guide to FreeBSD. Where are the instructions for installing FreeBSD? Installation instructions can be found in the Handbook entry on installing FreeBSD. What do I need in order to run FreeBSD? You'll need a 386 or better PC, with 5 MB or more of RAM and at least 60 MB of hard disk space. It can run with a low end MDA graphics card but to run X11R6, a VGA or better video card is needed. See also the section on I have only 4 MB of RAM. Can I install FreeBSD? FreeBSD 2.1.7 was the last version of FreeBSD that could be installed on a 4MB system. Newer versions of FreeBSD, like 2.2, need at least 5MB to install on a new system. All versions of FreeBSD, including 3.0, will run in 4MB of RAM, they just can't run the installation program in 4MB. You can add extra memory for the install process, if you like, and then after the system is up and running, go back to 4MB. Or you could always just swap your disk into a system which has >4MB, install onto it and then swap it back. There are also situations in which FreeBSD 2.1.7 will not install in 4 MB. To be exact: it does not install with 640 kB base + 3 MB extended memory. If your motherboard can remap some of the lost memory out of the 640kB to 1MB region, then you may still be able to get FreeBSD 2.1.7 up. Try to go into your BIOS setup and look for a remap option. Enable it. You may also have to disable ROM shadowing. It may be easier to get 4 more MB just for the install. Build a custom kernel with only the options you need and then get the 4MB out again. You may also install 2.0.5 and then upgrade your system to 2.1.7 with the upgrade option of the 2.1.7 installation program. After the installation, if you build a custom kernel, it will run in 4 MB. Someone has even succeeded in booting with 2 MB (the system was almost unusable though :-)) How can I make my own custom install floppy? Currently there's no way to just make a custom install floppy. You have to cut a whole new release, which will include your install floppy. To make a custom release, follow the instructions here. Can I have more than one operating system on my PC? Have a look at The multi-OS page. Can Windows 95/98 co-exist with FreeBSD? Install Windows 95/98 first, after that FreeBSD. FreeBSD's boot manager will then manage to boot Win95/98 and FreeBSD. If you install Windows 95/98 second, it will boorishly overwrite your boot manager without even asking. If that happens, see the next section. Windows 95/98 killed my boot manager! How do I get it back? You can reinstall the boot manager FreeBSD comes with in one of three ways: Running DOS, go into the tools/ directory of your FreeBSD distribution and look for bootinst.exe. You run it like so: ...\TOOLS> bootinst.exe boot.bin and the boot manager will be reinstalled. Boot the FreeBSD boot floppy again and go to the Custom installation menu item. Choose Partition. Select the drive which used to contain your boot manager (likely the first one) and when you come to the partition editor for it, as the very first thing (e.g. do not make any changes) select (W)rite. This will ask for confirmation, say yes, and when you get the Boot Manager selection prompt, be sure to select Boot Manager. This will re-write the boot manager to disk. Now quit out of the installation menu and reboot off the hard disk as normal. Boot the FreeBSD boot floppy (or CD-ROM) and choose the Fixit menu item. Select either the Fixit floppy or CD-ROM #2 (the live file system option) as appropriate and enter the fixit shell. Then execute the following command: Fixit# fdisk -B -b /boot/boot0 bootdevice substituting bootdevice for your real boot device such as ad0 (first IDE disk), ad4 (first IDE disk on auxiliary controller), da0 (first SCSI disk), etc. I have an IBM Thinkpad in the A, T, or X series that FreeBSD installs on, but then the machine locks up on next boot. How can I solve this? A bug in early revisions of IBM's BIOS on these machines mistakenly identifies the FreeBSD partition as a potential FAT suspend-to-disk partition. When the BIOS tries to parse the FreeBSD partition it hangs. According to IBM In an e-mail from Keith Frechette kfrechet@us.ibm.com., the following model/BIOS release numbers incorporate the fix. Model BIOS revision T20 IYET49WW or later T21 KZET22WW or later A20p IVET62WW or later A20m IWET54WW or later A21p KYET27WW or later A21m KXET24WW or later A21e KUET30WW If you have an earlier BIOS, and upgrading is not an option a workaround is to install FreeBSD, change the partition ID FreeBSD uses, and install new boot blocks that can handle the different partition ID. First, you'll need to to restore the machine to a state where it can get through its self-test screen. Doing this requires powering up the machine without letting it find a FreeBSD partition on its primary disk. One way is to remove the hard disk and temporarily move it to an older ThinkPad (such as a ThinkPad 600) or a desktop PC with an appropriate conversion cable. Once it's there, you can delete the FreeBSD partition and move the hard disk back. The ThinkPad should now be in a bootable state again. With the machine functional again, you can use the workaround procedure described here to get a working FreeBSD installation. Download boot1 and boot2 from http://people.freebsd.org/~bmah/ThinkPad/. Put these files somewhere you will be able to retrieve them later. Install FreeBSD as normal on to the ThinkPad. Do not use Dangerously Dedicated mode. Do not reboot when the install has finished. Either switch to the Emergency Holographic Shell (ALT F4) or start a fixit shell. Use &man.fdisk.8; to change the FreeBSD partition ID from 165 to 166 (this is the type used by OpenBSD). Bring the boot1 and boot2 files to the local filesystem. Use &man.disklabel.8; to write boot1 and boot2 to your FreeBSD slice. &prompt.root; disklabel -B -b boot1 -s boot2 ad0sn n is the number of the slice where you installed FreeBSD. Reboot. At the boot prompt you will be given the option of booting OpenBSD. This will actually boot FreeBSD. Getting this to work in the case where you want to dual boot OpenBSD and FreeBSD on the same laptop is left as an exercise for the reader. Can I install on a disk with bad blocks? Prior to 3.0, FreeBSD included a utility known as bad144, which automatically remapped bad blocks. Because modern IDE drives perform this function themselves, bad144 has been removed from the FreeBSD source tree. If you wish to install FreeBSD 3.0 or later, we strongly suggest you purchase a newer disk drive. If you do not wish to do this, you must run FreeBSD 2.x. If you are seeing bad block errors with a modern IDE drive, chances are the drive is going to die very soon (the drive's internal remapping functions are no longer sufficient to fix the bad blocks, which means the disk is heavily corrupted); we suggest you by a new hard drive. If you have a SCSI drive with bad blocks, see this answer. Strange things happen when I boot the install floppy! If you're seeing things like the machine grinding to a halt or spontaneously rebooting when you try to boot the install floppy, here are three questions to ask yourself:- Did you use a new, freshly-formatted, error-free floppy (preferably a brand-new one straight out of the box, as opposed to the magazine coverdisk that's been lying under the bed for the last three years)? Did you download the floppy image in binary (or image) mode? (don't be embarrassed, even the best of us have accidentally downloaded a binary file in ASCII mode at least once!) If you're using Windows95 or Win98 did you run fdimage or rawrite in pure DOS mode? These OS's can interfere with programs that write directly to hardware, which the disk creation program does; even running it inside a DOS shell in the GUI can cause this problem. There have also been reports of Netscape causing problems when downloading the boot floppy, so it's probably best to use a different FTP client if you can. I booted from my ATAPI CD-ROM, but the install program says no CD-ROM is found. Where did it go? The usual cause of this problem is a mis-configured CD-ROM drive. Many PCs now ship with the CD-ROM as the slave device on the secondary IDE controller, with no master device on that controller. This is illegal according to the ATAPI specification, but Windows plays fast and loose with the specification, and the BIOS ignores it when booting. This is why the BIOS was able to see the CD-ROM to boot from it, but why FreeBSD can not see it to complete the install. Reconfigure your system so that the CD-ROM is either the master device on the IDE controller it is attached to, or make sure that it is the slave on an IDE controller that also has a master device. Help! I can't install from tape! If you are installing 2.1.7R from tape, you must create the tape using a tar blocksize of 10 (5120 bytes). The default tar blocksize is 20 (10240 bytes), and tapes created using this default size cannot be used to install 2.1.7R; with these tapes, you will get an error that complains about the record size being too big. Connect two FreeBSD boxes over a parallel line (PLIP) Get a laplink cable. Make sure both computer have a kernel with lpt driver support. &prompt.root; dmesg | grep lp lpt0 at 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa lpt0: Interrupt-driven lp0: TCP/IP capable interface Plug in the laplink cable into the parallel interface. Configure the network interface parameters for lp0 on both sites as root. For example, if you want connect the host max with moritz max <-----> moritz IP Address 10.0.0.1 10.0.0.2 on max start &prompt.root; ifconfig lp0 10.0.0.1 10.0.0.2 on moritz start &prompt.root; ifconfig lp0 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.1 Thats all! Please read also the manpages &man.lp.4; and &man.lpt.4; . You should also add the hosts to /etc/hosts. 127.0.0.1 localhost.my.domain localhost 10.0.0.1 max.my.domain max 10.0.0.2 moritz.my.domain To check if it works do: on max: &prompt.root; ifconfig lp0 lp0: flags=8851<UP,POINTOPOINT,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 inet 10.0.0.1 --> 10.0.0.2 netmask 0xff000000 &prompt.root; netstat -r Routing tables Internet: Destination Gateway Flags Refs Use Netif Expire moritz max UH 4 127592 lp0 &prompt.root; ping -c 4 moritz PING moritz (10.0.0.2): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=2.774 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=2.530 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=2.556 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=2.714 ms --- moritz ping statistics --- 4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.530/2.643/2.774/0.103 ms Can I install on my laptop over PLIP (Parallel Line IP)? Connect the two computers using a Laplink parallel cable to use this feature: Wiring a parallel cable for networking A-name A-End B-End Descr. Post/Bit DATA0 -ERROR 2 15 15 2 Data 0/0x01 1/0x08 DATA1 +SLCT 3 13 13 3 Data 0/0x02 1/0x10 DATA2 +PE 4 12 12 4 Data 0/0x04 1/0x20 DATA3 -ACK 5 10 10 5 Strobe 0/0x08 1/0x40 DATA4 BUSY 6 11 11 6 Data 0/0x10 1/0x80 GND 18-25 18-25 GND -
See also this note on the Mobile Computing page. Which geometry should I use for a disk drive? By the geometry of a disk, we mean the number of cylinders, heads and sectors/track on a disk - I'll refer to this as C/H/S for convenience. This is how the PC's BIOS works out which area on a disk to read/write from. This seems to cause a lot of confusion for some reason. First of all, the physical geometry of a SCSI drive is totally irrelevant, as FreeBSD works in term of disk blocks. In fact, there is no such thing as the physical geometry, as the sector density varies across the disk - what manufacturers claim is the quote physical geometry is usually the geometry that they've worked out results in the least wasted space. For IDE disks, FreeBSD does work in terms of C/H/S, but all modern drives will convert this into block references internally as well. All that matters is the logical geometry - the answer that the BIOS gets when it asks what is your geometry? and then uses to access the disk. As FreeBSD uses the BIOS when booting, it's very important to get this right. In particular, if you have more than one operating system on a disk, they must all agree on the geometry, otherwise you will have serious problems booting! For SCSI disks, the geometry to use depends on whether extended translation support is turned on in your controller (this is often referred to as support for DOS disks >1GB or something similar). If it's turned off, then use N cylinders, 64 heads and 32 sectors/track, where N is the capacity of the disk in MB. For example, a 2GB disk should pretend to have 2048 cylinders, 64 heads and 32 sectors/track. If it is turned on (it's often supplied this way to get around certain limitations in MSDOS) and the disk capacity is more than 1GB, use M cylinders, 63 sectors per track (*not* 64), and 255 heads, where 'M' is the disk capacity in MB divided by 7.844238 (!). So our example 2GB drive would have 261 cylinders, 63 sectors per track and 255 heads. If you are not sure about this, or FreeBSD fails to detect the geometry correctly during installation, the simplest way around this is usually to create a small DOS partition on the disk. The correct geometry should then be detected (and you can always remove the DOS partition in the partition editor if you don't want to keep it, or leave it around for programming network cards and the like). Alternatively, there is a freely available utility distributed with FreeBSD called pfdisk.exe (located in the tools subdirectory on the FreeBSD CDROM or on the various FreeBSD ftp sites) which can be used to work out what geometry the other operating systems on the disk are using. You can then enter this geometry in the partition editor. Any restrictions on how I divide the disk up? Yes. You must make sure that your root partition is below 1024 cylinders so the BIOS can boot the kernel from it. (Note that this is a limitation in the PC's BIOS, not FreeBSD). For a SCSI drive, this will normally imply that the root partition will be in the first 1024MB (or in the first 4096MB if extended translation is turned on - see previous question). For IDE, the corresponding figure is 504MB. What about disk managers? Or, I have a large drive! FreeBSD recognizes the Ontrack Disk Manager and makes allowances for it. Other disk managers are not supported. If you just want to use the disk with FreeBSD you don't need a disk manager. Just configure the disk for as much space as the BIOS can deal with (usually 504 megabytes), and FreeBSD should figure out how much space you really have. If you're using an old disk with an MFM controller, you may need to explicitly tell FreeBSD how many cylinders to use. If you want to use the disk with FreeBSD and another operating system, you may be able to do without a disk manager: just make sure the the FreeBSD boot partition and the slice for the other operating system are in the first 1024 cylinders. If you're reasonably careful, a 20 megabyte boot partition should be plenty. When I boot FreeBSD I get Missing Operating System This is classically a case of FreeBSD and DOS or some other OS conflicting over their ideas of disk geometry. You will have to reinstall FreeBSD, but obeying the instructions given above will almost always get you going. I can't get past the boot manager's F? prompt. This is another symptom of the problem described in the preceding question. Your BIOS geometry and FreeBSD geometry settings do not agree! If your controller or BIOS supports cylinder translation (often marked as >1GB drive support), try toggling its setting and reinstalling FreeBSD. Do I need to install the complete sources? In general, no. However, we would strongly recommend that you install, at a minimum, the base source kit, which includes several of the files mentioned here, and the sys (kernel) source kit, which includes sources for the kernel. There is nothing in the system which requires the presence of the sources to operate, however, except for the kernel-configuration program &man.config.8;. With the exception of the kernel sources, our build structure is set up so that you can read-only mount the sources from elsewhere via NFS and still be able to make new binaries. (Because of the kernel-source restriction, we recommend that you not mount this on /usr/src directly, but rather in some other location with appropriate symbolic links to duplicate the top-level structure of the source tree.) Having the sources on-line and knowing how to build a system with them will make it much easier for you to upgrade to future releases of FreeBSD. To actually select a subset of the sources, use the Custom menu item when you are in the Distributions menu of the system installation tool. Do I need to build a kernel? Building a new kernel was originally pretty much a required step in a FreeBSD installation, but more recent releases have benefited from the introduction of a much friendlier kernel configuration tool. When at the FreeBSD boot prompt (boot:), use the flag and you will be dropped into a visual configuration screen which allows you to configure the kernel's settings for most common ISA cards. It's still recommended that you eventually build a new kernel containing just the drivers that you need, just to save a bit of RAM, but it's no longer a strict requirement for most systems. Should I use DES passwords, or MD5, and how do I specify which form my users receive? The default password format on FreeBSD is to use MD5-based passwords. These are believed to be more secure than the traditional UNIX password format, which used a scheme based on the DES algorithm. DES passwords are still available if you need to share your password file with legacy operating systems which still use the less secure password format (they are available if you choose to install the crypto distribution in sysinstall, or by installing the crypto sources if building from source). Which password format to use for new passwords is controlled by the passwd_format login capability in /etc/login.conf, which takes values of either des (if available) or md5. See the login.conf(5) manpage for more information about login capabilities. The boot floppy starts but hangs at the Probing Devices... screen. If you have a IDE Zip or Jaz drive installed, remove it and try again. The boot floppy can get confused by the drives. After the system is installed you can reconnect the drive. Hopefully this will be fixed in a later release. I get a panic: cant mount root error when rebooting the system after installation. This error comes from confusion between the boot block's and the kernel's understanding of the disk devices. The error usually manifests on two-disk IDE systems, with the hard disks arranged as the master or single device on separate IDE controllers, with FreeBSD installed on the secondary IDE controller. The boot blocks think the system is installed on wd1 (the second BIOS disk) while the kernel assigns the first disk on the secondary controller device wd2. After the device probing, the kernel tries to mount what the boot blocks think is the boot disk, wd1, while it is really wd2, and fails. To fix the problem, do one of the following: For FreeBSD 3.3 and later, reboot the system and hit Enter at the Booting kernel in 10 seconds; hit [Enter] to interrupt prompt. This will drop you into the boot loader. Then type set root_disk_unit="disk_number" . disk_number will be 0 if FreeBSD is installed on the master drive on the first IDE controller, 1 if it is installed on the slave on the first IDE controller, 2 if it is installed on the master of the second IDE controller, and 3 if it is installed on the slave of the second IDE controller. Then type boot, and your system should boot correctly. To make this change permanent (ie so you don't have to do this everytime you reboot or turn on your FreeBSD machine), put the line root_disk_unit="disk_number" in /boot/loader.conf.local . If using FreeBSD 3.2 or earlier, at the Boot: prompt, enter 1:wd(2,a)kernel and press Enter. If the system starts, then run the command echo "1:wd(2,a)kernel" > /boot.config to make it the default boot string. Move the FreeBSD disk onto the primary IDE controller, so the hard disks are consecutive. Rebuild your kernel, modify the wd configuration lines to read: controller wdc0 at isa? port "IO_WD1" bio irq 14 vector wdintr disk wd0 at wdc0 drive 0 # disk wd1 at wdc0 drive 1 # comment out this line controller wdc1 at isa? port "IO_WD2" bio irq 15 vector wdintr disk wd1 at wdc1 drive 0 # change from wd2 to wd1 disk wd2 at wdc1 drive 1 # change from wd3 to wd2 Install the new kernel. If you moved your disks and wish to restore the previous configuration, replace the disks in the desired configuration and reboot. Your system should boot successfully. What are the limits for memory? For memory, the limit is 4 gigabytes. This configuration has been tested, see wcarchive's configuration for more details. If you plan to install this much memory into a machine, you need to be careful. You'll probably want to use ECC memory and to reduce capacitive loading use 9 chip memory modules vice 18 chip memory modules. What are the limits for ffs filesystems? For ffs filesystems, the maximum theoretical limit is 8 terabytes (2G blocks), or 16TB for the default block size of 8K. In practice, there is a soft limit of 1 terabyte, but with modifications filesystems with 4 terabytes are possible (and exist). The maximum size of a single ffs file is approximately 1G blocks (4TB) if the block size is 4K. Maximum file sizes fs block size 2.2.7-stable 3.0-current works should work 4K 4T-1 4T-1 4T-1 4+t 8K 32+G 8T-1 32+G 32T-1 16K 128+G 16T-1 128+G 32T-1 32K 512+G 32T-1 512+G 64T-1 64K 2048+G 64T-1 2048+G 128T-1
When the fs block size is 4K, triple indirect blocks work and everything should be limited by the maximum fs block number that can be represented using triple indirect blocks (approx. 1K^3 + 1K^2 + 1K), but everything is limited by a (wrong) limit of 1G-1 on fs block numbers. The limit on fs block numbers should be 2G-1. There are some bugs for fs block numbers near 2G-1, but such block numbers are unreachable when the fs block size is 4K. For block sizes of 8K and larger, everything should be limited by the 2G-1 limit on fs block numbers, but is actually limited by the 1G-1 limit on fs block numbers, except under -STABLE triple indirect blocks are unreachable, so the limit is the maxiumum fs block number that can be represented using double indirect blocks (approx. (blocksize/4)^2 + (blocksize/4)), and under -CURRENT exceeding this limit may cause problems. Using the correct limit of 2G-1 blocks does cause problems. How can I put 1TB files on my floppy? I keep several virtual ones on floppies :-). The maxiumum file size is not closely related to the maximum disk size. The maximum disk size is 1TB. It is a feature that the file size can be larger than the disk size. The following example creates a file of size 8T-1 using a whole 32K of disk space (3 indirect blocks and 1 data block) on a small root partition. The dd command requires a dd that works with large files. &prompt.user; cat foo df . dd if=/dev/zero of=z bs=1 seek=`echo 2^43 - 2 | bc` count=1 ls -l z du z df . &prompt.user; sh foo Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/da0a 64479 27702 31619 47% / 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 1 bytes transferred in 0.000187 secs (5346 bytes/sec) -rw-r--r-- 1 bde bin 8796093022207 Sep 7 16:04 z 32 z Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/da0a 64479 27734 31587 47% / Bruce Evans, September 1998 I compiled a new kernel and now I get the error message archsw.readin.failed when booting. You can boot by specifying the kernel directly at the second stage, pressing any key when the | shows up before loader is started. More specifically, you have upgraded the source for your kernel, and installed a new kernel builtin from them without making world. This is not supported. Make world. How do I upgrade from 3.X -> 4.X? We strongly recommend that you use binary snapshots to do this. 4-STABLE snapshots are available at releng4.FreeBSD.org. If you wish to upgrade using source, please see the FreeBSD Handbook for more information. Upgrading via source is never recommended for new users, and upgading from 3.X -> 4.X is even less so; make sure you have read the instructions carefully before attempting to upgrade via source this! What are these security profiles? A security profile is a set of configuration options that attempts to achieve the desired ratio of security to convenience by enabling and disabling certain programs and other settings. The more severe the security profile, the less programs will be enabled by default; this is one of the basic principles of security: do not run anything except what you must. Please note that the security profile is just a default setting. All programs can be enabled and disabled after you've installed FreeBSD by editing or adding the appropriate line(s) to /etc/rc.conf. For more information on the latter, please see the &man.rc.conf.5; manual page. Following is a table that describes what each security profile does. The columns are the choices you have for a security profile, and the rows are the program or feature that is enabled or disabled. Possible security profiles Extreme High Moderate Low &man.inetd.8; NO NO YES YES &man.sendmail.8; NO YES YES YES &man.sshd.8; NO YES YES YES &man.portmap.8; NO NO [1] YES NFS server NO NO YES YES &man.securelevel.8; YES (2) [2] YES (1) [2] NO NO
Notes: The portmapper is enabled if the machine has been configured as an NFS client or server earlier in the installation. If you choose a security profile that sets the securelevel (Extreme or High), you must be aware of the implications. Please read the &man.init.8; manual page and pay particular attention to the meanings of the security levels, or you may have significant trouble later! The security profile is not a silver bullet! Setting it high does not mean you do have to keep up with security issues by reading an appropriate mailing list, using good passwords and passphrases, and generally adhering to good security practices. It simply sets up the desired security to convenience ration out of the box. The security profile mechanism is meant to be used when you first install FreeBSD. If you already have FreeBSD installed, it would probably be more beneficial to simply enable or disable the desired functionality. If you really want to use a security profile, you can re-run &man.sysinstall.8; to set it. Hardware compatibility What kind of hard drives does FreeBSD support? FreeBSD supports EIDE and SCSI drives (with a compatible controller; see the next section), and all drives using the original Western Digital interface (MFM, RLL, ESDI, and of course IDE). A few ESDI controllers that use proprietary interfaces may not work: stick to WD1002/3/6/7 interfaces and clones. Which SCSI controllers are supported? See the complete list in the Handbook. Which CD-ROM drives are supported by FreeBSD? Any SCSI drive connected to a supported controller is supported. The following proprietary CD-ROM interfaces are also supported: Mitsumi LU002 (8bit), LU005 (16bit) and FX001D (16bit 2x Speed). Sony CDU 31/33A Sound Blaster Non-SCSI CD-ROM Matsushita/Panasonic CD-ROM ATAPI compatible IDE CD-ROMs All non-SCSI cards are known to be extremely slow compared to SCSI drives, and some ATAPI CDROMs may not work. As of 2.2 the FreeBSD CDROM from BSDi supports booting directly from the CD. Does FreeBSD support ZIP drives? FreeBSD supports the SCSI ZIP drive out of the box, of course. The ZIP drive can only be set to run at SCSI target IDs 5 or 6, but if your SCSI host adapter's BIOS supports it you can even boot from it. I don't know which host adapters let you boot from targets other than 0 or 1... look at your docs (and let me know if it works out for you). ATAPI (IDE) Zip drives are supported in FreeBSD 2.2.6 and later releases. FreeBSD has contained support for Parallel Port Zip Drives since version 3.0. If you are using a sufficiently up to date version, then you should check that your kernel contains the scbus0, da0, ppbus0, and vp0 drivers (the GENERIC kernel contains everything except vp0). With all these drivers present, the Parallel Port drive should be available as /dev/da0s4. Disks can be mounted using mount /dev/da0s4 /mnt OR (for dos disks) mount_msdos /dev/da0s4 /mnt as appropriate. Also check out this note on removable drives, and this note on formatting. Does FreeBSD support JAZ, EZ and other removable drives? Apart from the IDE version of the EZ drive, these are all SCSI devices, so the should all look like SCSI disks to FreeBSD, and the IDE EZ should look like an IDE drive. I'm not sure how well FreeBSD supports changing the media out while running. You will of course need to dismount the drive before swapping media, and make sure that any external units are powered on when you boot the system so FreeBSD can see them. See this note on formatting. Which multi-port serial cards are supported by FreeBSD? There is a list of these in the Miscellaneous devices section of the handbook. Some unnamed clone cards have also been known to work, especially those that claim to be AST compatible. Check the sio man page to get more information on configuring such cards. I have a USB keyboard. Does FreeBSD support it? USB device support was added to FreeBSD 3.1. However, it is still in preliminary state and may not always work as of version 3.2. If you want to experiment with the USB keyboard support, follow the procedure described below. Use FreeBSD 3.2 or later. Add the following lines to your kernel configuration file, and rebuild the kernel. device uhci device ohci device usb device ukbd options KBD_INSTALL_CDEV In versions of FreeBSD before 4.0, use this instead: controller uhci0 controller ohci0 controller usb0 controller ukbd0 options KBD_INSTALL_CDEV Go to the /dev directory and create device nodes as follows: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; ./MAKEDEV kbd0 kbd1 Edit /etc/rc.conf and add the following lines: usbd_enable="YES" usbd_flags="" After the system is rebooted, the AT keyboard becomes /dev/kbd0 and the USB keyboard becomes /dev/kbd1, if both are connected to the system. If there is the USB keyboard only, it will be /dev/ukbd0. If you want to use the USB keyboard in the console, you have to explicitly tell the console driver to use the existence of the USB keyboard. This can be done by running the following command as a part of system initialization. &prompt.root; kbdcontrol -k /dev/kbd1 < /dev/ttyv0 > /dev/null Note that if the USB keyboard is the only keyboard, it is accessed as /dev/kbd0, thus, the command should look like: &prompt.root; kbdcontrol -k /dev/kbd0 < /dev/ttyv0 > /dev/null /etc/rc.i386 is a good place to add the above command. Once this is done, the USB keyboard should work in the X environment as well without any special settings. Hot-plugging and unplugging of the USB keyboard may not work quite right yet. It is a good idea to connect the keyboard before you start the system and leave it connected until the system is shutdown to avoid troubles. See the &man.ukbd.4; man page for more information. I have an unusual bus mouse. How do I set it up? FreeBSD supports the bus mouse and the InPort bus mouse from such manufactures as Microsoft, Logitech and ATI. The bus device driver is compiled in the GENERIC kernel by default in FreeBSD versions 2.X, but not included in version 3.0 or later. If you are building a custom kernel with the bus mouse driver, make sure to add the following line to the kernel config file In FreeBSD 3.0 or before, add: device mse0 at isa? port 0x23c tty irq5 vector mseintr In FreeBSD 3.X, the line should be: device mse0 at isa? port 0x23c tty irq5 And in FreeBSD 4.X and later, the line should read: device mse0 at isa? port 0x23c irq5 Bus mice usually comes with dedicated interface cards. These cards may allow you to set the port address and the IRQ number other than shown above. Refer to the manual of your mouse and the &man.mse.4; man page for more information. How do I use my PS/2 (mouse port or keyboard) mouse? If you're running a post-2.2.5 version of FreeBSD, the necessary driver, psm, is included and enabled in the kernel. The kernel should detect your PS/2 mouse at boot time. If you're running a previous but relatively recent version of FreeBSD (2.1.x or better) then you can simply enable it in the kernel configuration menu at installation time, otherwise later with at the boot: prompt. It is disabled by default, so you will need to enable it explicitly. If you're running an older version of FreeBSD then you'll have to add the following lines to your kernel configuration file and compile a new kernel. In FreeBSD 3.0 or earlier, the line should be: device psm0 at isa? port "IO_KBD" conflicts tty irq 12 vector psmintr In FreeBSD 3.1 or later, the line should be: device psm0 at isa? tty irq 12 In FreeBSD 4.0 or later, the line should be: device psm0 at atkbdc? irq 12 See the Handbook entry on configuring the kernel if you've no experience with building kernels. Once you have a kernel detecting psm0 correctly at boot time, make sure that an entry for psm0 exists in /dev. You can do this by typing: &prompt.root; cd /dev; sh MAKEDEV psm0 when logged in as root. Is it possible to make use of a mouse in any way outside the X Window? If you are using the default console driver, syscons, you can use a mouse pointer in text consoles to cut & paste text. Run the mouse daemon, moused, and turn on the mouse pointer in the virtual console: &prompt.root; moused -p /dev/xxxx -t yyyy &prompt.root; vidcontrol -m on Where xxxx is the mouse device name and yyyy is a protocol type for the mouse. See the &man.moused.8; man page for supported protocol types. You may wish to run the mouse daemon automatically when the system starts. In version 2.2.1, set the following variables in /etc/sysconfig. mousedtype="yyyy" mousedport="xxxx" mousedflags="" In versions 2.2.2 to 3.0, set the following variables in /etc/rc.conf. moused_type="yyyy" moused_port="xxxx" moused_flags="" In 3.1 and later, assuming you have a PS/2 mouse, all you need to is add moused_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf. In addition, if you would like to be able to use the mouse daemon on all virtual terminals instead of just console at boot-time, add the following to /etc/rc.conf. allscreens_flags="-m on" Staring from FreeBSD 2.2.6, the mouse daemon is capable of determining the correct protocol type automatically unless the mouse is a relatively old serial mouse model. Specify auto the protocol to invoke automatic detection. When the mouse daemon is running, access to the mouse needs to be coordinated between the mouse daemon and other programs such as the X Window. Refer to another section on this issue. How do I cut and paste text with mouse in the text console? Once you get the mouse daemon running (see previous section), hold down the button 1 (left button) and move the mouse to select a region of text. Then, press the button 2 (middle button) or the button 3 (right button) to paste it at the text cursor. In versions 2.2.6 and later, pressing the button 2 will paste the text. Pressing the button 3 will extend the selected region of text. If your mouse does not have the middle button, you may wish to emulate it or remap buttons using moused options. See the moused(8) man page for details. I have a USB mouse. Does FreeBSD support the USB mouse? USB device support was added to FreeBSD 3.1. However, it is still in a preliminary state and may not always work as of version 3.2. If you want to experiment with the USB mouse support, follow the procedure described below. Use FreeBSD 3.2 or later. Add the following lines to your kernel configuration file, and rebuild the kernel. device uhci device ohci device usb device ums In versions of FreeBSD before 4.0, use this instead: controller uhci0 controller ohci0 controller usb0 device ums0 Go to the /dev directory and create a device node as follows: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; ./MAKEDEV ums0 Edit /etc/rc.conf and add the following lines: moused_enable="YES" moused_type="auto" moused_port="/dev/ums0" moused_flags="" usbd_enable="YES" usbd_flags="" See the previous section for more detailed discussion on moused. In order to use the USB mouse in the X session, edit XF86Config. If you are using XFree86 3.3.2 or later, be sure to have the following lines in the Pointer section: Device "/dev/sysmouse" Protocol "Auto" If you are using earlier versions of XFree86, be sure to have the following lines in the Pointer section: Device "/dev/sysmouse" Protocol "SysMouse" Refer to another section on the mouse support in the X environment. Hot-plugging and unplugging of the USB mouse may not work quite right yet. It is a good idea connect the mouse before you start the system and leave it connected until the system is shutdown to avoid trouble. My mouse has a fancy wheel and buttons. Can I use them in FreeBSD? The answer is, unfortunately, It depends. These mice with additional features require specialized driver in most cases. Unless the mouse device driver or the user program has specific support for the mouse, it will act just like a standard two, or three button mouse. For the possible usage of wheels in the X Window environment, refer to that section. My mouse does not seem working. The mouse cursor jumps around on the screen. The mouse has a wheel and is connected to the PS/2 mouse port. The PS/2 mouse driver psm in FreeBSD versions 3.2 or earlier has difficulty with some wheel mice, including Logitech model M-S48 and its OEM siblings. Apply the following patch to /sys/i386/isa/psm.c and rebuild the kernel. Index: psm.c =================================================================== RCS file: /src/CVS/src/sys/i386/isa/Attic/psm.c,v retrieving revision 1.60.2.1 retrieving revision 1.60.2.2 diff -u -r1.60.2.1 -r1.60.2.2 --- psm.c 1999/06/03 12:41:13 1.60.2.1 +++ psm.c 1999/07/12 13:40:52 1.60.2.2 @@ -959,14 +959,28 @@ sc->mode.packetsize = vendortype[i].packetsize; /* set mouse parameters */ +#if 0 + /* + * A version of Logitech FirstMouse+ won't report wheel movement, + * if SET_DEFAULTS is sent... Don't use this command. + * This fix was found by Takashi Nishida. + */ i = send_aux_command(sc->kbdc, PSMC_SET_DEFAULTS); if (verbose >= 2) printf("psm%d: SET_DEFAULTS return code:%04x\n", unit, i); +#endif if (sc->config & PSM_CONFIG_RESOLUTION) { sc->mode.resolution = set_mouse_resolution(sc->kbdc, - (sc->config & PSM_CONFIG_RESOLUTION) - 1); + (sc->config & PSM_CONFIG_RESOLUTION) - 1); + } else if (sc->mode.resolution >= 0) { + sc->mode.resolution + = set_mouse_resolution(sc->kbdc, sc->dflt_mode.resolution); + } + if (sc->mode.rate > 0) { + sc->mode.rate = set_mouse_sampling_rate(sc->kbdc, sc->dflt_mode.rate); } + set_mouse_scaling(sc->kbdc, 1); /* request a data packet and extract sync. bits */ if (get_mouse_status(sc->kbdc, stat, 1, 3) < 3) { Versions later than 3.2 should be all right. How do I use the mouse/trackball/touchpad on my laptop? Please refer to the answer to the previous question. And check out this note on the Mobile Computing page. What types of tape drives are supported? FreeBSD supports SCSI and QIC-36 (with a QIC-02 interface). This includes 8-mm (aka Exabyte) and DAT drives. Some of the early 8-mm drives are not quite compatible with SCSI-2, and may not work well with FreeBSD. Does FreeBSD support tape changers? FreeBSD 2.2 supports SCSI changers using the ch(4) device and the chio(1) command. The details of how you actually control the changer can be found in the chio(1) man page. If you're not using AMANDA or some other product that already understands changers, remember that they're only know how to move a tape from one point to another, so you need to keep track of which slot a tape is in, and which slot the tape currently in the drive needs to go back to. Which sound cards are supported by FreeBSD? FreeBSD supports the SoundBlaster, SoundBlaster Pro, SoundBlaster 16, Pro Audio Spectrum 16, AdLib and Gravis UltraSound sound cards. There is also limited support for MPU-401 and compatible MIDI cards. Cards conforming to the Microsoft Sound System specification are also supported through the pcm driver. This is only for sound! This driver does not support CD-ROMs, SCSI or joysticks on these cards, except for the SoundBlaster. The SoundBlaster SCSI interface and some non-SCSI CDROMS are supported, but you can't boot off this device. Workarounds for no sound from es1370 with pcm driver? You can run the following command everytime the machine booted up: &prompt.root; mixer pcm 100 vol 100 cd 100 Which network cards does FreeBSD support? See the Ethernet cards section of the handbook for a more complete list. I don't have a math co-processor - is that bad? This will only affect 386/486SX/486SLC owners - other machines will have one built into the CPU. In general this will not cause any problems, but there are circumstances where you will take a hit, either in performance or accuracy of the math emulation code (see the section on FP emulation). In particular, drawing arcs in X will be VERY slow. It is highly recommended that you buy a math co-processor; it's well worth it. Some math co-processors are better than others. It pains us to say it, but nobody ever got fired for buying Intel. Unless you're sure it works with FreeBSD, beware of clones. What other devices does FreeBSD support? See the Handbook for the list of other devices supported. Does FreeBSD support power management on my laptop? FreeBSD supports APM on certain machines. Please look in the LINT kernel config file, searching for the APM keyword. My Micron system hangs at boot time Certain Micron motherboards have a non-conforming PCI BIOS implementation that causes grief when FreeBSD boots because PCI devices don't get configured at their reported addresses. Disable the Plug and Play Operating System flag in the BIOS to work around this problem. More information can be found at http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html#micron I have a newer Adaptec controller and FreeBSD can't find it. The newer AIC789x series Adaptec chips are supported under the CAM SCSI framework which made it's debut in 3.0. Patches against 2.2-STABLE are in ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/development/cam/. A CAM-enhanced boot floppy is available at http://people.FreeBSD.org/~abial/cam-boot/. In both cases read the README before beginning. I have an internal Plug & Play modem and FreeBSD can't find it. You will need to add the modem's PnP ID to the PnP ID list in the serial driver. To enable Plug & Play support, compile a new kernel with controller pnp0 in the configuration file, then reboot the system. The kernel will print the PnP IDs of all the devices it finds. Copy the PnP ID from the modem to the table in /sys/i386/isa/sio.c, at about line 2777. Look for the string SUP1310 in the structure siopnp_ids[] to find the table. Build the kernel again, install, reboot, and your modem should be found. You may have to manually configure the PnP devices using the pnp command in the boot-time configuration with a command like pnp 1 0 enable os irq0 3 drq0 0 port0 0x2f8 to make the modem show. How do I get the boot: prompt to show on the serial console? Build a kernel with options COMCONSOLE. Create /boot.config and place as the only text in the file. Unplug the keyboard from the system. See /usr/src/sys/i386/boot/biosboot/README.serial for information. Why doesn't my 3Com PCI network card work with my Micron computer? Certain Micron motherboards have a non-conforming PCI BIOS implementation that does not configure PCI devices at the addresses reported. This causes grief when FreeBSD boots. To work around this problem, disable the Plug and Play Operating System flag in the BIOS. More information on this problem is available at URL: http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html#micron Does FreeBSD support Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP)? SMP is supported in 3.0-STABLE and later releases only. SMP is not enabled in the GENERIC kernel, so you will have to recompile your kernel to enable SMP. Take a look at /sys/i386/conf/LINT to figure out what options to put in your kernel config file. The boot floppy hangs on a system with an ASUS K7V motherboard. How do I fix this? Go in to the BIOS setup and disable the boot virus protection. Troubleshooting I have bad blocks on my hard drive! With SCSI drives, the drive should be capable of re-mapping these automatically. However, many drives are shipped with this feature disabled, for some mysterious reason... To enable this, you'll need to edit the first device page mode, which can be done on FreeBSD by giving the command (as root) &prompt.root; scsi -f /dev/rsd0c -m 1 -e -P 3 and changing the values of AWRE and ARRE from 0 to 1:- AWRE (Auto Write Reallocation Enbld): 1 ARRE (Auto Read Reallocation Enbld): 1 The following paragraphs were submitted by Ted Mittelstaedt: For IDE drives, any bad block is usually a sign of potential trouble. All modern IDE drives come with internal bad-block remapping turned on. All IDE hard drive manufacturers today offer extensive warranties and will replace drives with bad blocks on them. If you still want to attempt to rescue an IDE drive with bad blocks, you can attempt to download the IDE drive manufacturer's IDE diagnostic program, and run this against the drive. Sometimes these programs can be set to force the drive electronics to rescan the drive for bad blocks and lock them out. For ESDI, RLL and MFM drives, bad blocks are a normal part of the drive and are no sign of trouble, generally. With a PC, the disk drive controller card and BIOS handle the task of locking out bad sectors. This is fine for operating systems like DOS that use BIOS code to access the disk. However, FreeBSD's disk driver does not go through BIOS, therefore a mechanism, bad144, exists that replaces this functionality. bad144 only works with the wd driver (which means it is not supported in FreeBSD 4.0), it is NOT able to be used with SCSI. bad144 works by entering all bad sectors found into a special file. One caveat with bad144 - the bad block special file is placed on the last track of the disk. As this file may possibly contain a listing for a bad sector that would occur near the beginning of the disk, where the /kernel file might be located, it therefore must be accessible to the bootstrap program that uses BIOS calls to read the kernel file. This means that the disk with bad144 used on it must not exceed 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors. This places an effective limit of 500MB on a disk that is mapped with bad144. To use bad144, simply set the Bad Block scanning to ON in the FreeBSD fdisk screen during the initial install. This works up through FreeBSD 2.2.7. The disk must have less than 1024 cylinders. It is generally recommended that the disk drive has been in operation for at least 4 hours prior to this to allow for thermal expansion and track wandering. If the disk has more than 1024 cylinders (such as a large ESDI drive) the ESDI controller uses a special translation mode to make it work under DOS. The wd driver understands about these translation modes, IF you enter the translated geometry with the set geometry command in fdisk. You must also NOT use the dangerously dedicated mode of creating the FreeBSD partition, as this ignores the geometry. Also, even though fdisk will use your overridden geometry, it still knows the true size of the disk, and will attempt to create a too large FreeBSD partition. If the disk geometry is changed to the translated geometry, the partition MUST be manually created with the number of blocks. A quick trick to use is to set up the large ESDI disk with the ESDI controller, boot it with a DOS disk and format it with a DOS partition. Then, boot the FreeBSD install and in the fdisk screen, read off and write down the blocksize and block numbers for the DOS partition. Then, reset the geometry to the same that DOS uses, delete the DOS partition, and create a cooperative FreeBSD partition using the blocksize you recorded earlier. Then, set the partition bootable and turn on bad block scanning. During the actual install, bad144 will run first, before any filesystems are created. (you can view this with an Alt-F2) If it has any trouble creating the badsector file, you have set too large a disk geometry - reboot the system and start all over again (including repartitioning and reformatting with DOS). If remapping is enabled and you are seeing bad blocks, consider replacing the drive. The bad blocks will only get worse as time goes on. FreeBSD does not recognize my Bustek 742a EISA SCSI! This info is specific to the 742a but may also cover other Buslogic cards. (Bustek = Buslogic) There are 2 general versions of the 742a card. They are hardware revisions A-G, and revisions H - onwards. The revision letter is located after the Assembly number on the edge of the card. The 742a has 2 ROM chips on it, one is the BIOS chip and the other is the Firmware chip. FreeBSD doesn't care what version of BIOS chip you have but it does care about what version of firmware chip. Buslogic will send upgrade ROMS out if you call their tech support dept. The BIOS and Firmware chips are shipped as a matched pair. You must have the most current Firmware ROM in your adapter card for your hardware revision. The REV A-G cards can only accept BIOS/Firmware sets up to 2.41/2.21. The REV H- up cards can accept the most current BIOS/Firmware sets of 4.70/3.37. The difference between the firmware sets is that the 3.37 firmware supports round robin The Buslogic cards also have a serial number on them. If you have a old hardware revision card you can call the Buslogic RMA department and give them the serial number and attempt to exchange the card for a newer hardware revision. If the card is young enough they will do so. FreeBSD 2.1 only supports Firmware revisions 2.21 onward. If you have a Firmware revision older than this your card will not be recognized as a Buslogic card. It may be recognized as an Adaptec 1540, however. The early Buslogic firmware contains an AHA1540 emulation mode. This is not a good thing for an EISA card, however. If you have an old hardware revision card and you obtain the 2.21 firmware for it, you will need to check the position of jumper W1 to B-C, the default is A-B. My HP Netserver's SCSI controller is not detected! This is basically a known problem. The EISA on-board SCSI controller in the HP Netserver machines occupies EISA slot number 11, so all the true EISA slots are in front of it. Alas, the address space for EISA slots >= 10 collides with the address space assigned to PCI, and FreeBSD's auto-configuration currently cannot handle this situation very well. So now, the best you can do is to pretend there is no address range clash :), by bumping the kernel option EISA_SLOTS to a value of 12. Configure and compile a kernel, as described in the Handbook entry on configuring the kernel. Of course, this does present you with a chicken-and-egg problem when installing on such a machine. In order to work around this problem, a special hack is available inside UserConfig. Do not use the visual interface, but the plain command-line interface there. Simply type eisa 12 quit at the prompt, and install your system as usual. While it's recommended you compile and install a custom kernel anyway, Hopefully, future versions will have a proper fix for this problem. You can not use a dangerously dedicated disk with an HP Netserver. See this note for more info. What's up with this CMD640 IDE controller? It's broken. It cannot handle commands on both channels simultaneously. There's a workaround available now and it is enabled automatically if your system uses this chip. For the details refer to the manual page of the disk driver (man 4 wd). If you're already running FreeBSD 2.2.1 or 2.2.2 with a CMD640 IDE controller and you want to use the second channel, build a new kernel with options "CMD640" enabled. This is the default for 2.2.5 and later. I keep seeing messages like ed1: timeout. This is usually caused by an interrupt conflict (e.g., two boards using the same IRQ). FreeBSD prior to 2.0.5R used to be tolerant of this, and the network driver would still function in the presence of IRQ conflicts. However, with 2.0.5R and later, IRQ conflicts are no longer tolerated. Boot with the -c option and change the ed0/de0/... entry to match your board. If you're using the BNC connector on your network card, you may also see device timeouts because of bad termination. To check this, attach a terminator directly to the NIC (with no cable) and see if the error messages go away. Some NE2000 compatible cards will give this error if there is no link on the UTP port or if the cable is disconnected. When I mount a CDROM, I get Incorrect super block. You have to tell mount the type of the device that you want to mount. By default, mount(8) will assume the filesystem is of type ufs. You want to mount a CDROM filesystem, and you do this by specifying the option to mount(8). This does, of course, assume that the CDROM contains an ISO 9660 filesystem, which is what most CDROMs have. As of 1.1R, FreeBSD automatically understands the Rock Ridge (long filename) extensions as well. As an example, if you want to mount the CDROM device, /dev/cd0c, under /mnt, you would execute: &prompt.root; mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0c /mnt Note that your device name (/dev/cd0c in this example) could be different, depending on the CDROM interface. Note that the option just causes the mount_cd9660 command to be executed, and so the above example could be shortened to: &prompt.root; mount_cd9660 /dev/cd0c /mnt When I mount a CDROM, I get Device not configured. This generally means that there is no CDROM in the CDROM drive, or the drive is not visible on the bus. Feed the drive something, and/or check its master/slave status if it is IDE (ATAPI). It can take a couple of seconds for a CDROM drive to notice that it's been fed, so be patient. Sometimes a SCSI CD-ROM may be missed because it hadn't enough time to answer the bus reset. If you have a SCSI CD-ROM please try to add the following symbol into your kernel configuration file and recompile. options "SCSI_DELAY=15" When I mount a CDROM, all non-English characters in filenames show up as ?. Most likely your CDROM uses the Joilet extention for storing information about files and directories. This extension specifies that all filenames are stored using Unicode two-byte characters. Currently, efforts are under way to introduce a generic Unicode interface into the FreeBSD kernel, but since that isn't ready yet, the CD9660 driver does not have the ability to decode the characters in the filenames. As a temporary solution, starting with FreeBSD 4.3, a special hook has been added into the CD9660 driver to allow the user to load an appropriate conversion table on the fly. Modules for some of the common encodings are available via the sysutils/cd9660_unicode port. My printer is ridiculously slow. What can I do ? If it's parallel, and the only problem is that it's terribly slow, try setting your printer port into polled mode: &prompt.root; lptcontrol -p Some newer HP printers are claimed not to work correctly in interrupt mode, apparently due to some (not yet exactly understood) timing problem. My programs occasionally die with Signal 11 errors. Signal 11 errors are caused when your process has attempted to access memory which the operating system has not granted it access to. If something like this is happening at seemingly random intervals then you need to start investigating things very carefully. These problems can usually be attributed to either: If the problem is occurring only in a specific application that you are developing yourself it is probably a bug in your code. If it's a problem with part of the base FreeBSD system, it may also be buggy code, but more often than not these problems are found and fixed long before us general FAQ readers get to use these bits of code (that's what -current is for). In particular, a dead giveaway that this is *not* a FreeBSD bug is if you see the problem when you're compiling a program, but the activity that the compiler is carrying out changes each time. For example, suppose you're running make buildworld, and the compile fails while trying to compile ls.c in to ls.o. If you next run make buildworld again, and the compile fails in the same place then this is a broken build -- try updating your sources and try again. If the compile fails elsewhere then this is almost certainly hardware. What you should do: In the first case you can use a debugger e.g. gdb to find the point in the program which is attempting to access a bogus address and then fix it. In the second case you need to verify that it's not your hardware at fault. Common causes of this include : Your hard disks might be overheating: Check the fans in your case are still working, as your disk (and perhaps other hardware might be overheating). The processor running is overheating: This might be because the processor has been overclocked, or the fan on the processor might have died. In either case you need to ensure that you have hardware running at what it's specified to run at, at least while trying to solve this problem. i.e. Clock it back to the default settings. If you are overclocking then note that it's far cheaper to have a slow system than a fried system that needs replacing! Also the wider community is not often sympathetic to problems on overclocked systems, whether you believe it's safe or not. Dodgy memory: If you have multiple memory SIMMS/DIMMS installed then pull them all out and try running the machine with each SIMM or DIMM individually and narrow the problem down to either the problematic DIMM/SIMM or perhaps even a combination. Over-optimistic Motherboard settings: In your BIOS settings, and some motherboard jumpers you have options to set various timings, mostly the defaults will be sufficient, but sometimes, setting the wait states on RAM too low, or setting the RAM Speed: Turbo option, or similar in the BIOS will cause strange behaviour. A possible idea is to set to BIOS defaults, but it might be worth noting down your settings first! Unclean or insufficient power to the motherboard. If you have any unused I/O boards, hard disks, or CDROMs in your system, try temporarily removing them or disconnecting the power cable from them, to see if your power supply can manage a smaller load. Or try another power supply, preferably one with a little more power (for instance, if your current power supply is rated at 250 Watts try one rated at 300 Watts). You should also read the SIG11 FAQ (listed below) which has excellent explanations of all these problems, albeit from a Linux viewpoint. It also discusses how memory testing software or hardware can still pass faulty memory. Finally, if none of this has helped it is possible that you've just found a bug in FreeBSD, and you should follow the instructions to send a problem report. There's an extensive FAQ on this at the SIG11 problem FAQ When I boot, the screen goes black and loses sync! This is a known problem with the ATI Mach 64 video card. The problem is that this card uses address 2e8, and the fourth serial port does too. Due to a bug (feature?) in the sio(4) driver it will touch this port even if you don't have the fourth serial port, and even if you disable sio3 (the fourth port) which normally uses this address. Until the bug has been fixed, you can use this workaround: Enter at the bootprompt. (This will put the kernel into configuration mode). Disable sio0, sio1, sio2 and sio3 (all of them). This way the sio driver doesn't get activated -> no problems. Type exit to continue booting. If you want to be able to use your serial ports, you'll have to build a new kernel with the following modification: in /usr/src/sys/i386/isa/sio.c find the one occurrence of the string 0x2e8 and remove that string and the preceding comma (keep the trailing comma). Now follow the normal procedure of building a new kernel. Even after applying these workarounds, you may still find that the X Window System does not work properly. If this is the case, make sure that the XFree86 version you are using is at least XFree86 3.3.3 or higher. This version and upwards has built-in support for the Mach64 cards and even a dedicated X server for those cards. I have 128 MB of RAM but the system only uses 64 MB. Due to the manner in which FreeBSD gets the memory size from the BIOS, it can only detect 16 bits worth of Kbytes in size (65535 Kbytes = 64MB) (or less... some BIOSes peg the memory size to 16M). If you have more than 64MB, FreeBSD will attempt to detect it; however, the attempt may fail. To work around this problem, you need to use the kernel option specified below. There is a way to get complete memory information from the BIOS, but we don't have room in the bootblocks to do it. Someday when lack of room in the bootblocks is fixed, we'll use the extended BIOS functions to get the full memory information...but for now we're stuck with the kernel option. options "MAXMEM=n" Where n is your memory in Kilobytes. For a 128 MB machine, you'd want to use 131072. FreeBSD 2.0 panics with kmem_map too small! The message may also be mb_map too small! The panic indicates that the system ran out of virtual memory for network buffers (specifically, mbuf clusters). You can increase the amount of VM available for mbuf clusters by adding: options "NMBCLUSTERS=n" to your kernel config file, where n is a number in the range 512-4096, depending on the number of concurrent TCP connections you need to support. I'd recommend trying 2048 - this should get rid of the panic completely. You can monitor the number of mbuf clusters allocated/in use on the system with netstat -m. The default value for NMBCLUSTERS is 512 + MAXUSERS * 16. CMAP busy panic when rebooting with a new kernel. The logic that attempts to detect an out of date /var/db/kvm_*.db files sometimes fails and using a mismatched file can sometimes lead to panics. If this happens, reboot single-user and do: &prompt.root; rm /var/db/kvm_*.db ahc0: brkadrint, Illegal Host Access at seqaddr 0x0 This is a conflict with an Ultrastor SCSI Host Adapter. During the boot process enter the kernel configuration menu and disable uha0, which is causing the problem. Sendmail says mail loops back to myself This is answered in the sendmail FAQ as follows:- * I'm getting "Local configuration error" messages, such as: 553 relay.domain.net config error: mail loops back to myself 554 <user@domain.net>... Local configuration error How can I solve this problem? You have asked mail to the domain (e.g., domain.net) to be forwarded to a specific host (in this case, relay.domain.net) by using an MX record, but the relay machine doesn't recognize itself as domain.net. Add domain.net to /etc/sendmail.cw (if you are using FEATURE(use_cw_file)) or add "Cw domain.net" to /etc/sendmail.cf. The current version of the sendmail FAQ is no longer maintained with the sendmail release. It is however regularly posted to comp.mail.sendmail, comp.mail.misc, comp.mail.smail, comp.answers, and news.answers. You can also receive a copy via email by sending a message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with the command send usenet/news.answers/mail/sendmail-faq as the body of the message. Full screen applications on remote machines misbehave The remote machine may be setting your terminal type to something other than the cons25 terminal type required by the FreeBSD console. There are a number of possible work-arounds for this problem: After logging on to the remote machine, set your TERM shell variable to ansi or sco if the remote machine knows about these terminal types. Use a VT100 emulator like screen at the FreeBSD console. screen offers you the ability to run multiple concurrent sessions from one terminal, and is a neat program in its own right. Each screen window behaves like a VT100 terminal, so the TERM variable at the remote end should be set to vt100. Install the cons25 terminal database entry on the remote machine. The way to do this depends on the operating system on the remote machine. The system administration manuals for the remote system should be able to help you here. Fire up an X server at the FreeBSD end and login to the remote machine using an X based terminal emulator such as xterm or rxvt. The TERM variable at the remote host should be set to xterm or vt100. My machine prints calcru: negative time... This can be caused by various hardware and/or software ailments relating to interrupts. It may be due to bugs but can also happen by nature of certain devices. Running TCP/IP over the parallel port using a large MTU is one good way to provoke this problem. Graphics accelerators can also get you here, in which case you should check the interrupt setting of the card first. A side effect of this problem are dying processes with the message SIGXCPU exceeded cpu time limit. For FreeBSD 3.0 and later from Nov 29, 1998 forward: If the problem cannot be fixed otherwise the solution is to set this sysctl variable: &prompt.root; sysctl -w kern.timecounter.method=1 This means a performance impact, but considering the cause of this problem, you probably will not notice. If the problem persists, keep the sysctl set to one and set the NTIMECOUNTER option in your kernel to increasingly large values. If by the time you have reached NTIMECOUNTER=20 the problem isn't solved, interrupts are too hosed on your machine for reliable timekeeping. I see pcm0 not found or my sound card is found as pcm1 but I have device pcm0 in my kernel config file This occurs in FreeBSD 3.x with PCI sound cards. The pcm0 device is reserved exclusively for ISA-based cards so, if you have a PCI card, then you will see this error, and your card will appear as pcm1. You cannot remove the warning by simply changing the line in the kernel config file to device pcm1 as this will result in pcm1 being reserved for ISA cards and your PCI card being found as pcm2 (along with the warning pcm1 not found). If you have a PCI sound card you will also have to make the snd1 device rather than snd0: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; ./MAKEDEV snd1 This situation does not arise in FreeBSD 4.x as has a lot of work has been done to make the it more PnP-centric and the pcm0 device is no longer reserved exclusively fo ISA cards My PnP card is no longer found (or found as unknown) since upgrading to FreeBSD 4.x FreeBSD 4.x is now much more PnP-centric and this has had the side effect of some PnP devices (e.g. sound cards and internal modems) not working even though they worked under FreeBSD 3.x. The reasons for this behaviour are explained by the following e-mail, posted to the freebsd-questions mailing list by Peter Wemm, in answer to a question about an internal modem that was no longer found after an upgrade to FreeBSD 4.x (the comments in [] have been added to clarify the context.
The PNP bios preconfigured it [the modem] and left it laying around in port space, so [in 3.x] the old-style ISA probes found it there. Under 4.0, the ISA code is much more PnP-centric. It was possible [in 3.x] for an ISA probe to find a stray device and then for the PNP device id to match and then fail due to resource conflicts. So, it disables the programmable cards first so this double probing cannot happen. It also means that it needs to know the PnP id's for supported PnP hardware. Making this more user tweakable is on the TODO list.
To get the device working again requires finding its PnP id and adding it to the list that the ISA probes use to identify PnP devices. This is obtained using &man.pnpinfo.8; to probe the device, for example this is the output from &man.pnpinfo.8; for an internal modem: &prompt.root; pnpinfo Checking for Plug-n-Play devices... Card assigned CSN #1 Vendor ID PMC2430 (0x3024a341), Serial Number 0xffffffff PnP Version 1.0, Vendor Version 0 Device Description: Pace 56 Voice Internal Plug & Play Modem Logical Device ID: PMC2430 0x3024a341 #0 Device supports I/O Range Check TAG Start DF I/O Range 0x3f8 .. 0x3f8, alignment 0x8, len 0x8 [16-bit addr] IRQ: 4 - only one type (true/edge) [more TAG lines elided] TAG End DF End Tag Successfully got 31 resources, 1 logical fdevs -- card select # 0x0001 CSN PMC2430 (0x3024a341), Serial Number 0xffffffff Logical device #0 IO: 0x03e8 0x03e8 0x03e8 0x03e8 0x03e8 0x03e8 0x03e8 0x03e8 IRQ 5 0 DMA 4 0 IO range check 0x00 activate 0x01 The information you require is in the Vendor ID line at the start of the output. The hexadecimal number in parentheses (0x3024a341 in this example) is the PnP id and the string immediately before this (PMC2430) is a unique ASCII id. This information needs adding to the file /usr/src/sys/isa/sio.c. You should first make a backup of sio.c just in case things go wrong. You will also need it to make the patch to submit with your PR (you are going to submit a PR, aren't you?) then edit sio.c and search for the line static struct isa_pnp_id sio_ids[] = { then scroll down to find the correct place to add the entry for your device. The entries look like this, and are sorted on the ASCII Vendor ID string which should be included in the comment to the right of the line of code along with all (if it will fit) or part of the Device Description from the output of &man.pnpinfo.8;: {0x0f804f3f, NULL}, /* OZO800f - Zoom 2812 (56k Modem) */ {0x39804f3f, NULL}, /* OZO8039 - Zoom 56k flex */ {0x3024a341, NULL}, /* PMC2430 - Pace 56 Voice Internal Modem */ {0x1000eb49, NULL}, /* ROK0010 - Rockwell ? */ {0x5002734a, NULL}, /* RSS0250 - 5614Jx3(G) Internal Modem */ Add the hexadecimal Vendor ID for your device in the correct place, save the file, rebuild your kernel, and reboot. Your device should now be found as an sio device as it was under FreeBSD 3.x I get the error nlist failed when running, for example, top or systat. The problem is that the application you are trying to run is looking for a specific kernel symbol, but, for whatever reason, cannot find it; this error stems from one of two problems: Your kernel and userland are not synchronized (i.e., you built a new kernel but did not do an installworld, or vice versa), and thus the symbol table is different from what the user application thinks it is. If this is the case, simply complete the upgrade process (see /usr/src/UPDATING for the correct sequence). You are not using /boot/loader to load your kernel, but doing it directly from boot2 (see &man.boot.8;). While there is nothing wrong with bypassing /boot/loader, it generally does a better job of making the kernel symbols available to user applications. Why does it take so long to connect to my computer via &man.ssh.1; or &man.telnet.1;? The symptom: there is a long delay between the time the TCP connection is established and the time when the client software asks for a password (or, in &man.telnet.1;'s case, when a login prompt appears). The problem: more likely than not, the delay is caused by the server software trying to resolve the client's IP address into a hostname. Many servers, including the Telnet and SSH servers that come with FreeBSD, do this in order to, among other things, store the hostname in a log file for future reference by the administrator. The remedy: if the problem occurs whenever you connect from your computer (the client) to any server, the problem is with the client; likewise, if the problem only occurs when someone connects to your computer (the server) the problem is with the server. If the problem is with the client, the only remedy is to fix the DNS so the server can resolve it. If this is on a local network, consider it a server problem and keep reading; conversely, if this is on the global Internet, you will most likely need to contact your ISP and ask them to fix it for you. If the problem is with the server, and this is on a local network, you need to configure the server to be able to resolve address-to-hostname queries for your local address range. See the &man.hosts.5; and &man.named.8; manual pages for more information. If this is on the global Internet, the problem may be that your server's resolver is not functioning correctly. To check, try to look up another host--say, www.yahoo.com. If it doesn't work, that's your problem. Commercial Applications This section is still very sparse, though we're hoping, of course, that companies will add to it! :) The FreeBSD group has no financial interest in any of the companies listed here but simply lists them as a public service (and feels that commercial interest in FreeBSD can have very positive effects on FreeBSD's long-term viability). We encourage commercial software vendors to send their entries here for inclusion. See the Vendors page for a longer list. + + + Where can I get an Office Suite for FreeBSD? + + + + + BSDi + offers a FreeBSD native version of VistaSource + ApplixWare 5. + + ApplixWare is a rich full-featured, commercial + Office Suite for FreeBSD containing a word processor, + spreadsheet, presentation program, vector drawing + package, and other applications. + + + You can purchase ApplixWare for FreeBSD here. + + + + + The Linux version of StarOffice + works flawlessly on FreeBSD. The easiest way to + install the Linux version of StarOffice is through the + FreeBSD + Ports collection. Future versions of the + open-source OpenOffice + suite should work as well. + + + + Where can I get Motif for FreeBSD? Contact Apps2go for the least expensive ELF Motif 2.1.20 distribution for FreeBSD (either i386 or Alpha). There are two distributions, the developement edition and the runtime edition (for much less). These distributions includes: OSF/Motif manager, xmbind, panner, wsm. Development kit with uil, mrm, xm, xmcxx, include and Imake files. Static and dynamic ELF libraries (for use with FreeBSD 3.0 and above). Demonstration applets. Be sure to specify that you want the FreeBSD version of Motif when ordering (don't forget to mention the architecture you want too)! Versions for NetBSD and OpenBSD are also sold by Apps2go. This is currently a FTP only download. More info Apps2go WWW page or Sales or Support email addresses. or phone (817) 431 8775 or +1 817 431-8775 Contact Metro Link for an either ELF or a.out Motif 2.1 distribution for FreeBSD. This distribution includes: OSF/Motif manager, xmbind, panner, wsm. Development kit with uil, mrm, xm, xmcxx, include and Imake files. Static and dynamic libraries (specify ELF for use with FreeBSD 3.0 and later; or a.out for use with FreeBSD 2.2.8 and eariler). Demonstration applets. Preformatted man pages. Be sure to specify that you want the FreeBSD version of Motif when ordering! Versions for Linux are also sold by Metro Link. This is available on either a CDROM or for FTP download. Contact Xi Graphics for an a.out Motif 2.0 distribution for FreeBSD. This distribution includes: OSF/Motif manager, xmbind, panner, wsm. Development kit with uil, mrm, xm, xmcxx, include and Imake files. Static and dynamic libraries (for use with FreeBSD 2.2.8 and eariler). Demonstration applets. Preformatted man pages. Be sure to specify that you want the FreeBSD version of Motif when ordering! Versions for BSDI and Linux are also sold by Xi Graphics. This is currently a 4 diskette set... in the future this will change to a unified CD distribution like their CDE. Where can I get CDE for FreeBSD? Xi Graphics used to sell CDE for FreeBSD, but no longer do. KDE is an open source X11 desktop which is similar to CDE in many respects. You might also like the look and feel of xfce. KDE and xfce are both in the ports system. Are there any commercial high-performance X servers? Yes, Xi Graphics and Metro Link sells Accelerated-X product for FreeBSD and other Intel based systems. The Metro Link offering is a high performance X Server that offers easy configuration using the FreeBSD Package suite of tools, support for multiple concurrent video boards and is distributed in binary form only, in a convienent FTP download. Not to mention the Metro Link offering is available at the very reasonable price of $39. Metro Link also sells both ELF and a.out Motif for FreeBSD (see above). More info Metro Link WWW page or Sales or Support email addresses. or phone (954) 938-0283 or +1 954 938-0283 The Xi Graphics offering is a high performance X Server that offers easy configuration, support for multiple concurrent video boards and is distributed in binary form only, in a unified diskette distribution for FreeBSD and Linux. Xi Graphics also offers a high performance X Server taylored for laptop support. There is a free compatibility demo of version 5.0 available. Xi Graphics also sells Motif and CDE for FreeBSD (see above). More info Xi Graphics WWW page or Sales or Support email addresses. or phone (800) 946 7433 or +1 303 298-7478. Are there any Database systems for FreeBSD? Yes! See the Commercial Vendors section of FreeBSD's Web site. Also see the Databases section of the Ports collection. Can I run Oracle on FreeBSD? Yes. The following pages tell you exactly how to setup Linux-Oracle on FreeBSD: http://www.scc.nl/~marcel/howto-oracle.html http://www.lf.net/lf/pi/oracle/install-linux-oracle-on-freebsd User Applications So, where are all the user applications? Please take a look at the ports page for info on software packages ported to FreeBSD. The list currently tops 3400 and is growing daily, so come back to check often or subscribe to the freebsd-announce mailing list for periodic updates on new entries. Most ports should be available for the 2.2, 3.x and 4.x branches, and many of them should work on 2.1.x systems as well. Each time a FreeBSD release is made, a snapshot of the ports tree at the time of release in also included in the ports/ directory. We also support the concept of a package, essentially no more than a gzipped binary distribution with a little extra intelligence embedded in it for doing whatever custom installation work is required. A package can be installed and uninstalled again easily without having to know the gory details of which files it includes. Use the package installation menu in /stand/sysinstall (under the post-configuration menu item) or invoke the pkg_add(1) command on the specific package files you're interested in installing. Package files can usually be identified by their .tgz suffix and CDROM distribution people will have a packages/All directory on their CD which contains such files. They can also be downloaded over the net for various versions of FreeBSD at the following locations: for 2.2.8-RELEASE/2.2.8-STABLE ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-2.2.8/ for 3.X-RELEASE/3.X-STABLE ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-3-stable/ for 4.X-RELEASE/4-STABLE ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/ for 5.X-CURRENT ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5-current or your nearest local mirror site. Note that all ports may not be available as packages since new ones are constantly being added. It is always a good idea to check back periodically to see which packages are available at the ftp.FreeBSD.org master site. Why is /bin/sh so minimal? Why doesn't FreeBSD use bash or another shell? Because POSIX says that there shall be such a shell. The more complicated answer: many people need to write shell scripts which will be portable across many systems. That's why POSIX specifies the shell and utility commands in great detail. Most scripts are written in Bourne shell, and because several important programming interfaces (&man.make.1;, &man.system.3;, &man.popen.3;, and analogues in higher-level scripting languages like Perl and Tcl) are specified to use the Bourne shell to interpret commands. Because the Bourne shell is so often and widely used, it is important for it to be quick to start, be deterministic in its behavior, and have a small memory footprint. The existing implementation is our best effort at meeting as many of these requirements simultaneously as we can. In order to keep /bin/sh small, we have not provided many of the convenience features that other shells have. That's why the Ports Collection includes more featureful shells like bash, scsh, tcsh, and zsh. (You can compare for yourself the memory utilization of all these shells by looking at the VSZ and RSS columns in a ps -u listing.) Where do I find libc.so.3.0? You are trying to run a package built on 2.2 and later on a 2.1.x system. Please take a look at the previous section and get the correct port/package for your system. I get a message Error: can't find libc.so.4.0 You accidently downloaded packages meant for 4.X and 5.X systems and attempted to install them on your 2.X or 3.X FreeBSD system. Please download the correct version of the packages. ghostscript gives lots of errors with my 386/486SX. You don't have a math co-processor, right? You will need to add the alternative math emulator to your kernel; you do this by adding the following to your kernel config file and it will be compiled in. options GPL_MATH_EMULATE You will need to remove the MATH_EMULATE option when you do this. When I run a SCO/iBCS2 application, it bombs on socksys (FreeBSD 3.0 and older only). You first need to edit the /etc/sysconfig (or /etc/rc.conf) file in the last section to change the following variable to YES: # Set to YES if you want ibcs2 (SCO) emulation loaded at startup ibcs2=NO It will load the ibcs2 kernel module at startup. You'll then need to set up /compat/ibcs2/dev to look like: lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9 Oct 15 22:20 X0R@ -> /dev/null lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 7 Oct 15 22:20 nfsd@ -> socksys -rw-rw-r-- 1 root wheel 0 Oct 28 12:02 null lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9 Oct 15 22:20 socksys@ -> /dev/null crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 41, 1 Oct 15 22:14 spx You just need socksys to go to /dev/null to fake the open & close. The code in -CURRENT will handle the rest. This is much cleaner than the way it was done before. If you want the spx driver for a local socket X connection, define SPX_HACK when you compile the system. How do I configure INN (Internet News) for my machine? After installing the inn package or port, an excellent place to start is Dave Barr's INN Page where you'll find the INN FAQ. What version of Microsoft FrontPage should I get? Use the Port, Luke! A pre-patched version of Apache is available in the ports tree. Does FreeBSD support Java? Yes. Please see http://www.FreeBSD.org/java/. Why can't I build this port on my 3.X-STABLE machine? If you're running a FreeBSD version that lags significantly behind -CURRENT or -STABLE, you may need a ports upgrade kit from http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/. If you are up to date, then someone might have committed a change to the port which works for -CURRENT but which broke the port for -STABLE. Please submit a bug report on this with the send-pr(1) command, since the ports collection is supposed to work for both the -CURRENT and -STABLE branches. Where do I find ld.so? If you want to run some aout applications like Netscape Navigator on an Elf'ened machine such as 3.1-R or later, it would need /usr/libexec/ld.so and some aout libs. They are included in the compat22 distribution. Use /stand/sysinstall or install.sh in the compat22 subdirectory and install it. Also read ERRATAs for 3.1-R and 3.2-R. I updated the sources, now how do I update my installed ports? Unfortunately, there is no easy way to update installed ports. The pkg_version command can be used to generate a script that will update the installed ports with a newer version in the ports tree: &prompt.root; pkg_version > /tmp/myscript The output script must be edited by hand before you use it. Current versions of pkg_version force this by inserting an exit at the beginning of the script. You should save the output of the script, as it will note packages that depend on the one that has been udpated. These may or may not need to be updated as well. The usual case where they need to be updated is that a shared library has changed version numbers, so the ports that used that library need to be rebuilt to use the new version. If your system is up full time, the &man.periodic.8 system can be used to generate a weekly list of ports that might need updating by setting weekly_status_pkg_enable="YES" in /etc/periodic.conf. Kernel Configuration I'd like to customize my kernel. Is it difficult? Not at all! Check out the kernel config section of the Handbook. I recommend making a dated snapshot of your kernel in kernel.YYMMDD after you get it all working, that way if you do something dire the next time you play with your configuration you can boot that kernel instead of having to go all the way back to kernel.GENERIC. This is particularly important if you're now booting off a controller that isn't supported in the GENERIC kernel (yes, personal experience). My kernel compiles fail because _hw_float is missing. Let me guess. You removed npx0 from your kernel configuration file because you don't have a math co-processor, right? Wrong! :-) The npx0 is MANDATORY. Even if you don't have a mathematic co-processor, you must include the npx0 device. Why is my kernel so big (over 10MB)? Chances are, you compiled your kernel in debug mode. Kernels built in debug mode contain many symbols that are used for debugging, thus greatly increasing the size of the kernel. Note that if you running a FreeBSD 3.0 or later system, there will be little or no performance decrease from running a debug kernel, and it is useful to keep one around in case of a system panic. However, if you are running low on disk space, or you simply don't want to run a debug kernel, make sure that both of the following are true: You do not have a line in your kernel configuration file that reads: makeoptions DEBUG=-g You are not running config with the option. Both of the above situations will cause your kernel to be built in debug mode. As long as you make sure you follow the steps above, you can build your kernel normally, and you should notice a fairly large size decrease; most kernels tend to be around 1.5MB to 2MB. Interrupt conflicts with multi-port serial code. Q. When I compile a kernel with multi-port serial code, it tells me that only the first port is probed and the rest skipped due to interrupt conflicts. How do I fix this? A. The problem here is that FreeBSD has code built-in to keep the kernel from getting trashed due to hardware or software conflicts. The way to fix this is to leave out the IRQ settings on all but one port. Here is a example: # # Multiport high-speed serial line - 16550 UARTS # device sio2 at isa? port 0x2a0 tty irq 5 flags 0x501 vector siointr device sio3 at isa? port 0x2a8 tty flags 0x501 vector siointr device sio4 at isa? port 0x2b0 tty flags 0x501 vector siointr device sio5 at isa? port 0x2b8 tty flags 0x501 vector siointr Every kernel I try to build fails to compile; even GENERIC. There are a number of possible causes for this problem. They are, in no particular order: You are not using the new make buildkernel and make installkernel targets, and your source tree is different from the one used to build the currently running system (e.g., you're compiling 4.2-RELEASE on a 4.0-RELEASE system). If you're attempting an upgrade, please read the /usr/src/UPDATING file, paying particular attention to the COMMON ITEMS section at the end. You are using the new make buildkernel and make installkernel targets, but you failed to assert the completion of the make buildworld target. The make buildkernel target relies on files generated by the make buildworld target to complete its job correctly. Even if you are trying to build FreeBSD-STABLE, it is possible that you fetched the source tree at a time when it was either being modified, or broken for other reasons; only releases are absolutly guaranteed to be buildable, although FreeBSD-STABLE builds fine the majority of the time. If you have not already done so, try re-fetching the source tree and see if the problem goes away. Try using a different server in case the one you're using is having problems. System Administration Where are the system start-up configuration files? From 2.0.5R to 2.2.1R, the primary configuration file is /etc/sysconfig. All the options are to be specified in this file and other files such as /etc/rc and /etc/netstart just include it. Look in the /etc/sysconfig file and change the value to match your system. This file is filled with comments to show what to put in there. In post-2.2.1 and 3.0, /etc/sysconfig was renamed to a more self-describing rc.conf file and the syntax cleaned up a bit in the process. /etc/netstart was also renamed to /etc/rc.network so that all files could be copied with a cp /usr/src/etc/rc* /etc command. And, in 3.1 and later, /etc/rc.conf has been moved to /etc/defaults/rc.conf. Do not edit this file! Instead, if there is any entry in /etc/defaults/rc.conf that you want to change, you should copy the line into /etc/rc.conf and change it there. For example, if you wish to start named, the DNS server included with FreeBSD in FreeBSD 3.1 or later, all you need to do is: &prompt.root; echo named_enable="YES" >> /etc/rc.conf To start up local services in FreeBSD 3.1 or later, place shell scripts in the /usr/local/etc/rc.d directory. These shell scripts should be set executable, and end with a .sh. In FreeBSD 3.0 and earlier releases, you should edit the /etc/rc.local file. The /etc/rc.serial is for serial port initialization (e.g. locking the port characteristics, and so on.). The /etc/rc.i386 is for Intel-specifics settings, such as iBCS2 emulation or the PC system console configuration. How do I add a user easily? Use the adduser command. For more complicated usage, the pw command. To remove the user again, use the rmuser command. Once again, pw will work as well. How can I add my new hard disk to my FreeBSD system? See the Disk Formatting Tutorial at www.FreeBSD.org. I have a new removable drive, how do I use it? Whether it's a removable drive like a ZIP or an EZ drive (or even a floppy, if you want to use it that way), or a new hard disk, once it's installed and recognized by the system, and you have your cartridge/floppy/whatever slotted in, things are pretty much the same for all devices. (this section is based on Mark Mayo's ZIP FAQ) If it's a ZIP drive or a floppy , you've already got a DOS filesystem on it, you can use a command like this: &prompt.root; mount -t msdos /dev/fd0c /floppy if it's a floppy, or this: &prompt.root; mount -t msdos /dev/da2s4 /zip for a ZIP disk with the factory configuration. For other disks, see how they're laid out using fdisk or /stand/sysinstall. The rest of the examples will be for a ZIP drive on da2, the third SCSI disk. Unless it's a floppy, or a removable you plan on sharing with other people, it's probably a better idea to stick a BSD file system on it. You'll get long filename support, at least a 2X improvement in performance, and a lot more stability. First, you need to redo the DOS-level partitions/filesystems. You can either use fdisk or /stand/sysinstall, or for a small drive that you don't want to bother with multiple operating system support on, just blow away the whole FAT partition table (slices) and just use the BSD partitioning: &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rda2 count=2 &prompt.root; disklabel -Brw da2 auto You can use disklabel or /stand/sysinstall to create multiple BSD partitions. You'll certainly want to do this if you're adding swap space on a fixed disk, but it's probably irrelevant on a removable drive like a ZIP. Finally, create a new file system, this one's on our ZIP drive using the whole disk: &prompt.root; newfs /dev/rda2c and mount it: &prompt.root; mount /dev/da2c /zip and it's probably a good idea to add a line like this to /etc/fstab so you can just type mount /zip in the future: /dev/da2c /zip ffs rw,noauto 0 0 Why do I keep getting messages like root: not found after editing my crontab file? This is normally caused by editing the system crontab (/etc/crontab) and then using &man.crontab.1; to install it: &prompt.root; crontab /etc/crontab This is not the correct way to do things. The system crontab has a different format to the per-user crontabs which &man.crontab.1; updates (the &man.crontab.5; manual page explains the differences in more detail). If this is what you did, the extra crontab is simply a copy of /etc/crontab in the wrong format it. Delete it with the command: &prompt.root; crontab -r Next time, when you edit /etc/crontab, you should not do anything to inform &man.cron.8; of the changes, since it will notice them automatically. If you want something to be run once per day, week, or month, it's probably better to add shell scripts /usr/local/etc/periodic, and let the &man.periodic.8; command run from the system cron schedule it with the other periodic system tasks. The actual reason for the error is that the system crontab has an extra field, specifying which user to run the command as. In the default system crontab provided with FreeBSD, this is root for all entries. When this crontab is used as the root user's crontab (which is not the same as the system crontab), &man.cron.8; assumes the string root is the first word of the command to execute, but no such command exists. I made a mistake in rc.conf, or another startup file, and now I can't edit it because the filesystem is read-only. What should I do? When you get the prompt to enter the shell pathname, simply press ENTER, and run mount / to re-mount the root filesystem in read/write mode. You may also need to run mount -a -t ufs to mount the filesystem where your favourite editor is defined. If your favourite editor is on a network filesystem, you will need to either configure the network manually before you can mount network filesystems, or use an editor which resides on a local filesystem, such as &man.ed.1;. If you intend to use a full screen editor such as &man.vi.1; or &man.emacs.1;, you may also need to run export TERM=cons25 so that these editors can load the correct data from the &man.termcap.5; database. Once you have performed these steps, you can edit /etc/rc.conf as you usually would to fix the syntax error. The error message displayed immediately after the kernel boot messages should tell you the number of the line in the file which is at fault. How do I mount a secondary DOS partition? The secondary DOS partitions are found after ALL the primary partitions. For example, if you have an E partition as the second DOS partition on the second SCSI drive, you need to create the special files for slice 5 in /dev, then mount /dev/da1s5: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV da1s5 &prompt.root; mount -t msdos /dev/da1s5 /dos/e Can I mount other foreign filesystems under FreeBSD? Digital UNIX UFS CDROMs can be mounted directly on FreeBSD. Mounting disk partitions from Digital UNIX and other systems that support UFS may be more complex, depending on the details of the disk partitioning for the operating system in question. Linux: 2.2 and later have support for ext2fs partitions. See mount_ext2fs for more information. NT: A read-only NTFS driver exists for FreeBSD. For more information, see this tutorial by Mark Ovens at http://ukug.uk.freebsd.org/~mark/ntfs_install.html. Any other information on this subject would be appreciated. How can I use the NT loader to boot FreeBSD? This procedure is slightly different for 2.2.x and 3.x (with the 3-stage boot) systems. The general idea is that you copy the first sector of your native root FreeBSD partition into a file in the DOS/NT partition. Assuming you name that file something like c:\bootsect.bsd (inspired by c:\bootsect.dos), you can then edit the c:\boot.ini file to come up with something like this: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows NT" C:\BOOTSECT.BSD="FreeBSD" C:\="DOS" For 2.2.x systems this procedure assumes that DOS, NT, FreeBSD, or whatever have been installed into their respective fdisk partitions on the same disk. In my case DOS & NT are in the first fdisk partition and FreeBSD is in the second. I also installed FreeBSD to boot from its native partition, not the disk MBR. Mount a DOS-formatted floppy (if you've converted to NTFS) or the FAT partition, under, say, /mnt. &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/rda0a of=/mnt/bootsect.bsd bs=512 count=1 Reboot into DOS or NT. NTFS users copy the bootsect.bsd and/or the bootsect.lnx file from the floppy to C:\. Modify the attributes (permissions) on boot.ini with: C:\> attrib -s -r c:\boot.ini Edit to add the appropriate entries from the example boot.ini above, and restore the attributes: C:\> attrib +s +r c:\boot.ini If FreeBSD is booting from the MBR, restore it with the DOS fdisk command after you reconfigure them to boot from their native partitions. For FreeBSD 3.x systems the procedure is somewhat simpler. If FreeBSD is installed on the same disk as the NT boot partition simply copy /boot/boot1 to C:\BOOTSECT.BSD However, if FreeBSD is installed on a different disk /boot/boot1 will not work, /boot/boot0 is needed. DO NOT SIMPLY COPY /boot/boot0 INSTEAD OF /boot/boot1, YOU WILL OVERWRITE YOUR PARTITION TABLE AND RENDER YOUR COMPUTER UN-BOOTABLE! /boot/boot0 needs to be installed using sysinstall by selecting the FreeBSD boot manager on the screen which asks if you wish to use a boot manager. This is because /boot/boot0 has the partition table area filled with NULL characters but sysinstall copies the partition table before copying /boot/boot0 to the MBR. When the FreeBSD boot manager runs it records the last OS booted by setting the active flag on the partition table entry for that OS and then writes the whole 512-bytes of itself back to the MBR so if you just copy /boot/boot0 to C:\BOOTSECT.BSD then it writes an empty partition table, with the active flag set on one entry, to the MBR. How do I boot FreeBSD and Linux from LILO? If you have FreeBSD and Linux on the same disk, just follow LILO's installation instructions for booting a non-Linux operating system. Very briefly, these are: Boot Linux, and add the following lines to /etc/lilo.conf: other=/dev/hda2 table=/dev/hda label=FreeBSD (the above assumes that your FreeBSD slice is known to Linux as /dev/hda2; tailor to suit your setup). Then, run lilo as root and you should be done. If FreeBSD resides on another disk, you need to add loader=/boot/chain.b to the LILO entry. For example: other=/dev/dab4 table=/dev/dab loader=/boot/chain.b label=FreeBSD In some cases you may need to specify the BIOS drive number to the FreeBSD boot loader to successfully boot off the second disk. For example, if your FreeBSD SCSI disk is probed by BIOS as BIOS disk 1, at the FreeBSD boot loader prompt you need to specify: Boot: 1:da(0,a)/kernel On FreeBSD 2.2.5 and later, you can configure boot(8) to automatically do this for you at boot time. The Linux+FreeBSD mini-HOWTO is a good reference for FreeBSD and Linux interoperability issues. How do I boot FreeBSD and Linux using BootEasy? Install LILO at the start of your Linux boot partition instead of in the Master Boot Record. You can then boot LILO from BootEasy. If you're running Windows-95 and Linux this is recommended anyway, to make it simpler to get Linux booting again if you should need to reinstall Windows95 (which is a Jealous Operating System, and will bear no other Operating Systems in the Master Boot Record). Will a dangerously dedicated disk endanger my health? The installation procedure allows you to chose two different methods in partitioning your harddisk(s). The default way makes it compatible with other operating systems on the same machine, by using fdisk table entries (called slices in FreeBSD), with a FreeBSD slice that employs partitions of its own. Optionally, one can chose to install a boot-selector to switch between the possible operating systems on the disk(s). The alternative uses the entire disk for FreeBSD, and makes no attempt to be compatible with other operating systems. So why it is called dangerous? A disk in this mode doesn't contain what normal PC utilities would consider a valid fdisk table. Depending on how well they have been designed, they might complain at you once they are getting in contact with such a disk, or even worse, they might damage the BSD bootstrap without even asking or notifying you. In addition, the dangerously dedicated disk's layout is known to confuse many BIOSsen, including those from AWARD (eg. as found in HP Netserver and Micronics systems as well as many others) and Symbios/NCR (for the popular 53C8xx range of SCSI controllers). This isn't a complete list, there are more. Symptoms of this confusion include the read error message printed by the FreeBSD bootstrap when it can't find itself, as well as system lockups when booting. Why have this mode at all then? It only saves a few kbytes of disk space, and it can cause real problems for a new installation. Dangerously dedicated mode's origins lie in a desire to avoid one of the most common problems plaguing new FreeBSD installers - matching the BIOS geometry numbers for a disk to the disk itself. Geometry is an outdated concept, but one still at the heart of the PC's BIOS and its interaction with disks. When the FreeBSD installer creates slices, it has to record the location of these slices on the disk in a fashion that corresponds with the way the BIOS expects to find them. If it gets it wrong, you won't be able to boot. Dangerously dedicated mode tries to work around this by making the problem simpler. In some cases, it gets it right. But it's meant to be used as a last-ditch alternative - there are better ways to solve the problem 99 times out of 100. So, how do you avoid the need for DD mode when you're installing? Start by making a note of the geometry that your BIOS claims to be using for your disks. You can arrange to have the kernel print this as it boots by specifying at the boot: prompt, or using boot -v in the loader. Just before the installer starts, the kernel will print a list of BIOS geometries. Don't panic - wait for the installer to start and then use scrollback to read the numbers. Typically the BIOS disk units will be in the same order that FreeBSD lists your disks, first IDE, then SCSI. When you're slicing up your disk, check that the disk geometry displayed in the FDISK screen is correct (ie. it matches the BIOS numbers); if it's wrong, use the g key to fix it. You may have to do this if there's absolutely nothing on the disk, or if the disk has been moved from another system. Note that this is only an issue with the disk that you're going to boot from; FreeBSD will sort itself out just fine with any other disks you may have. Once you've got the BIOS and FreeBSD agreeing about the geometry of the disk, your problems are almost guaranteed to be over, and with no need for DD mode at all. If, however, you are still greeted with the dreaded read error message when you try to boot, it's time to cross your fingers and go for it - there's nothing left to lose. To return a dangerously dedicated disk for normal PC use, there are basically two options. The first is, you write enough NULL bytes over the MBR to make any subsequent installation believe this to be a blank disk. You can do this for example with &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rda0 count=15 Alternatively, the undocumented DOS feature C:\> fdisk /mbr will to install a new master boot record as well, thus clobbering the BSD bootstrap. How can I add more swap space? The best way is to increase the size of your swap partition, or take advantage of this convenient excuse to add another disk. The general rule of thumb is to have around 2x the swap space as you have main memory. However, if you have a very small amount of main memory you may want to configure swap beyond that. It is also a good idea to configure sufficient swap relative to anticipated future memory upgrades so you do not have to futz with your swap configuration later. Adding swap onto a separate disk makes things faster than simply adding swap onto the same disk. As an example, if you are compiling source located on one disk, and the swap is on another disk, this is much faster than both swap and compile on the same disk. This is true for SCSI disks specifically. When you have several disks, configuring a swap partition on each one is usually beneficial, even if you wind up putting swap on a work disk. Typically, each fast disk in your system should have some swap configured. FreeBSD supports up to 4 interleaved swap devices by default. When configuring multiple swap partitions you generally want to make them all about the same size, but people sometimes make their primary swap parition larger in order to accomodate a kernel core dump. Your primary swap partition must be at least as large as main memory in order to be able to accomodate a kernel core. IDE drives are not able to allow access to both drives on the same channel at the same time (FreeBSD doesn't support mode 4, so all IDE disk I/O is programmed). I would still suggest putting your swap on a separate drive however. The drives are so cheap, it is not worth worrying about. Swapping over NFS is only recommended if you do not have a local disk to swap to. Swapping over NFS is slow and inefficient in FreeBSD releases prior to 4.x, but reasonably fast in releases greater or equal to 4.0. Even so, it will be limited to the network bandwidth available and puts an additional burden on the NFS server. Here is an example for 64Mb vn-swap (/usr/swap0, though of course you can use any name that you want). Make sure your kernel was built with the line pseudo-device vn 1 #Vnode driver (turns a file into a device) in your config-file. The GENERIC kernel already contains this. create a vn-device &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV vn0 create a swapfile (/usr/swap0) &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/usr/swap0 bs=1024k count=64 set proper permissions on (/usr/swap0) &prompt.root; chmod 0600 /usr/swap0 enable the swap file in /etc/rc.conf swapfile="/usr/swap0" # Set to name of swapfile if aux swapfile desired. reboot the machine To enable the swap file immediately, type &prompt.root; vnconfig -ce /dev/vn0c /usr/swap0 swap I'm having problems setting up my printer. Please have a look at the Handbook entry on printing. It should cover most of your problem. See the Handbook entry on printing. The keyboard mappings are wrong for my system. The kbdcontrol program has an option to load a keyboard map file. Under /usr/share/syscons/keymaps are a number of map files. Choose the one relevant to your system and load it. &prompt.root; kbdcontrol -l uk.iso Both the /usr/share/syscons/keymaps and the .kbd extension are assumed by kbdcontrol. This can be configured in /etc/sysconfig (or rc.conf). See the appropriate comments in this file. In 2.0.5R and later, everything related to text fonts, keyboard mapping is in /usr/share/examples/syscons. The following mappings are currently supported: Belgian ISO-8859-1 Brazilian 275 keyboard Codepage 850 Brazilian 275 keyboard ISO-8859-1 Danish Codepage 865 Danish ISO-8859-1 French ISO-8859-1 German Codepage 850 German ISO-8859-1 Italian ISO-8859-1 Japanese 106 Japanese 106x Latin American Norwegian ISO-8859-1 Polish ISO-8859-2 (programmer's) Russian Codepage 866 (alternative) Russian koi8-r (shift) Russian koi8-r Spanish ISO-8859-1 Swedish Codepage 850 Swedish ISO-8859-1 Swiss-German ISO-8859-1 United Kingdom Codepage 850 United Kingdom ISO-8859-1 United States of America ISO-8859-1 United States of America dvorak United States of America dvorakx I get messages like: unknown: <PNP0303> can't assign resources on boot These indicate Plug-and-Play devices that the current kernel doesn't have drivers for. They're harmless. If you dislike these messages, the FreeBSD Project will happily accept driver contributions via send-pr. I can't get user quotas to work properly. Don't turn on quotas on /, Put the quota file on the file system that the quotas are to be enforced on. ie: Filesystem Quota file /usr /usr/admin/quotas /home /home/admin/quotas … … What's inappropriate about my ccd? The symptom of this is: &prompt.root; ccdconfig -C ccdconfig: ioctl (CCDIOCSET): /dev/ccd0c: Inappropriate file type or format This usually happens when you are trying to concatenate the c partitions, which default to type unused. The ccd driver requires the underlying partition type to be FS_BSDFFS. Edit the disklabel of the disks you are trying to concatenate and change the types of partitions to 4.2BSD. Why can't I edit the disklabel on my ccd? The symptom of this is: &prompt.root; disklabel ccd0 (it prints something sensible here, so let's try to edit it) &prompt.root; disklabel -e ccd0 (edit, save, quit) disklabel: ioctl DIOCWDINFO: No disk label on disk; use "disklabel -r" to install initial label This is because the disklabel returned by ccd is actually a fake one that is not really on the disk. You can solve this problem by writing it back explicitly, as in: &prompt.root; disklabel ccd0 > /tmp/disklabel.tmp &prompt.root; disklabel -Rr ccd0 /tmp/disklabel.tmp &prompt.root; disklabel -e ccd0 (this will work now) Does FreeBSD support System V IPC primitives? Yes, FreeBSD supports System V-style IPC. This includes shared memory, messages and semaphores. You need to add the following lines to your kernel config to enable them. options SYSVSHM options SYSVSHM # enable shared memory options SYSVSEM # enable for semaphores options SYSVMSG # enable for messaging In FreeBSD 3.2 and later, these options are already part of the GENERIC kernel, which meansthey should already be compiled into your system. Recompile and install your kernel. How do I use sendmail for mail delivery with UUCP? The sendmail configuration that ships with FreeBSD is suited for sites that connect directly to the Internet. Sites that wish to exchange their mail via UUCP must install another sendmail configuration file. Tweaking /etc/sendmail.cf manually is considered something for purists. Sendmail version 8 comes with a new approach of generating config files via some m4 preprocessing, where the actual hand-crafted configuration is on a higher abstraction level. You should use the configuration files under /usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail/cf If you didn't install your system with full sources, the sendmail config stuff has been broken out into a separate source distribution tarball just for you. Assuming you've got your CD-ROM mounted, do: &prompt.root; cd /cdrom/src &prompt.root; cat scontrib.?? | tar xzf - -C /usr/src contrib/sendmail Don't panic, this is only a few hundred kilobytes in size. The file README in the cf directory can serve as a basic introduction to m4 configuration. For UUCP delivery, you are best advised to use the mailertable feature. This constitutes a database that sendmail can use to base its routing decision upon. First, you have to create your .mc file. The directory /usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail/cf/cf is the home of these files. Look around, there are already a few examples. Assuming you have named your file foo.mc, all you need to do in order to convert it into a valid sendmail.cf is: &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail/cf/cf &prompt.root; make foo.cf &prompt.root; cp foo.cf /etc/sendmail.cf A typical .mc file might look like: include(`../m4/cf.m4') VERSIONID(`Your version number') OSTYPE(bsd4.4) FEATURE(nodns) FEATURE(nocanonify) FEATURE(mailertable) define(`UUCP_RELAY', your.uucp.relay) define(`UUCP_MAX_SIZE', 200000) MAILER(local) MAILER(smtp) MAILER(uucp) Cw your.alias.host.name Cw youruucpnodename.UUCP The nodns and nocanonify features will prevent any usage of the DNS during mail delivery. The UUCP_RELAY clause is needed for bizarre reasons, don't ask. Simply put an Internet hostname there that is able to handle .UUCP pseudo-domain addresses; most likely, you will enter the mail relay of your ISP there. Once you've got this, you need this file called /etc/mailertable. A typical example of this gender again: # # makemap hash /etc/mailertable.db < /etc/mailertable # horus.interface-business.de uucp-dom:horus .interface-business.de uucp-dom:if-bus interface-business.de uucp-dom:if-bus .heep.sax.de smtp8:%1 horus.UUCP uucp-dom:horus if-bus.UUCP uucp-dom:if-bus . uucp-dom: As you can see, this is part of a real-life file. The first three lines handle special cases where domain-addressed mail should not be sent out to the default route, but instead to some UUCP neighbor in order to shortcut the delivery path. The next line handles mail to the local Ethernet domain that can be delivered using SMTP. Finally, the UUCP neighbors are mentioned in the .UUCP pseudo-domain notation, to allow for a uucp-neighbor !recipient override of the default rules. The last line is always a single dot, matching everything else, with UUCP delivery to a UUCP neighbor that serves as your universal mail gateway to the world. All of the node names behind the uucp-dom: keyword must be valid UUCP neighbors, as you can verify using the command uuname. As a reminder that this file needs to be converted into a DBM database file before being usable, the command line to accomplish this is best placed as a comment at the top of the mailertable. You always have to execute this command each time you change your mailertable. Final hint: if you are uncertain whether some particular mail routing would work, remember the option to sendmail. It starts sendmail in address test mode; simply enter 0 , followed by the address you wish to test for the mail routing. The last line tells you the used internal mail agent, the destination host this agent will be called with, and the (possibly translated) address. Leave this mode by typing Control-D. &prompt.user; sendmail -bt ADDRESS TEST MODE (ruleset 3 NOT automatically invoked) Enter <ruleset> <address> > 0 foo@interface-business.de rewrite: ruleset 0 input: foo @ interface-business . de ... rewrite: ruleset 0 returns: $# uucp-dom $@ if-bus $: foo \ < @ interface-business . de > > ^D How do I set up mail with a dialup connection to the 'net? If you've got a statically assigned IP number, you should not need to adjust anything from the default. Set your host name up as your assigned internet name and sendmail will do the rest. If you've got a dynamically assigned IP number and use a dialup ppp connection to the internet, you will probably be given a mailbox on your ISPs mail server. Lets assume your ISPs domain is myISP.com, and that your user name is user. Lets also assume you've called your machine bsd.home and that your ISP has told you that you may use relay.myISP.com as a mail relay. In order to retrieve mail from your mailbox, you'll need to install a retrieval agent. Fetchmail is a good choice as it supports many different protocols. Usually, POP3 will be provided by your ISP. If you've chosen to use user-ppp, you can automatically fetch your mail when a connection to the 'net is established with the following entry in /etc/ppp/ppp.linkup: MYADDR: !bg su user -c fetchmail If you are using sendmail (as shown below) to deliver mail to non-local accounts, put the command !bg su user -c "sendmail -q" after the above shown entry. This forces sendmail to process your mailqueue as soon as the connection to the 'net is established. I'm assuming that you have an account for user on bsd.home. In the home directory of user on bsd.home, create a .fetchmailrc file: poll myISP.com protocol pop3 fetchall pass MySecret Needless to say, this file should not be readable by anyone except user as it contains the password MySecret. In order to send mail with the correct from: header, you must tell sendmail to use user@myISP.com rather than user@bsd.home. You may also wish to tell sendmail to send all mail via relay.myISP.com, allowing quicker mail transmission. The following .mc file should suffice: VERSIONID(`bsd.home.mc version 1.0') OSTYPE(bsd4.4)dnl FEATURE(nouucp)dnl MAILER(local)dnl MAILER(smtp)dnl Cwlocalhost Cwbsd.home MASQUERADE_AS(`myISP.com')dnl FEATURE(allmasquerade)dnl FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)dnl FEATURE(nocanonify)dnl FEATURE(nodns)dnl define(`SMART_HOST', `relay.myISP.com') Dmbsd.home define(`confDOMAIN_NAME',`bsd.home')dnl define(`confDELIVERY_MODE',`deferred')dnl Refer to the previous section for details of how to turn this .mc file into a sendmail.cf file. Also, don't forget to restart sendmail after updating sendmail.cf. What's this UID 0 toor account? Have I been compromised? Don't worry. toor is an alternative superuser account (toor is root spelt backwards). Previously it was created when the &man.bash.1; shell was installed but now it is created by default. It is intended to be used with a non-standard shell so you don't have to change root's default shell. This is important as shells which aren't part of the base distribution (for example a shell installed from ports or packages) are likely be to be installed in /usr/local/bin which, by default, resides on a different filesystem. If root's shell is located in /usr/local/bin and /usr (or whatever filesystem contains /usr/local/bin) isn't mounted for some reason, root won't be able to log in to fix a problem (although if you reboot into single user mode you'll be prompted for the path to a shell). Some people use toor for day-to-day root tasks with a non-standard shell, leaving root, with a standard shell, for single user mode or emergencies. By default you can't log in using toor as it doesn't have a password, so log in as root and set a password for toor if you want to use it. Eek! I forgot the root password! Don't Panic! Simply restart the system, type boot -s at the Boot: prompt (just -s for FreeBSD releases before 3.2) to enter Single User mode. At the question about the shell to use, hit ENTER. You'll be dropped to a &prompt.root; prompt. Enter mount -u / to remount your root filesystem read/write, then run mount -a to remount all the filesystems. Run passwd root to change the root password then run exit to continue booting. How do I keep Control-Alt-Delete from rebooting the system? If you are using syscons (the default console driver) in FreeBSD 2.2.7-RELEASE or later, build and install a new kernel with the line options SC_DISABLE_REBOOT in the configuration file. If you use the PCVT console driver in FreeBSD 2.2.5-RELEASE or later, use the following kernel configuration line instead: options PCVT_CTRL_ALT_DEL For older versions of FreeBSD, edit the keymap you are using for the console and replace the boot keywords with nop. The default keymap is /usr/share/syscons/keymaps/us.iso.kbd. You may have to instruct /etc/rc.conf to load this keymap explicitly for the change to take effect. Of course if you are using an alternate keymap for your country, you should edit that one instead. How do I reformat DOS text files to UNIX ones? Simply use this perl command: &prompt.user; perl -i.bak -npe 's/\r\n/\n/g' file ... file is the file(s) to process. The modification is done in-place, with the original file stored with a .bak extension. Alternatively you can use the tr command: &prompt.user; tr -d '\r' < dos-text-file > unix-file dos-text-file is the file containing DOS text while unix-file will contain the converted output. This can be quite a bit faster than using perl. How do I kill processes by name? Use killall. Why is su bugging me about not being in root's ACL? The error comes from the Kerberos distributed authentication system. The problem isn't fatal but annoying. You can either run su with the -K option, or uninstall Kerberos as described in the next question. How do I uninstall Kerberos? To remove Kerberos from the system, reinstall the bin distribution for the release you are running. If you have the CDROM, you can mount the cd (we'll assume on /cdrom) and run &prompt.root; cd /cdrom/bin &prompt.root; ./install.sh Alternately, you can remove all "MAKE_KERBEROS" options from /etc/make.conf and rebuild world. How do I add pseudoterminals to the system? If you have lots of telnet, ssh, X, or screen users, you'll probably run out of pseudoterminals. Here's how to add more: Build and install a new kernel with the line pseudo-device pty 256 in the configuration file. Run the commands &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV pty{1,2,3,4,5,6,7} to make 256 device nodes for the new terminals. Edit /etc/ttys and add lines for each of the 256 terminals. They should match the form of the existing entries, i.e. they look like ttyqc none network The order of the letter designations is tty[pqrsPQRS][0-9a-v], using a regular expression. Reboot the system with the new kernel and you're ready to go. I can't create the snd0 device! There is no snd device. The name is used as a shorthand for the various devices that make up the FreeBSD sound driver, such as mixer, sequencer, and dsp. To create these devices you should &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV snd0 How do I re-read /etc/rc.conf and re-start /etc/rc without a reboot? Go into single user mode and than back to multi user mode. On the console do: &prompt.root; shutdown now (Note: without -r or -h) &prompt.root; return &prompt.root; exit What is a sandbox? Sandbox is a security term. It can mean two things: A process which is placed inside a set of virtual walls that are designed to prevent someone who breaks into the process from being able to break into the wider system. The process is said to be able to play inside the walls. That is, nothing the process does in regards to executing code is supposed to be able to breech the walls so you do not have to do a detailed audit of its code to be able to say certain things about its security. The walls might be a userid, for example. This is the definition used in the security and named man pages. Take the ntalk service, for example (see /etc/inetd.conf). This service used to run as userid root. Now it runs as userid tty. The tty user is a sandbox designed to make it more difficult for someone who has successfully hacked into the system via ntalk from being able to hack beyond that user id. A process which is placed inside a simulation of the machine. This is more hard-core. Basically it means that someone who is able to break into the process may believe that he can break into the wider machine but is, in fact, only breaking into a simulation of that machine and not modifying any real data. The most common way to accomplish this is to build a simulated environment in a subdirectory and then run the processes in that directory chroot'd (i.e. / for that process is this directory, not the real / of the system). Another common use is to mount an underlying filesystem read-only and then create a filesystem layer on top of it that gives a process a seemingly writeable view into that filesystem. The process may believe it is able to write to those files, but only the process sees the effects - other processes in the system do not, necessarily. An attempt is made to make this sort of sandbox so transparent that the user (or hacker) does not realize that he is sitting in it. UNIX implements two core sanboxes. One is at the process level, and one is at the userid level. Every UNIX process is completely firewalled off from every other UNIX process. One process can not modify the address space of another. This is unlike Windows where a process can easily overwrite the address space of any other, leading to a crash. A UNIX process is owned by a patricular userid. If the userid is not the root user, it serves to firewall the process off from processes owned by other users. The userid is also used to firewall off on-disk data. What is securelevel? The securelevel is a security mechanism implemented in the kernel. Basically, when the securelevel is positive, the kernel restricts certain tasks; not even the superuser (i.e., root) is allowed to do them. At the time of this writing, the securelevel mechanism is capable of, among other things, limiting the ability to, unset certain file flags, such as schg (the system immutable flag), write to kernel memory via /dev/mem and /dev/kmem, load kernel modules, and alter &man.ipfirewall.4; rules. To check the status of the securelevel on a running system, simply execute the following command: &prompt.root; sysctl kern.securelevel The output will contain the name of the &man.sysctl.8; variable (in this case, kern.securelevel) and a number. The latter is the current value of the securelevel. If it is positive (i.e., greater than 0), at least some of the securelevel's protections are enabled. You cannot lower the securelevel of a running system; being able to do that would defeat its purpose. If you need to do a task that requires that the securelevel be non-positive (e.g., an installworld or changing the date), you will have to change the securelevel setting in /etc/rc.conf (you want to look for the kern_securelevel and kern_securelevel_enable variables) and reboot. For more information on securelevel and the specific things all the levels do, please consult the &man.init.8; manual page. Securelevel is not a silver bullet; it has many known deficiencies. More often than not, it provides a false sense of security. One of its biggest problems is that in order for it to be at all effective, all files used in the boot process up until the securelevel is set must be protected. If an attacker can get the system to execute their code prior to the securelevel being set (which happens quite late in the boot process since some things the system must do at start-up cannot be done at an elevated securelevel), its protections are invalidated. While this task of protecting all files used in the boot process is not technically impossible, if it is achieved, system maintenance will become a nightmare since one would have to take the system down, at least to single-user mode, to modify a configuration file. This point and others are often discussed on the mailing lists, particuarly freebsd-security. Please search the archives here for an extensive discussion. Some people are hopeful that securelevel will soon go away in favor of a more fine-grained mechanism, but things are still hazy in this respect. Consider yourself warned. How do I let ordinary users mount floppies, CDROMs and other removable media? Ordinary users can be permitted to mount devices. Here is how: As root set the sysctl variable vfs.usermount to 1. &prompt.root; sysctl -w vfs.usermount=1 As root assign the appropriate permissions to the block device associated with the removable media. For example, to allow users to mount the first floppy drive, use: &prompt.root; chmod 666 /dev/fd0 To allow users in the group operator to mount the cdrom drive, use: &prompt.root; chgrp operator /dev/cd0c &prompt.root; chmod 640 /dev/cd0c Finally, add the line vfs.usermount=1 to the file /etc/sysctl.conf so that it is reset at system boot time. All users can now mount the floppy /dev/fd0 onto a directory that they own: &prompt.user; mkdir ~/my-mount-point &prompt.user; mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 ~/my-mount-point Users in group operator can now mount the cdrom /dev/cd0c onto a directory that they own: &prompt.user; mkdir ~/my-mount-point &prompt.user; mount -t msdos /dev/cd0c ~/my-mount-point Unmounting the device is simple: &prompt.user; umount ~/my-mount-point Enabling vfs.usermount, however, has negative security implications. A better way to access MSDOS formatted media is to use the mtools package in the ports collection. How do I move my system over to my huge new disk? The best way is to reinstall the OS on the new disk, then move the user data over. This is highly recommended if you've been tracking -stable for more than one release, or have updated a release instead of installing a new one. You can install booteasy on both disks with &man.boot0cfg.8;, and dual boot them until you are happy with the new configuration. Skip the next paragraph to find out how to move the data after doing this. Should you decide not to do a fresh install, you need to partition and label the new disk with either /stand/sysinstall, or &man.fdisk.8; and &man.disklabel.8;. You should also install booteasy on both disks with &man.boot0cfg.8;, so that you can dual boot to the old or new system after the copying is done. See the formatting-media tutorial for details on this process. Now you've got the new disk set up, and are ready to move the data. Unfortunately, you can't just blindly copy the data. Things like device files (in /dev) and symbolic links tend to screw that up. You need to use tools that understand these things, which means &man.dump.8; and &man.tar.1;. I recommend doing the data moves in single user mode, but it's not required. You should never use anything but &man.dump.8; and &man.restore.8; to move the root file system. The &man.tar.1; command may work - then again, it may not. You should also use &man.dump.8; and &man.restore.8; if you are moving a single partition to another empty partition. The sequence of steps to use dump to move a partitions data to a new partition is: newfs the new partition. mount it on a temporary mount point. cd to that directory. dump the old partition, piping output to the new one. For example, if you are going to move root to /dev/ad1s1a, with /mnt as the temporary mount point, it's: &prompt.root; newfs /dev/ad1s1a &prompt.root; mount /dev/ad1s1a &prompt.root; cd /mnt &prompt.root; dump 0uaf - / | restore xf - If you are going to rearrange your partitions - say, splitting one into two, or combing two into one, you may find yourself needing to move everything under a subdirectory to a new location. Since &man.dump.8; works with file systems, it can't do this. So you use &man.tar.1;. The general command to move /old to /new for &man.tar.1; is: &prompt.root; (cd /old; tar cf - .) | (cd /new; tar xpf -) If /old has file systems mounted on that, and you don't want to move that data or unmount them, you just add the 'l' flag to the first &man.tar.1;: &prompt.root; (cd /old; tar clf - .) | (cd /new; tar xpf -). You might prefer cpio(1), pax(1) or cpdup (in ports/sysutils/cpdup) to tar. I tried to update my system to the latest -STABLE, but got -RC or -BETA! What's going on? Short answer: it's just a name. RC stands for Release Candidate. It signifies that a release is imminent. In FreeBSD, -BETA is typically synonymous with the code freeze before a release. Long answer: FreeBSD derives its releases from one of two places. Major, dot-zero, releases, such as 3.0-RELEASE and 4.0-RELEASE, are branched from the head of the development stream, commonly referred to as -CURRENT. Minor releases, such as 3.1-RELEASE or 4.2-RELEASE, are snapshots of the active -STABLE branch. When a release is about to be made, the branch from which it will be derived from has to undergo a certain process. Part of this process is a code freeze. When a code freeze is initiated, the name of the branch is changed to reflect that it's about to become a release. For example, if the branch used to be called 4.0-STABLE, its name will be changed to 4.1-BETA to signify the code freeze and signify that extra pre-release testing should be happening. Bug fixes can still be committed to be part of the release. When the source code is in shape for the release the name will be chagned to 4.1-RC to signify that a release is about to be made from it. Once in the RC stage, only the most critical bugs found can be fixed. Once the release, 4.1-RELEASE in this example, has been made, the branch will be renamed to 4.1-STABLE. I tried to install a new kernel, and the chflags failed. How do I get around this? Short answer: You're probably at security level greater than 0. Reboot directly to single user mode to install the kernel. Long answer: FreeBSD disallows changing system flags at security levels greater than 0. You can check your security level with the command: &prompt.root; sysctl kern.securelevel You cannot lower the security level; you have to boot to single mode to install the kernel, or change the security in /etc/rc.conf then reboot. See the &man.init.8; man page for details on securelevel, and see /etc/defaults/rc.conf and the &man.rc.conf.5; man page for more information on rc.conf. I can't change the time on my system by more than one second! How do I get around this? Short answer: You're probably at security level greater than 1. Reboot directly to single user mode to change the date. Long answer: FreeBSD disallows changing the time by more that one second at security levels greater than 1. You can check your security level with the command: &prompt.root; sysctl kern.securelevel You cannot lower the security level; you have to boot to single mode to change the date, or change the security level in /etc/rc.conf then reboot. See the &man.init.8; man page for details on securelevel, and see /etc/defaults/rc.conf and the &man.rc.conf.5; man page for more information on rc.conf. There is a memory leak in &man.rpc.statd.8;! It is using 256 Mbytes of memory! No, there is no memory leak, and it's not using 256 Mbytes of memory. It simply likes to (i.e., always does) map an obscene amount of memory into its address space for convenience. There is nothing terribly wrong with this from a technical standpoint; it just throws off things like &man.top.1; and &man.ps.1;. &man.rpc.statd.8; maps its status file (resident on /var) into its address space; to save worrying about remapping it later when it needs to grow, it maps it with a generious size. This is very evident from the source code, where one can see that the length argument to &man.mmap.2; is 0x10000000, or one sixteenth of the address space on an IA32, or exactly 256MB. Why can't I unset the schg file flag? You're running at an elevated (i.e., greater than 0) securelevel. Lower the securelevel and try again. For more information, see the FAQ entry on securelevel and the &man.init.8; manual page. The X Window System and Virtual Consoles I want to run X, how do I go about it? The easiest way is to simply specify that you want to run X during the installation process. Then read and follow the documentation on the xf86config tool, which assists you in configuring XFree86(tm) for your particular graphics card/mouse/etc. You may also wish to investigate the Xaccel server. See the section on Xi Graphics or Metro Link for more details. I tried to run X, but I get an KDENABIO failed (Operation not permitted) error when I type startx. What do I do now? Your system is running at a raised securelevel, isn't it? It is, indeed, impossible to start X at a raised securelevel. To see why, look at the &man.init.8; man page. So the question is what else you should do instead, and you basically have two choices: set your securelevel back down to zero (usually from /etc/rc.conf), or run &man.xdm.1; at boot time (before the securelevel is raised). See for more information about running &man.xdm.1; at boot time. Why doesn't my mouse work with X? If you are using syscons (the default console driver), you can configure FreeBSD to support a mouse pointer on each virtual screen. In order to avoid conflicting with X, syscons supports a virtual device called /dev/sysmouse. All mouse events received from the real mouse device are written to the sysmouse device via moused. If you wish to use your mouse on one or more virtual consoles, and use X, see and set up moused. Then edit /etc/XF86Config and make sure you have the following lines. Section Pointer Protocol "SysMouse" Device "/dev/sysmouse" ..... The above example is for XFree86 3.3.2 or later. For earlier versions, the Protocol should be MouseSystems. Some people prefer to use /dev/mouse under X. To make this work, /dev/mouse should be linked to /dev/sysmouse: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; rm -f mouse &prompt.root; ln -s sysmouse mouse My mouse has a fancy wheel. Can I use it in X? Yes. But you need to customize X client programs. See Colas Nahaboo's web page (http://www.inria.fr/koala/colas/mouse-wheel-scroll/) . If you want to use the imwheel program, just follow these simple steps. Translate the Wheel Events The imwheel program works by translating mouse button 4 and mouse button 5 events into key events. Thus, you have to get the mouse driver to translate mouse wheel events to button 4 and 5 events. There are two ways of doing this, the first way is to have &man.moused.8; do the translation. The second way is for the X server itself to do the event translation. Using &man.moused.8; to Translate Wheel Events To have &man.moused.8; perform the event translations, simply add to the command line used to start &man.moused.8;. For example, if you normally start &man.moused.8; via moused -p /dev/psm0 you would start it by entering moused -p /dev/psm0 -z 4 instead. If you start &man.moused.8; automatically during bootup via /etc/rc.conf, you can simply add to the moused_flags variable in /etc/rc.conf. You now need to tell X that you have a 5 button mouse. To do this, simply add the line Buttons 5 to the Pointer section of /etc/XF86Config. For example, you might have the following Pointer section in /etc/XF86Config. <quote>Pointer</quote> Section for Wheeled Mouse in XFree86 3.3.x series XF86Config with moused Translation Section "Pointer" Protocol "SysMouse" Device "/dev/sysmouse" Buttons 5 EndSection <quote>InputDevice</quote> Section for Wheeled Mouse in XFree86 4.x series XF86Config with automatic protocol recognition and button mapping Translation Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse1" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/psm0" Option "Buttons" "5" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection <quote>.emacs</quote> example for naive page scrolling with Wheeled Mouse ;; wheel mouse (global-set-key [mouse-4] 'scroll-down) (global-set-key [mouse-5] 'scroll-up) Using Your X Server to Translate the Wheel Events If you aren't running &man.moused.8;, or if you don't want &man.moused.8; to translate your wheel events, you can have the X server do the event translation instead. This requires a couple of modifications to your /etc/XF86Config file. First, you need to choose the proper protocol for your mouse. Most wheeled mice use the IntelliMouse protocol. However, XFree86 does support other protocols, such as MouseManPlusPS/2 for the Logitech MouseMan+ mice. Once you have chosen the protocol you will use, you need to add a Protocol line to the Pointer section. Secondly, you need to tell the X server to remap wheel scroll events to mouse buttons 4 and 5. This is done with the ZAxisMapping option. For example, if you aren't using &man.moused.8;, and you have an IntelliMouse attached to the PS/2 mouse port you would use the following in /etc/XF86Config. <quote>Pointer</quote> Section for Wheeled Mouse in <filename>XF86Config</filename> with X Server Translation Section "Pointer" Protocol "IntelliMouse" Device "/dev/psm0" ZAxisMapping 4 5 EndSection Install imwheel Next, install imwheel from the Ports collection. It can be found in the x11 category. This program will map the wheel events from your mouse into keyboard events. For example, it might send Page Up to a program when you scroll the wheel forwards. Imwheel uses a configuration file to map the wheel events to keypresses so that it can send different keys to different applications. The default imwheel configuration file is installed in /usr/X11R6/etc/imwheelrc. You can copy it to ~/.imwheelrc and then edit it if you wish to customize imwheel's configuration. The format of the configuration file is documented in &man.imwheel.1;. Configure Emacs to Work with Imwheel (optional) If you use emacs or Xemacs, then you need to add a small section to your ~/.emacs file. For emacs, add the following: <application>Emacs</application> Configuration for <application>Imwheel</application> ;;; For imwheel (setq imwheel-scroll-interval 3) (defun imwheel-scroll-down-some-lines () (interactive) (scroll-down imwheel-scroll-interval)) (defun imwheel-scroll-up-some-lines () (interactive) (scroll-up imwheel-scroll-interval)) (global-set-key [?\M-\C-\)] 'imwheel-scroll-up-some-lines) (global-set-key [?\M-\C-\(] 'imwheel-scroll-down-some-lines) ;;; end imwheel section For Xemacs, add the following to your ~/.emacs file instead: <application>Xemacs</application> Configuration for <application>Imwheel</application> ;;; For imwheel (setq imwheel-scroll-interval 3) (defun imwheel-scroll-down-some-lines () (interactive) (scroll-down imwheel-scroll-interval)) (defun imwheel-scroll-up-some-lines () (interactive) (scroll-up imwheel-scroll-interval)) (define-key global-map [(control meta \))] 'imwheel-scroll-up-some-lines) (define-key global-map [(control meta \()] 'imwheel-scroll-down-some-lines) ;;; end imwheel section Run Imwheel You can just type imwheel in an xterm to start it up once it is installed. It will background itself and take effect immediately. If you want to always use imwheel, simply add it to your .xinitrc or .xsession file. You can safely ignore any warnings imwheel displays about PID files. Those warnings only apply to the Linux version of imwheel. X Window menus and dialog boxes don't work right! Try turning off the Num Lock key. If your Num Lock key is on by default at boot-time, you may add the following line in the Keyboard section of the XF86Config file. # Let the server do the NumLock processing. This should only be # required when using pre-R6 clients ServerNumLock What is a virtual console and how do I make more? Virtual consoles, put simply, enable you to have several simultaneous sessions on the same machine without doing anything complicated like setting up a network or running X. When the system starts, it will display a login prompt on the monitor after displaying all the boot messages. You can then type in your login name and password and start working (or playing!) on the first virtual console. At some point, you will probably wish to start another session, perhaps to look at documentation for a program you are running or to read your mail while waiting for an FTP transfer to finish. Just do Alt-F2 (hold down the Alt key and press the F2 key), and you will find a login prompt waiting for you on the second virtual console! When you want to go back to the original session, do Alt-F1. The default FreeBSD installation has three virtual consoles enabled (8 starting with 3.3-RELEASE), and Alt-F1, Alt-F2, and Alt-F3 will switch between these virtual consoles. To enable more of them, edit /etc/ttys and add entries for ttyv4 to ttyvc after the comment on Virtual terminals: # Edit the existing entry for ttyv3 in /etc/ttys and change # "off" to "on". ttyv3 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyv4 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyv5 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyv6 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyv7 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyv8 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyv9 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyva "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure ttyvb "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure Use as many or as few as you want. The more virtual terminals you have, the more resources that are used; this can be important if you have 8MB RAM or less. You may also want to change the secure to insecure. If you want to run an X server you must leave at least one virtual terminal unused (or turned off) for it to use. That is to say that if you want to have a login prompt pop up for all twelve of your Alt-function keys, you're out of luck - you can only do this for eleven of them if you also want to run an X server on the same machine. The easiest way to disable a console is by turning it off. For example, if you had the full 12 terminal allocation mentioned above and you wanted to run X, you would change settings for virtual terminal 12 from: ttyvb "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure to: ttyvb "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure If your keyboard has only ten function keys, you would end up with: ttyv9 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure ttyva "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure ttyvb "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure (You could also just delete these lines.) Once you have edited /etc/ttys, the next step is to make sure that you have enough virtualterminal devices. The easiest way to do this is: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV vty12 Next, the easiest (and cleanest) way to activate the virtual consoles is to reboot. However, if you really don't want to reboot, you can just shut down the X Window system and execute (as root): &prompt.root; kill -HUP 1 It's imperative that you completely shut down X Window if it is running, before running this command. If you don't, your system will probably appear to hang/lock up after executing the kill command. How do I access the virtual consoles from X? Use Ctrl Alt Fn to switch back to a virtual console. Ctrl Alt F1 would return you to the first virtual console. Once you are back to a text console, you can then use Alt Fn as normal to move between them. To return to the X session, you must switch to the virtual console running X. If you invoked X from the command line, (e.g., using startx) then the X session will attach to the next unused virtual console, not the text console from which it was invoked. If you have eight active virtual terminals then X will be running on the ninth, and you would use Alt F9 to return. How do I start XDM on boot? There are two schools of thought on how to start xdm. One school starts xdm from /etc/ttys using the supplied example, while the other simply runs xdm from rc.local or from a X.sh script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d. Both are equally valid, and one may work in situations where the other doesn't. In both cases the result is the same: X will popup a graphical login: prompt. The ttys method has the advantage of documenting which vty X will start on and passing the responsibility of restarting the X server on logout to init. The rc.local method makes it easy to kill xdm if there is a problem starting the X server. If loaded from rc.local, xdm should be started without any arguments (i.e., as a daemon). xdm must start AFTER getty runs, or else getty and xdm will conflict, locking out the console. The best way around this is to have the script sleep 10 seconds or so then launch xdm. If you are to start xdm from /etc/ttys, there still is a chance of conflict between xdm and getty. One way to avoid this is to add the vt number in the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers file. :0 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X vt4 The above example will direct the X server to run in /dev/ttyv3. Note the number is offset by one. The X server counts the vty from one, whereas the FreeBSD kernel numbers the vty from zero. When I run xconsole, I get Couldn't open console. If you start X with startx, the permissions on /dev/console will not get changed, resulting in things like xterm -C and xconsolenot working. This is because of the way console permissions are set by default. On a multi-user system, one doesn't necessarily want just any user to be able to write on the system console. For users who are logging directly onto a machine with a VTY, the fbtab file exists to solve such problems. In a nutshell, make sure an uncommented line of the form /dev/ttyv0 0600 /dev/console is in /etc/fbtab and it will ensure that whomever logs in on /dev/ttyv0 will own the console. I used to run XFree86 as a regular user, but now when I start it it says I must be root! All X servers need to be run as root in order to get direct access to your video hardware. Older versions of XFree86 (<= 3.3.6) installed all bundled servers to be automatically run as root (setuid to root). This is obviously a security hazard because X servers are large, complicated programs. Newer versions of XFree86 do not install the servers setuid to root for just this reason. Obviously, running an X server as the root user is not acceptable, nor a good idea security-wise. There are two ways to be able to use X as a regular user. The first is to use xdm or another display manager (e.g., kdm); the second is to use the Xwrapper. xdm is a daemon that handles graphical logins. It is usually started at boot time, and is responsible for authenticating users and starting their sessions; it is essentially the graphical counterpart of getty and login. For more information on xdm see the XFree86 documentation, and the the FAQ entry on it. Xwrapper is the X server wrapper; it is a small utility to enable one to manually run an X server while maintaining reasonable safety. It performs some sanity checks on the command line arguments given, and if they pass, runs the appropriate X server. If you do not want to run a display manger for whatever reason, this is for you. If you have installed the complete ports collection, you can find the port in /usr/ports/x11/wrapper. My PS/2 mouse doesn't behave properly under X. Your mouse and the mouse driver may have somewhat become out of synchronization. In versions 2.2.5 and earlier, switching away from X to a virtual terminal and getting back to X again may make them re-synchronized. If the problem occurs often, you may add the following option in your kernel configuration file and recompile it. options PSM_CHECKSYNC See the section on building a kernel if you've no experience with building kernels. With this option, there should be less chance of synchronization problem between the mouse and the driver. If, however, you still see the problem, click any mouse button while holding the mouse still to re-synchronize the mouse and the driver. Note that unfortunately this option may not work with all the systems and voids the tap feature of the ALPS GlidePoint device attached to the PS/2 mouse port. In versions 2.2.6 and later, synchronization check is done in a slightly better way and is standard in the PS/2 mouse driver. It should even work with GlidePoint. (As the check code has become a standard feature, PSM_CHECKSYNC option is not available in these versions.) However, in rare case the driver may erroneously report synchronization problem and you may see the kernel message: psmintr: out of sync (xxxx != yyyy) and find your mouse doesn't seem to work properly. If this happens, disable the synchronization check code by setting the driver flags for the PS/2 mouse driver to 0x100. Enter UserConfig by giving the option at the boot prompt: boot: -c Then, in the UserConfig command line, type: UserConfig> flags psm0 0x100 UserConfig> quit My PS/2 mouse from MouseSystems doesn't seem to work. There have been some reports that certain model of PS/2 mouse from MouseSystems works only if it is put into the high resolution mode. Otherwise, the mouse cursor may jump to the upper-left corner of the screen every so often. Unfortunately there is no workaround for versions 2.0.X and 2.1.X. In versions 2.2 through 2.2.5, apply the following patch to /sys/i386/isa/psm.c and rebuild the kernel. See the section on building a kernel if you've no experience with building kernels. @@ -766,6 +766,8 @@ if (verbose >= 2) log(LOG_DEBUG, "psm%d: SET_DEFAULTS return code:%04x\n", unit, i); + set_mouse_resolution(sc->kbdc, PSMD_RES_HIGH); + #if 0 set_mouse_scaling(sc->kbdc); /* 1:1 scaling */ set_mouse_mode(sc->kbdc); /* stream mode */ In versions 2.2.6 or later, specify the flags 0x04 to the PS/2 mouse driver to put the mouse into the high resolution mode. Enter UserConfig by giving the option at the boot prompt: boot: -c Then, in the UserConfig command line, type: UserConfig> flags psm0 0x04 UserConfig> quit See the previous section for another possible cause of mouse problems. When building an X app, imake can't find Imake.tmpl. Where is it? Imake.tmpl is part of the Imake package, a standard X application building tool. Imake.tmpl, as well as several header files that are required to build X apps, is contained in the X prog distribution. You can install this from sysinstall or manually from the X distribution files. How do I reverse the mouse buttons? Run the command xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1" from your .xinitrc or .xsession. How do I install a splash screen and where do I find them? Just prior to the release of FreeBSD 3.1, a new feature was added to allow the display of splash screens during the boot messages. The splash screens currently must be a 256 color bitmap (*.BMP) or ZSoft PCX (*.PCX) file. In addition, they must have a resolution of 320x200 or less to work on standard VGA adapters. If you compile VESA support into your kernel, then you can use larger bitmaps up to 1024x768. Note that VESA support requires the VM86 kernel option to be compiled into the kernel. The actual VESA support can either be compiled directly into the kernel with the VESA kernel config option or by loading the VESA kld module during bootup. To use a splash screen, you need to modify the startup files that control the boot process for FreeBSD. The files for this changed prior to the release of FreeBSD 3.2, so there are now two ways of loading a splash screen: FreeBSD 3.1 The first step is to find a bitmap version of your splash screen. Release 3.1 only supports Windows bitmap splash screens. Once you've found your splash screen of choice copy it to /boot/splash.bmp. Next, you need to have a /boot/loader.rc file that contains the following lines: load kernel load -t splash_image_data /boot/splash.bmp load splash_bmp autoboot FreeBSD 3.2+ In addition to adding support for PCX splash screens, FreeBSD 3.2 includes a nicer way of configuring the boot process. If you wish, you can use the method listed above for FreeBSD 3.1. If you do and you want to use PCX, replace splash_bmp with splash_pcx. If, on the other hand, you want to use the newer boot configuration, you need to create a /boot/loader.rc file that contains the following lines: include /boot/loader.4th start and a /boot/loader.conf that contains the following: splash_bmp_load="YES" bitmap_load="YES" This assumes you are using /boot/splash.bmp for your splash screen. If you'd rather use a PCX file, copy it to /boot/splash.pcx, create a /boot/loader.rc as instructed above, and create a /boot/loader.conf that contains: splash_pcx_load="YES" bitmap_load="YES" bitmap_name="/boot/splash.pcx" Now all you need is a splash screen. For that you can surf on over to the gallery at http://www.baldwin.cx/splash/. Can I use the Windows(tm) keys on my keyboard in X? Yes. All you need to do is use &man.xmodmap.1; to define what function you wish them to perform. Assuming all Windows(tm) keyboards are standard then the keycodes for the 3 keys are 115 - Windows(tm) key, between the left-hand Ctrl and Alt keys 116 - Windows(tm) key, to the right of the Alt-Gr key 117 - Menu key, to the left of the right-hand Ctrl key To have the left Windows(tm) key print a comma, try this. &prompt.root; xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = comma" You will probably have to re-start your window manager to see the result. To have the Windows(tm) key-mappings enabled automatically everytime you start X either put the xmodmap commands in your ~/.xinitrc file or, preferably, create a file ~/.xmodmaprc and include the xmodmap options, one per line, then add the line xmodmap $HOME/.xmodmaprc to your ~/.xinitrc. For example, I have mapped the 3 keys to be F13, F14, and F15 respectively. This makes it easy to map them to useful functions within applications or your window manager. To do this put the following in ~/.xmodmaprc. keycode 115 = F13 keycode 116 = F14 keycode 117 = F15 I use fvwm2 and have mapped the keys so that F13 iconifies (or de-iconifies) the window the cursor is in, F14 brings the window the cursor is in to the front or, if it is already at the front, pushes it to the back, and F15 pops up the main Workplace (application) menu even if the cursor is not on the desktop, which is useful if you don't have any part of the desktop visible (and the logo on the key matches its functionality). The entries in my ~/.fvwmrc which map the keys this way are: Key F13 FTIWS A Iconify Key F14 FTIWS A RaiseLower Key F15 A A Menu Workplace Nop Networking Where can I get information on diskless booting? Diskless booting means that the FreeBSD box is booted over a network, and reads the necessary files from a server instead of its hard disk. For full details, please read the Handbook entry on diskless booting Can a FreeBSD box be used as a dedicated network router? Internet standards and good engineering practice prohibit us from providing packet forwarding by default in FreeBSD. You can however enable this feature by changing the following variable to YES in rc.conf: gateway_enable=YES # Set to YES if this host will be a gateway This option will put the sysctl variable net.inet.ip.forwarding to 1. In most cases, you will also need to run a routing process to tell other systems on your network about your router; FreeBSD comes with the standard BSD routing daemon routed, or for more complex situations you may want to try GaTeD (available from http://www.gated.org/ ) which supports FreeBSD as of 3_5Alpha7. It is our duty to warn you that, even when FreeBSD is configured in this way, it does not completely comply with the Internet standard requirements for routers; however, it comes close enough for ordinary usage. Can I connect my Win95 box to the Internet via FreeBSD? Typically, people who ask this question have two PC's at home, one with FreeBSD and one with Win95; the idea is to use the FreeBSD box to connect to the Internet and then be able to access the Internet from the Windows95 box through the FreeBSD box. This is really just a special case of the previous question. ... and the answer is yes! In FreeBSD 3.x, user-mode ppp contains a option. If you run ppp with the , set gateway_enable to YES in /etc/rc.conf, and configure your Windows machine correctly, this should work fine. More detailed information about setting this up can be found in the Pedantic PPP Primer by Steve Sims. If you are using kernel-mode ppp, or have an Ethernet connection to the Internet, you will have to use natd. Please look at the natd section of this FAQ. Why does recompiling the latest BIND from ISC fail? There is a conflict between the cdefs.h file in the distribution and the one shipped with FreeBSD. Just remove compat/include/sys/cdefs.h. Does FreeBSD support SLIP and PPP? Yes. See the manual pages for &man.slattach.8;, &man.sliplogin.8;, &man.ppp.8;, and &man.pppd.8;. &man.ppp.8; and &man.pppd.8; provide support for both incoming and outgoing connections, while &man.sliplogin.8; deals exlusively with incoming connections, and &man.slattach.8; deals exclusively with outgoing connections. For more information on how to use these, please see the Handbook chapter on PPP and SLIP. If you only have access to the Internet through a shell account, you may want to have a look at the slirp package. It can provide you with (limited) access to services such as ftp and http direct from your local machine. Does FreeBSD support NAT or Masquerading If you have a local subnet (one or more local machines), but have been allocated only a single IP number from your Internet provider (or even if you receive a dynamic IP number), you may want to look at the natd program. natd allows you to connect an entire subnet to the internet using only a single IP number. The ppp program has similar functionality built in via the switch. The alias library is used in both cases. I can't create a /dev/ed0 device! In the Berkeley networking framework, network interfaces are only directly accessible by kernel code. Please see the /etc/rc.network file and the manual pages for the various network programs mentioned there for more information. If this leaves you totally confused, then you should pick up a book describing network administration on another BSD-related operating system; with few significant exceptions, administering networking on FreeBSD is basically the same as on SunOS 4.0 or Ultrix. How can I setup Ethernet aliases? Add netmask 0xffffffff to your ifconfig command-line like the following: &prompt.root; ifconfig ed0 alias 204.141.95.2 netmask 0xffffffff How do I get my 3C503 to use the other network port? If you want to use the other ports, you'll have to specify an additional parameter on the ifconfig command line. The default port is link0. To use the AUI port instead of the BNC one, use link2. These flags should be specified using the ifconfig_* variables in /etc/rc.conf. I'm having problems with NFS to/from FreeBSD. Certain PC network cards are better than others (to put it mildly) and can sometimes cause problems with network intensive applications like NFS. See the Handbook entry on NFS for more information on this topic. Why can't I NFS-mount from a Linux box? Some versions of the Linux NFS code only accept mount requests from a privileged port; try &prompt.root; mount -o -P linuxbox:/blah /mnt Why can't I NFS-mount from a Sun box? Sun workstations running SunOS 4.X only accept mount requests from a privileged port; try &prompt.root; mount -o -P sunbox:/blah /mnt Why does mountd keep telling me it can't change attributes and that I have a bad exports list on my FreeBSD NFS server? The most frequent problem is not understanding this passage from the &man.exports.5 manual page correctly:
Each line in the file (other than comment lines that begin with a #) specifies the mount point(s) and export flags within one local server filesystem for one or more hosts. A host may be specified only once for each local filesystem on the server and there may be only one default entry for each server filesystem that applies to all other hosts.
This is made more clear by an example of a common mistake. If everything above /usr is part of one filesystem (there are no mounts above /usr) the following exports list is not valid: /usr/src client /usr/ports client There are two lines specifying properties for one filesystem, /usr, exported to the same host, client. The correct format is: /usr/src /usr/ports client To rephrase the passage from the manual page, the properties of one filesystem exported to a given host (world-wide exports are treated like another unique host) must all occur on one line. And yes, this does cause limitiation in how you can export filesystems without ugly workarounds, but for most people, this is not an issue. The following is an example of a valid export list, where /usr and /exports are local filesystems: # Export src and ports to client01 and client02, but only # client01 has root privileges on it /usr/src /usr/ports -maproot=0 client01 /usr/src /usr/ports client02 # The "client" machines have root and can mount anywhere # up /exports. The world can mount /exports/obj read-only /exports -alldirs -maproot=0 client01 client02 /exports/obj -ro I'm having problems talking PPP to NeXTStep machines. Try disabling the TCP extensions in /etc/rc.conf by changing the following variable to NO: tcp_extensions=NO Xylogic's Annex boxes are also broken in this regard and you must use the above change to connect thru them. How do I enable IP multicast support? Multicast host operations are fully supported in FreeBSD 2.0 and later by default. If you want your box to run as a multicast router, you will need to recompile your kernel with the MROUTING option and run mrouted. FreeBSD 2.2 and later will start mrouted at boot time if the flag mrouted_enable is set to "YES" in /etc/rc.conf. MBONE tools are available in their own ports category, mbone. If you are looking for the conference tools vic and vat, look there! For more information, see the Mbone Information Web. Which network cards are based on the DEC PCI chipset? Here is a list compiled by Glen Foster, with some more modern additions: Vendor Model ---------------------------------------------- ASUS PCI-L101-TB Accton ENI1203 Cogent EM960PCI Compex ENET32-PCI D-Link DE-530 Dayna DP1203, DP2100 DEC DE435, DE450 Danpex EN-9400P3 JCIS Condor JC1260 Linksys EtherPCI Mylex LNP101 SMC EtherPower 10/100 (Model 9332) SMC EtherPower (Model 8432) TopWare TE-3500P Znyx (2.2.x) ZX312, ZX314, ZX342, ZX345, ZX346, ZX348 (3.x) ZX345Q, ZX346Q, ZX348Q, ZX412Q, ZX414, ZX442, ZX444, ZX474, ZX478, ZX212, ZX214 (10mbps/hd) Why do I have to use the FQDN for hosts on my site? You will probably find that the host is actually in a different domain; for example, if you are in foo.bar.edu and you wish to reach a host called mumble in the bar.edu domain, you will have to refer to it by the fully-qualified domain name, mumble.bar.edu, instead of just mumble. Traditionally, this was allowed by BSD BIND resolvers. However the current version of bind that ships with FreeBSD no longer provides default abbreviations for non-fully qualified domain names other than the domain you are in. So an unqualified host mumble must either be found as mumble.foo.bar.edu, or it will be searched for in the root domain. This is different from the previous behavior, where the search continued across mumble.bar.edu, and mumble.edu. Have a look at RFC 1535 for why this was considered bad practice, or even a security hole. As a good workaround, you can place the line search foo.bar.edu bar.edu instead of the previous domain foo.bar.edu into your /etc/resolv.conf file. However, make sure that the search order does not go beyond the boundary between local and public administration, as RFC 1535 calls it. Permission denied for all networking operations. If you have compiled your kernel with the IPFIREWALL option, you need to be aware that the default policy as of 2.1.7R (this actually changed during 2.1-STABLE development) is to deny all packets that are not explicitly allowed. If you had unintentionally misconfigured your system for firewalling, you can restore network operability by typing the following while logged in as root: &prompt.root; ipfw add 65534 allow all from any to any You can also set firewall_type="open" in /etc/rc.conf. For further information on configuring a FreeBSD firewall, see the Handbook section. How much overhead does IPFW incur? The answer to this depends mostly on your rule set and processor speed. For most applications dealing with ethernet and small rule sets, the answer is, negligible. For those of you that need actual measurements to satisfy your curiosity, read on. The following measurements were made using 2.2.5-STABLE on a 486-66. IPFW was modified to measure the time spent within the ip_fw_chk routine, displaying the results to the console every 1000 packets. Two rule sets, each with 1000 rules were tested. The first set was designed to demonstrate a worst case scenario by repeating the rule: &prompt.root; ipfw add deny tcp from any to any 55555 This demonstrates worst case by causing most of IPFW's packet check routine to be executed before finally deciding that the packet does not match the rule (by virtue of the port number). Following the 999th iteration of this rule was an allow ip from any to any. The second set of rules were designed to abort the rule check quickly: &prompt.root; ipfw add deny ip from 1.2.3.4 to 1.2.3.4 The nonmatching source IP address for the above rule causes these rules to be skipped very quickly. As before, the 1000th rule was an allow ip from any to any. The per-packet processing overhead in the former case was approximately 2.703ms/packet, or roughly 2.7 microseconds per rule. Thus the theoretical packet processing limit with these rules is around 370 packets per second. Assuming 10Mbps ethernet and a ~1500 byte packet size, we would only be able to achieve a 55.5% bandwidth utilization. For the latter case each packet was processed in approximately 1.172ms, or roughly 1.2 microseconds per rule. The theoretical packet processing limit here would be about 853 packets per second, which could consume 10Mbps ethernet bandwidth. The excessive number of rules tested and the nature of those rules do not provide a real-world scenario -- they were used only to generate the timing information presented here. Here are a few things to keep in mind when building an efficient rule set: Place an established rule early on to handle the majority of TCP traffic. Don't put any allow tcp statements before this rule. Place heavily triggered rules earlier in the rule set than those rarely used (without changing the permissiveness of the firewall, of course). You can see which rules are used most often by examining the packet counting statistics with ipfw -a l. Why is my &man.ipfw.8; fwd rule to redirect a service to another machine not working? Possibly because you want to do network address translation (NAT) and not just forward packets. A fwd rule does exactly what it says; it forwards packets. It does not actually change the data inside the packet. Say we have a rule like: 01000 fwd 10.0.0.1 from any to foo 21 When a packet with a destination address of foo arrives at the machine with this rule, the packet is forwarded to 10.0.0.1, but it still has the destination address of foo! The destination address of the packet is not changed to 10.0.0.1. Most machines would probably drop a packet that they receive with a destination address that is not their own. Therefore, using a fwd rule does not often work the way the user expects. This behavior is a feature and not a bug. See the FAQ about redirecting services, the &man.natd.8; manual, or one of the several port redirecting utilities in the ports collection for a correct way to do this. How can I redirect service requests from one machine to another? You can redirect FTP (and other service) request with the socket package, available in the ports tree in category sysutils. Simply replace the service's commandline to call socket instead, like so: ftp stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/local/bin/socket socket ftp.foo.com ftp where ftp.foo.com and ftp are the host and port to redirect to, respectively. Where can I get a bandwidth management tool? There are two bandwidth management tools available for FreeBSD. ALTQ is available for free; Bandwidth Manager from Emerging Technologies is a commercial product. Why do I get /dev/bpf0: device not configured? The Berkeley Packet Filter (bpf) driver needs to be enabled before running programs that utilize it. Add this to your kernel config file and build a new kernel: pseudo-device bpfilter # Berkeley Packet Filter Secondly, after rebooting you will have to create the device node. This can be accomplished by a change to the /dev directory, followed by the execution of: &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV bpf0 Please see the handbook's entry on device nodes for more information on creating devices. How do I mount a disk from a Windows machine that's on my network, like smbmount in Linux? Use the sharity light package in the ports collection. What are these messages about icmp-response bandwidth limit 300/200 pps in my log files? This is the kernel telling you that some activity is provoking it to send more ICMP or TCP reset (RST) responses than it thinks it should. ICMP responses are often generated as a result of attempted connections to unused UDP ports. TCP resets are generated as a result of attempted connections to unopened TCP ports. Among others, these are the kinds of activities which may cause these messages: Brute-force denial of service (DoS) attacks (as opposed to single-packet attacks which exploit a specific vulnerability). Port scans which attempt to connect to a large number of ports (as opposed to only trying a few well-known ports). The first number in the message tells you how many packets the kernel would have sent if the limit wasn't in place, and the second number tells you the limit. You can control the limit using the net.inet.icmp.icmplim sysctl variable like this, where 300 is the limit in packets per second: &prompt.root; sysctl -w net.inet.icmp.icmplim=300 If you don't want to see messages about this in your log files, but you still want the kernel to do response limiting, you can use the net.inet.icmp.icmplim_output sysctl variable to disable the output like this: &prompt.root; sysctl -w net.inet.icmp.icmplim_output=0 Finally, if you want to disable response limiting, you can set the net.inet.icmp.icmplim sysctl variable (see above for an example) to 0. Disabling response limiting is discouraged for the reasons listed above. PPP I can't make ppp work. What am I doing wrong ? You should first read the ppp man page and the ppp section of the handbook. Enable logging with the command set log Phase Chat Connect Carrier lcp ipcp ccp command This command may be typed at the ppp command prompt or it may be entered in the /etc/ppp/ppp.conf configuration file (the start of the default section is the best place to put it). Make sure that /etc/syslog.conf contains the lines !ppp *.* /var/log/ppp.log and that the file /var/log/ppp.log exists. You can now find out a lot about what's going on from the log file. Don't worry if it doesn't all make sense. If you need to get help from someone, it may make sense to them. If your version of ppp doesn't understand the set log command, you should download the latest version. It will build on FreeBSD version 2.1.5 and higher. Ppp just hangs when I run it This is usually because your hostname won't resolve. The best way to fix this is to make sure that /etc/hosts is consoluted by your resolver first by editing /etc/host.conf and putting the hosts line first. Then, simply put an entry in /etc/hosts for your local machine. If you have no local network, change your localhost line: 127.0.0.1 foo.bar.com foo localhost Otherwise, simply add another entry for your host. Consult the relevant man pages for more details. You should be able to successfully ping -c1 `hostname` when you're done. Ppp won't dial in -auto mode First, check that you've got a default route. By running netstat -rn, you should see two entries like this: Destination Gateway Flags Refs Use Netif Expire default 10.0.0.2 UGSc 0 0 tun0 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.1 UH 0 0 tun0 This is assuming that you've used the addresses from the handbook, the man page or from the ppp.conf.sample file. If you haven't got a default route, it may be because you're running an old version of ppp that doesn't understand the word HISADDR in the ppp.conf file. If your version of ppp is from before FreeBSD 2.2.5, change the add 0 0 HISADDR line to one saying add 0 0 10.0.0.2 Another reason for the default route line being missing is that you have mistakenly set up a default router in your /etc/rc.conf file (this file was called /etc/sysconfig prior to release 2.2.2), and you have omitted the line saying delete ALL from ppp.conf. If this is the case, go back to the Final system configuration section of the handbook. What does No route to host mean This error is usually due to a missing MYADDR: delete ALL add 0 0 HISADDR section in your /etc/ppp/ppp.linkup file. This is only necessary if you have a dynamic IP address or don't know the address of your gateway. If you're using interactive mode, you can type the following after entering packet mode (packet mode is indicated by the capitalized PPP in the prompt): delete ALL add 0 0 HISADDR Refer to the PPP and Dynamic IP addresses section of the handbook for further details. My connection drops after about 3 minutes The default ppp timeout is 3 minutes. This can be adjusted with the line set timeout NNN where NNN is the number of seconds of inactivity before the connection is closed. If NNN is zero, the connection is never closed due to a timeout. It is possible to put this command in the ppp.conf file, or to type it at the prompt in interactive mode. It is also possible to adjust it on the fly while the line is active by connecting to ppps server socket using telnet or pppctl. Refer to the ppp man page for further details. My connection drops under heavy load If you have Link Quality Reporting (LQR) configured, it is possible that too many LQR packets are lost between your machine and the peer. Ppp deduces that the line must therefore be bad, and disconnects. Prior to FreeBSD version 2.2.5, LQR was enabled by default. It is now disabled by default. LQR can be disabled with the line disable lqr My connection drops after a random amount of time Sometimes, on a noisy phone line or even on a line with call waiting enabled, your modem may hang up because it thinks (incorrectly) that it lost carrier. There's a setting on most modems for determining how tolerant it should be to temporary losses of carrier. On a USR Sportster for example, this is measured by the S10 register in tenths of a second. To make your modem more forgiving, you could add the following send-expect sequence to your dial string: set dial "...... ATS10=10 OK ......" Refer to your modem manual for details. My connection hangs after a random amount of time Many people experience hung connections with no apparent explaination. The first thing to establish is which side of the link is hung. If you are using an external modem, you can simply try using ping to see if the TD light is flashing when you transmit data. If it flashes (and the RD light doesn't), the problem is with the remote end. If TD doesn't flash, the problem is local. With an internal modem, you'll need to use the set server command in your ppp.conf file. When the hang occurs, connect to ppp using pppctl. If your network connection suddenly revives (ppp was revived due to the activity on the diagnostic socket) or if you can't connect (assuming the set socket command succeeded at startup time), the problem is local. If you can connect and things are still hung, enable local async logging with set log local async and use ping from another window or terminal to make use of the link. The async logging will show you the data being transmitted and received on the link. If data is going out and not coming back, the problem is remote. Having established whether the problem is local or remote, you now have two possibilities: The remote end isn't responding There's very little you can do about this. Most ISPs will refuse to help if you're not running a Microsoft OS. You can enable lqr in your ppp.conf file, allowing ppp to detect the remote failure and hang up, but this detection is relatively slow and therefore not that useful. You may want to avoid telling your ISP that you're running user-ppp.... First, try disabling all local compression by adding the following to your configuration: disable pred1 deflate deflate24 protocomp acfcomp shortseq vj deny pred1 deflate deflate24 protocomp acfcomp shortseq vj Then reconnect to ensure that this makes no difference. If things improve or if the problem is solved completely, determine which setting makes the difference through trial and error. This will provide good amunition when you contact your ISP (although it may make it apparent that you're not running a Microsoft product). Before contacting your ISP, enable async logging locally and wait until the connection hangs again. This may use up quite a bit of disk space. The last data read from the port may be of interest. It is usually ascii data, and may even describe the problem (Memory fault, core dumped ?). If your ISP is helpful, they should be able to enable logging on their end, then when the next link drop occurs, they may be able to tell you why their side is having a problem. Feel free to send the details to &a.brian;, or even to ask your ISP to contact me directly. Ppp is hung Your best bet here is to rebuild ppp by adding CFLAGS+=-g and STRIP= to the end of the Makefile, then doing a make clean && make && make install. When ppp hangs, find the ppp process id with ps ajxww | fgrep ppp and run gdb ppp PID. From the gdb prompt, you can then use bt to get a stack trace. Send the results to brian@Awfulhak.org. Nothing happens after the Login OK! message Prior to FreeBSD version 2.2.5, once the link was established, ppp would wait for the peer to initiate the Line Control Protocol (LCP). Many ISPs will not initiate negotiations and expect the client to do so. To force ppp to initiate the LCP, use the following line: set openmode active Note: It usually does no harm if both sides initiate negotiation, so openmode is now active by default. However, the next section explains when it does do some harm. I keep seeing errors about magic being the same Occasionally, just after connecting, you may see messages in the log that say magic is the same. Sometimes, these messages are harmless, and sometimes one side or the other exits. Most ppp implementations cannot survive this problem, and even if the link seems to come up, you'll see repeated configure requests and configure acknowledgements in the log file until ppp eventually gives up and closes the connection. This normally happens on server machines with slow disks that are spawning a getty on the port, and executing ppp from a login script or program after login. I've also heard reports of it happening consistently when using slirp. The reason is that in the time taken between getty exiting and ppp starting, the client-side ppp starts sending Line Control Protocol (LCP) packets. Because ECHO is still switched on for the port on the server, the client ppp sees these packets reflect back. One part of the LCP negotiation is to establish a magic number for each side of the link so that reflections can be detected. The protocol says that when the peer tries to negotiate the same magic number, a NAK should be sent and a new magic number should be chosen. During the period that the server port has ECHO turned on, the client ppp sends LCP packets, sees the same magic in the reflected packet and NAKs it. It also sees the NAK reflect (which also means ppp must change its magic). This produces a potentially enormous number of magic number changes, all of which are happily piling into the server's tty buffer. As soon as ppp starts on the server, it's flooded with magic number changes and almost immediately decides it's tried enough to negotiate LCP and gives up. Meanwhile, the client, who no longer sees the reflections, becomes happy just in time to see a hangup from the server. This can be avoided by allowing the peer to start negotiating with the following line in your ppp.conf file: set openmode passive This tells ppp to wait for the server to initiate LCP negotiations. Some servers however may never initiate negotiations. If this is the case, you can do something like: set openmode active 3 This tells ppp to be passive for 3 seconds, and then to start sending LCP requests. If the peer starts sending requests during this period, ppp will immediately respond rather than waiting for the full 3 second period. LCP negotiations continue 'till the connection is closed There is currently an implementation mis-feature in ppp where it doesn't associate LCP, CCP & IPCP responses with their original requests. As a result, if one ppp implementation is more than 6 seconds slower than the other side, the other side will send two additional LCP configuration requests. This is fatal. Consider two implementations, A and B. A starts sending LCP requests immediately after connecting and B takes 7 seconds to start. When B starts, A has sent 3 LCP REQs. We're assuming the line has ECHO switched off, otherwise we'd see magic number problems as described in the previous section. B sends a REQ, then an ACK to the first of A's REQs. This results in A entering the OPENED state and sending and ACK (the first) back to B. In the meantime, B sends back two more ACKs in response to the two additional REQs sent by A before B started up. B then receives the first ACK from A and enters the OPENED state. A receives the second ACK from B and goes back to the REQ-SENT state, sending another (forth) REQ as per the RFC. It then receives the third ACK and enters the OPENED state. In the meantime, B receives the forth REQ from A, resulting in it reverting to the ACK-SENT state and sending another (second) REQ and (forth) ACK as per the RFC. A gets the REQ, goes into REQ-SENT and sends another REQ. It immediately receives the following ACK and enters OPENED. This goes on 'till one side figures out that they're getting nowhere and gives up. The best way to avoid this is to configure one side to be passive - that is, make one side wait for the other to start negotiating. This can be done with the set openmode passive command. Care should be taken with this option. You should also use the set stopped N command to limit the amount of time that ppp waits for the peer to begin negotiations. Alternatively, the set openmode active N command (where N is the number of seconds to wait before starting negotiations) can be used. Check the manual page for details. Ppp locks up shortly after connecting Prior to version 2.2.5 of FreeBSD, it was possible that your link was disabled shortly after connection due to ppp mis-handling Predictor1 compression negotiation. This would only happen if both sides tried to negotiate different Compression Control Protocols (CCP). This problem is now corrected, but if you're still running an old version of ppp, the problem can be circumvented with the line disable pred1 Ppp locks up when I shell out to test it When you execute the shell or ! command, ppp executes a shell (or if you've passed any arguements, ppp will execute those arguements). Ppp will wait for the command to complete before continuing. If you attempt to use the ppp link while running the command, the link will appear to have frozen. This is because ppp is waiting for the command to complete. If you wish to execute commands like this, use the !bg command instead. This will execute the given command in the background, and ppp can continue to service the link. Ppp over a null-modem cable never exits There is no way for ppp to automatically determine that a direct connection has been dropped. This is due to the lines that are used in a null-modem serial cable. When using this sort of connection, LQR should always be enabled with the line enable lqr LQR is accepted by default if negotiated by the peer. Why does ppp dial for no reason in -auto mode If ppp is dialing unexpectedly, you must determine the cause, and set up Dial filters (dfilters) to prevent such dialing. To determine the cause, use the following line: set log +tcp/ip This will log all traffic through the connection. The next time the line comes up unexpectedly, you will see the reason logged with a convenient timestamp next to it. You can now disable dialing under these circumstances. Usually, this sort of problem arises due to DNS lookups. To prevent DNS lookups from establishing a connection (this will not prevent ppp from passing the packets through an established connection), use the following: set dfilter 1 deny udp src eq 53 set dfilter 2 deny udp dst eq 53 set dfilter 3 permit 0/0 0/0 This is not always suitable, as it will effectively break your demand-dial capabilities - most programs will need a DNS lookup before doing any other network related things. In the DNS case, you should try to determine what is actually trying to resolve a host name. A lot of the time, sendmail is the culprit. You should make sure that you tell sendmail not to do any DNS lookups in its configuration file. See the section on Mail Configuration for details on how to create your own configuration file and what should go into it. You may also want to add the following line to your .mc file: define(`confDELIVERY_MODE', `d')dnl This will make sendmail queue everything until the queue is run (usually, sendmail is invoked with , telling it to run the queue every 30 minutes) or until a sendmail -q is done (perhaps from your ppp.linkup file). What do these CCP errors mean I keep seeing the following errors in my log file: CCP: CcpSendConfigReq CCP: Received Terminate Ack (1) state = Req-Sent (6) This is because ppp is trying to negotiate Predictor1 compression, and the peer does not want to negotiate any compression at all. The messages are harmless, but if you wish to remove them, you can disable Predictor1 compression locally too: disable pred1 Ppp locks up during file transfers with IO errors Under FreeBSD 2.2.2 and before, there was a bug in the tun driver that prevents incoming packets of a size larger than the tun interface's MTU size. Receipt of a packet greater than the MTU size results in an IO error being logged via syslogd. The ppp specification says that an MRU of 1500 should always be accepted as a minimum, despite any LCP negotiations, therefore it is possible that should you decrease the MTU to less than 1500, your ISP will transmit packets of 1500 regardless, and you will tickle this non-feature - locking up your link. The problem can be circumvented by never setting an MTU of less than 1500 under FreeBSD 2.2.2 or before. Why doesn't ppp log my connection speed? In order to log all lines of your modem conversation, you must enable the following: set log +connect This will make ppp log everything up until the last requested expect string. If you wish to see your connect speed and are using PAP or CHAP (and therefore don't have anything to chat after the CONNECT in the dial script - no set login script), you must make sure that you instruct ppp to expect the whole CONNECT line, something like this: set dial "ABORT BUSY ABORT NO\\sCARRIER TIMEOUT 4 \ \"\" ATZ OK-ATZ-OK ATDT\\T TIMEOUT 60 CONNECT \\c \\n" Here, we get our CONNECT, send nothing, then expect a line-feed, forcing ppp to read the whole CONNECT response. Ppp ignores the \ character in my chat script Ppp parses each line in your config files so that it can interpret strings such as set phone "123 456 789" correctly (and realize that the number is actually only one argument. In order to specify a " character, you must escape it using a backslash (\). When the chat interpreter parses each argument, it re-interprets the argument in order to find any special escape sequences such as \P or \T (see the man page). As a result of this double-parsing, you must remember to use the correct number of escapes. If you wish to actually send a \ character to (say) your modem, you'd need something like: set dial "\"\" ATZ OK-ATZ-OK AT\\\\X OK" resulting in the following sequence: ATZ OK AT\X OK or set phone 1234567 set dial "\"\" ATZ OK ATDT\\T" resulting in the following sequence: ATZ OK ATDT1234567 Ppp gets a seg-fault, but I see no ppp.core file Ppp (or any other program for that matter) should never dump core. Because ppp runs with an effective user id of 0, the operating system will not write ppps core image to disk before terminating it. If, however ppp is actually termating due to a segmentation violation or some other signal that normally causes core to be dumped, and you're sure you're using the latest version (see the start of this section), then you should do the following: &prompt.user; tar xfz ppp-*.src.tar.gz &prompt.user; cd ppp*/ppp &prompt.user; echo STRIP= >>Makefile &prompt.user; echo CFLAGS+=-g >>Makefile &prompt.user; make clean all &prompt.user; su &prompt.root; make install &prompt.root; chmod 555 /usr/sbin/ppp You will now have a debuggable version of ppp installed. You will have to be root to run ppp as all of its privileges have been revoked. When you start ppp, take a careful note of what your current directory was at the time. Now, if and when ppp receives the segmentation violation, it will dump a core file called ppp.core. You should then do the following: &prompt.user; su &prompt.root; gdb /usr/sbin/ppp ppp.core (gdb) bt ..... (gdb) f 0 .... (gdb) i args .... (gdb) l ..... All of this information should be given alongside your question, making it possible to diagnose the problem. If you're familiar with gdb, you may wish to find out some other bits and pieces such as what actually caused the dump and the addresses & values of the relevant variables. The process that forces a dial in auto mode never connects This was a known problem with ppp set up to negotiate a dynamic local IP number with the peer in auto mode. It is fixed in the latest version - search the man page for iface. The problem was that when that initial program calls connect(2), the IP number of the tun interface is assigned to the socket endpoint. The kernel creates the first outgoing packet and writes it to the tun device. Ppp then reads the packet and establishes a connection. If, as a result of ppps dynamic IP assignment, the interface address is changed, the original socket endpoint will be invalid. Any subsequent packets sent to the peer will usually be dropped. Even if they aren't, any responses will not route back to the originating machine as the IP number is no longer owned by that machine. There are several theoretical ways to approach this problem. It would be nicest if the peer would re-assign the same IP number if possible :-) The current version of ppp does this, but most other implementations don't. The easiest method from our side would be to never change the tun interface IP number, but instead to change all outgoing packets so that the source IP number is changed from the interface IP to the negotiated IP on the fly. This is essentially what the iface-alias option in the latest version of ppp is doing (with the help of libalias(3) and ppp's switch) - it's maintaining all previous interface addresses and NATing them to the last negotiated address. Another alternative (and probably the most reliable) would be to implement a system call that changes all bound sockets from one IP to another. Ppp would use this call to modify the sockets of all existing programs when a new IP number is negotiated. The same system call could be used by dhcp clients when they are forced to re-bind() their sockets. Yet another possibility is to allow an interface to be brought up without an IP number. Outgoing packets would be given an IP number of 255.255.255.255 up until the first SIOCAIFADDR ioctl is done. This would result in fully binding the socket. It would be up to ppp to change the source IP number, but only if it's set to 255.255.255.255, and only the IP number and IP checksum would need to change. This, however is a bit of a hack as the kernel would be sending bad packets to an improperly configured interface, on the assumption that some other mechanism is capable of fixing things retrospectively. Why don't most games work with the -nat switch The reason games and the like don't work when libalias is in use is that the machine on the outside will try to open a connection or send (unsolicited) UDP packets to the machine on the inside. The NAT software doesn't know that it should send these packets to the interior machine. To make things work, make sure that the only thing running is the software that you're having problems with, then either run tcpdump on the tun interface of the gateway or enable ppp tcp/ip logging (set log +tcp/ip) on the gateway. When you start the offending software, you should see packets passing through the gateway machine. When something comes back from the outside, it'll be dropped (that's the problem). Note the port number of these packets then shut down the offending software. Do this a few times to see if the port numbers are consistent. If they are, then the following line in the relevant section of /etc/ppp/ppp.conf will make the software functional: nat port proto internalmachine:port port where proto is either tcp or udp, internalmachine is the machine that you want the packets to be sent to and port is the destination port number of the packets. You won't be able to use the software on other machines without changing the above command, and running the software on two internal machines at the same time is out of the question - after all, the outside world is seeing your entire internal network as being just a single machine. If the port numbers aren't consistent, there are three more options: 1) Submit support in libalias. Examples of special cases can be found in /usr/src/lib/libalias/alias_*.c (alias_ftp.c is a good prototype). This usually involves reading certain recognised outgoing packets, identifying the instruction that tells the outside machine to initiate a connection back to the internal machine on a specific (random) port and setting up a route in the alias table so that the subsequent packets know where to go. This is the most difficult solution, but it is the best and will make the software work with multiple machines. 2) Use a proxy. The application may support socks5 for example, or (as in the cvsup case) may have a passive option that avoids ever requesting that the peer open connections back to the local machine. 3) Redirect everything to the internal machine using nat addr. This is the sledge-hammer approach. Has anybody made a list of useful port numbers ? Not yet, but this is intended to grow into such a list (if any interest is shown). In each example, internal should be replaced with the IP number of the machine playing the game. Asheron's Call nat port udp internal :65000 65000 Manually change the port number within the game to 65000. If you've got a number of machines that you wish to play on assign a unique port number for each (i.e. 65001, 65002, etc) and add a nat port line for each one. Half Life nat port udp internal:27005 27015 PCAnywhere 8.0 nat port udp internal:5632 5632 nat port tcp internal:5631 5631 Quake nat port udp internal:6112 6112 Alternatively, you may want to take a look at www.battle.net for Quake proxy support. Quake 2 nat port udp internal:27901 27910 Red Alert nat port udp internal:8675 8675 nat port udp internal:5009 5009 What are FCS errors ? FCS stands for Frame Check Sequence. Each ppp packet has a checksum attached to ensure that the data being received is the data being sent. If the FCS of an incoming packet is incorrect, the packet is dropped and the HDLC FCS count is increased. The HDLC error values can be displayed using the show hdlc command. If your link is bad (or if your serial driver is dropping packets), you will see the occasional FCS error. This is not usually worth worrying about although it does slow down the compression protocols substantially. If you have an external modem, make sure your cable is properly shielded from interference - this may eradicate the problem. If your link freezes as soon as you've connected and you see a large number of FCS errors, this may be because your link is not 8 bit clean. Make sure your modem is not using software flow control (XON/XOFF). If your datalink must use software flow control, use the command set accmap 0x000a0000 to tell ppp to escape the ^Q and ^S characters. Another reason for seeing too many FCS errors may be that the remote end has stopped talking PPP. You may want to enable async logging at this point to determine if the incoming data is actually a login or shell prompt. If you have a shell prompt at the remote end, it's possible to terminate ppp without dropping the line by using the close lcp command (a following term command will reconnect you to the shell on the remote machine. If nothing in your log file indicates why the link might have been terminated, you should ask the remote administrator (your ISP?) why the session was terminated. Why do MacOS and Windows 98 connections freeze when running PPPoE on the gateway Thanks to Michael Wozniak mwozniak@netcom.ca for figuring this out and Dan Flemming danflemming@mac.com for the Mac solution: This is due to what's called a Black Hole router. MacOS and Windows 98 (and maybe other Microsoft OSs) send TCP packets with a requested segment size too big to fit into a PPPoE frame (MTU is 1500 by default for ethernet) and have the don't fragment bit set (default of TCP) and the Telco router is not sending ICMP must fragment back to the www site you are trying to load. (Alternatively, the router is sending the ICMP packet correctly, but the firewall at the www site is dropping it.) When the www server is sending you frames that don't fit into the PPPoE pipe the Telco router drops them on the floor and your page doesn't load (some pages/graphics do as they are smaller than a MSS.) This seems to be the default of most Telco PPPoE configurations (if only they knew how to program a router... sigh...) One fix is to use regedit on your 95/98 boxes to add the following registry entry... HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Class\NetTrans\0000\MaxMTU It should be a string with a value 1450 (more accurately it should be 1464 to fit TCP packets into a PPPoE frame perfectly but the 1450 gives you a margin of error for other IP protocols you may encounter). This registry key is reported to have moved to Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\ID for adapter\MTU in Windows 2000. Refer to Microsoft Knowledge Base documents Q158474 - Windows TCPIP Registry Entries and Q120642 - TCPIP & NBT Configuration Parameters for Windows NT for more information on changing Windoze MTU to work with a FreeBSD/NAT/PPPoE router. Unfortunately, MacOS does not provide an interface for changing TCP/IP settings. However, there is commercial software available, such as OTAdvancedTuner (OT for OpenTransport, the MacOS TCP/IP stack) by Sustainable Softworks, that will allow users to customize TCP/IP settings. MacOS NAT users should select ip_interface_MTU from the drop-down menu, enter 1450 instead of 1500 in the box, click the box next to Save as Auto Configure, and click Make Active. The latest version of ppp (2.3 or greater) has an enable tcpmssfixup command that will automatically adjust the MSS to an appropriate value. This facility is enabled by default. If you're stuck with an older version of ppp, you may want to look at the tcpmssd port. None of this helps - I'm desperate ! If all else fails, send as much information as you can, including your config files, how you're starting ppp, the relevant parts of your log file and the output of the netstat -rn command (before and after connecting) to the freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org mailing list or the comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc news group, and someone should point you in the right direction. Where can I find a free FreeBSD account? While FreeBSD does not provide open access to any of their servers, others do provide open access Unix systems. The charge varies and limited services may be available. Arbornet, Inc, also known as M-Net, has been providing open access to Unix systems since 1983. Starting on an Altos running System III, the site switched to BSD/OS in 1991. In June of 2000, the site switched again to FreeBSD. M-Net can be accessed via telnet and SSH and provides basic access to the entire FreeBSD software suite. However, network access is limited to members and patrons who donate to the system, which is run as a non-proft organization. M-Net also provides an bulletin board system and interactive chat. Grex provides a site very similar to M-Net including the same bulletin board and interactive chat software. However, the machine is a Sun 4M and is running SunOS Serial Communications This section answers common questions about serial communications with FreeBSD. PPP and SLIP are covered in the section. How do I tell if FreeBSD found my serial ports? As the FreeBSD kernel boots, it will probe for the serial ports in your system for which the kernel was configured. You can either watch your system closely for the messages it prints or run the command &prompt.user; dmesg | grep sio after your system's up and running. Here's some example output from the above command: sio0 at 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 on isa sio0: type 16550A sio1 at 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on isa sio1: type 16550A This shows two serial ports. The first is on irq 4, is using port address 0x3f8, and has a 16550A-type UART chip. The second uses the same kind of chip but is on irq 3 and is at port address 0x2f8. Internal modem cards are treated just like serial ports---except that they always have a modem attached to the port. The GENERIC kernel includes support for two serial ports using the same irq and port address settings in the above example. If these settings aren't right for your system, or if you've added modem cards or have more serial ports than your kernel is configured for, just reconfigure your kernel. See section about building a kernel for more details. How do I tell if FreeBSD found my modem cards? Refer to the answer to the previous question. I just upgraded to 2.0.5 and my tty0X are missing! Don't worry, they have been merged with the ttydX devices. You'll have to change any old configuration files you have, though. How do I access the serial ports on FreeBSD? The third serial port, sio2 (known as COM3 in DOS), is on /dev/cuaa2 for dial-out devices, and on /dev/ttyd2 for dial-in devices. What's the difference between these two classes of devices? You use ttydX for dial-ins. When opening /dev/ttydX in blocking mode, a process will wait for the corresponding cuaaX device to become inactive, and then wait for the carrier detect line to go active. When you open the cuaaX device, it makes sure the serial port isn't already in use by the ttydX device. If the port's available, it steals it from the ttydX device. Also, the cuaXX device doesn't care about carrier detect. With this scheme and an auto-answer modem, you can have remote users log in and you can still dialout with the same modem and the system will take care of all the conflicts. How do I enable support for a multiport serial card? Again, the section on kernel configuration provides information about configuring your kernel. For a multiport serial card, place an sio line for each serial port on the card in the kernel configuration file. But place the irq and vector specifiers on only one of the entries. All of the ports on the card should share one irq. For consistency, use the last serial port to specify the irq. Also, specify the COM_MULTIPORT option. The following example is for an AST 4-port serial card on irq 7: options "COM_MULTIPORT" device sio4 at isa? port 0x2a0 tty flags 0x781 device sio5 at isa? port 0x2a8 tty flags 0x781 device sio6 at isa? port 0x2b0 tty flags 0x781 device sio7 at isa? port 0x2b8 tty flags 0x781 irq 7 vector siointr The flags indicate that the master port has minor number 7 (0x700), diagnostics enabled during probe (0x080), and all the ports share an irq (0x001). Can FreeBSD handle multiport serial cards sharing irqs? Not yet. You'll have to use a different irq for each card. Can I set the default serial parameters for a port? The ttydX (or cuaaX) device is the regular device you'll want to open for your applications. When a process opens the device, it'll have a default set of terminal I/O settings. You can see these settings with the command &prompt.root; stty -a -f /dev/ttyd1 When you change the settings to this device, the settings are in effect until the device is closed. When it's reopened, it goes back to the default set. To make changes to the default set, you can open and adjust the settings of the initial state device. For example, to turn on CLOCAL mode, 8 bits, and XON/XOFF flow control by default for ttyd5, do: &prompt.root; stty -f /dev/ttyid5 clocal cs8 ixon ixoff A good place to do this is in /etc/rc.serial. Now, an application will have these settings by default when it opens ttyd5. It can still change these settings to its liking, though. You can also prevent certain settings from being changed by an application by making adjustments to the lock state device. For example, to lock the speed of ttyd5 to 57600 bps, do &prompt.root; stty -f /dev/ttyld5 57600 Now, an application that opens ttyd5 and tries to change the speed of the port will be stuck with 57600 bps. Naturally, you should make the initial state and lock state devices writable only by root. The MAKEDEV script does NOT do this when it creates the device entries. How can I enable dialup logins on my modem? So you want to become an Internet service provider, eh? First, you'll need one or more modems that can auto-answer. Your modem will need to assert carrier-detect when it detects a carrier and not assert it all the time. It will need to hang up the phone and reset itself when the data terminal ready (DTR) line goes from on to off. It should probably use RTS/CTS flow control or no local flow control at all. Finally, it must use a constant speed between the computer and itself, but (to be nice to your callers) it should negotiate a speed between itself and the remote modem. For many Hayes command-set--compatible modems, this command will make these settings and store them in nonvolatile memory: AT &C1 &D3 &K3 &Q6 S0=1 &W See the section on sending AT commands below for information on how to make these settings without resorting to an MS-DOS terminal program. Next, make an entry in /etc/ttys for the modem. This file lists all the ports on which the operating system will await logins. Add a line that looks something like this: ttyd1 "/usr/libexec/getty std.57600" dialup on insecure This line indicates that the second serial port (/dev/ttyd1) has a modem connected running at 57600 bps and no parity (std.57600, which comes from the file /etc/gettytab). The terminal type for this port is dialup. The port is on and is insecure---meaning root logins on the port aren't allowed. For dialin ports like this one, use the ttydX entry. It's common practice to use dialup as the terminal type. Many users set up in their .profile or .login files a prompt for the actual terminal type if the starting type is dialup. The example shows the port as insecure. To become root on this port, you have to login as a regular user, then su to become root. If you use secure then root can login in directly. After making modifications to /etc/ttys, you need to send a hangup or HUP signal to the init process: &prompt.root; kill -HUP 1 This forces the init process to reread /etc/ttys. The init process will then start getty processes on all on ports. You can find out if logins are available for your port by typing &prompt.user; ps -ax | grep '[t]tyd1' You should see something like: 747 ?? I 0:00.04 /usr/libexec/getty std.57600 ttyd1 How can I connect a dumb terminal to my FreeBSD box? If you're using another computer as a terminal into your FreeBSD system, get a null modem cable to go between the two serial ports. If you're using an actual terminal, see its accompanying instructions. Then, modify /etc/ttys, like above. For example, if you're hooking up a WYSE-50 terminal to the fifth serial port, use an entry like this: ttyd4 "/usr/libexec/getty std.38400" wyse50 on secure This example shows that the port on /dev/ttyd4 has a wyse50 terminal connected at 38400 bps with no parity (std.38400 from /etc/gettytab) and root logins are allowed (secure). Why can't I run tip or cu? On your system, the programs tip and cu are probably executable only by uucp and group dialer. You can use the group dialer to control who has access to your modem or remote systems. Just add yourself to group dialer. Alternatively, you can let everyone on your system run tip and cu by typing: &prompt.root; chmod 4511 /usr/bin/cu &prompt.root; chmod 4511 /usr/bin/tip My stock Hayes modem isn't supported---what can I do? Actually, the man page for tip is out of date. There is a generic Hayes dialer already built in. Just use at=hayes in your /etc/remote file. The Hayes driver isn't smart enough to recognize some of the advanced features of newer modems---messages like BUSY, NO DIALTONE, or CONNECT 115200 will just confuse it. You should turn those messages off when you use tip (using ATX0&W). Also, the dial timeout for tip is 60 seconds. Your modem should use something less, or else tip will think there's a communication problem. Try ATS7=45&W. Actually, as shipped tip doesn't yet support it fully. The solution is to edit the file tipconf.h in the directory /usr/src/usr.bin/tip/tip. Obviously you need the source distribution to do this. Edit the line #define HAYES 0 to #define HAYES 1. Then make and make install. Everything works nicely after that. How am I expected to enter these AT commands? Make what's called a direct entry in your /etc/remote file. For example, if your modem's hooked up to the first serial port, /dev/cuaa0, then put in the following line: cuaa0:dv=/dev/cuaa0:br#19200:pa=none Use the highest bps rate your modem supports in the br capability. Then, type tip cuaa0 and you'll be connected to your modem. If there is no /dev/cuaa0 on your system, do this: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV cuaa0 Or use cu as root with the following command: &prompt.root; cu -lline -sspeed with line being the serial port (e.g. /dev/cuaa0) and speed being the speed (e.g.57600). When you are done entering the AT commands hit ~. to exit. The <@> sign for the pn capability doesn't work! The <@> sign in the phone number capability tells tip to look in /etc/phones for a phone number. But the <@> sign is also a special character in capability files like /etc/remote. Escape it with a backslash: pn=\@ How can I dial a phone number on the command line? Put what's called a generic entry in your /etc/remote file. For example: tip115200|Dial any phone number at 115200 bps:\ :dv=/dev/cuaa0:br#115200:at=hayes:pa=none:du: tip57600|Dial any phone number at 57600 bps:\ :dv=/dev/cuaa0:br#57600:at=hayes:pa=none:du: Then you can do something like tip -115200 5551234. If you prefer cu over tip, use a generic cu entry: cu115200|Use cu to dial any number at 115200bps:\ :dv=/dev/cuaa1:br#57600:at=hayes:pa=none:du: and type cu 5551234 -s 115200. Do I have to type in the bps rate every time I do that? Put in an entry for tip1200 or cu1200, but go ahead and use whatever bps rate is appropriate with the br capability. tip thinks a good default is 1200 bps which is why it looks for a tip1200 entry. You don't have to use 1200 bps, though. I access a number of hosts through a terminal server. Rather than waiting until you're connected and typing CONNECT host each time, use tip's cm capability. For example, these entries in /etc/remote: pain|pain.deep13.com|Forrester's machine:\ :cm=CONNECT pain\n:tc=deep13: muffin|muffin.deep13.com|Frank's machine:\ :cm=CONNECT muffin\n:tc=deep13: deep13:Gizmonics Institute terminal server:\ :dv=/dev/cuaa2:br#38400:at=hayes:du:pa=none:pn=5551234: will let you type tip pain or tip muffin to connect to the hosts pain or muffin; and tip deep13 to get to the terminal server. Can tip try more than one line for each site? This is often a problem where a university has several modem lines and several thousand students trying to use them... Make an entry for your university in /etc/remote and use <\@> for the pn capability: big-university:\ :pn=\@:tc=dialout dialout:\ :dv=/dev/cuaa3:br#9600:at=courier:du:pa=none: Then, list the phone numbers for the university in /etc/phones: big-university 5551111 big-university 5551112 big-university 5551113 big-university 5551114 tip will try each one in the listed order, then give up. If you want to keep retrying, run tip in a while loop. Why do I have to hit CTRL+P twice to send CTRL+P once? CTRL+P is the default force character, used to tell tip that the next character is literal data. You can set the force character to any other character with the ~s escape, which means set a variable. Type ~sforce=single-char followed by a newline. single-char is any single character. If you leave out single-char, then the force character is the nul character, which you can get by typing CTRL+2 or CTRL+SPACE. A pretty good value for single-char is SHIFT+CTRL+6, which I've seen only used on some terminal servers. You can have the force character be whatever you want by specifying the following in your $HOME/.tiprc file: force=single-char Suddenly everything I type is in UPPER CASE?? You must've pressed CTRL+A, tip raise character, specially designed for people with broken caps-lock keys. Use ~s as above and set the variable raisechar to something reasonable. In fact, you can set it to the same as the force character, if you never expect to use either of these features. Here's a sample .tiprc file perfect for Emacs users who need to type CTRL+2 and CTRL+A a lot: force=^^ raisechar=^^ The ^^ is SHIFT+CTRL+6. How can I do file transfers with tip? If you're talking to another UNIX system, you can send and receive files with ~p (put) and ~t (take). These commands run cat and echo on the remote system to accept and send files. The syntax is: ~p <local-file> [<remote-file>] ~t <remote-file> [<local-file>] There's no error checking, so you probably should use another protocol, like zmodem. How can I run zmodem with tip? First, install one of the zmodem programs from the ports collection (such as one of the two from the comms category, lrzsz and rzsz). To receive files, start the sending program on the remote end. Then, press enter and type ~C rz (or ~C lrz if you installed lrzsz) to begin receiving them locally. To send files, start the receiving program on the remote end. Then, press enter and type ~C sz files (or ~C lsz files) to send them to the remote system. FreeBSD can't seem to find my serial ports, even when the settings are correct. Motherboards and cards with Acer UARTs do not probe properly under the FreeBSD sio probe. Obtain a patch from www.lemis.com to fix your problem. Miscellaneous Questions FreeBSD uses far more swap space than Linux. Why? FreeBSD only appears to use more swap than Linux. In actual fact, it does not. The main difference between FreeBSD and Linux in this regard is that FreeBSD will proactively move entirely idle, unused pages of main memory into swap in order to make more main memory available for active use. Linux tends to only move pages to swap as a last resort. The perceived heavier use of swap is balanced by the more efficient use of main memory. Note that while FreeBSD is proactive in this regard, it does not arbitrarily decide to swap pages when the system is truely idle. Thus you will not find your system all paged out when you get up in the morning after leaving it idle overnight. Why does &man.top.1; show very little free memory even when I have very few programs running? The simple answer is that free memory is wasted memory. Any memory that your programs don't actively allocate is used within the FreeBSD kernel as disk cache. The values shown by &man.top.1; labelled as Inact, Cache, and Buf are all cached data at different aging levels. This cached data means the system does not have to access a slow disk again for data it has accessed recently, thus increasing overall performance. In general, a low value shown for Free memory in &man.top.1; is good, provided it is not very low. Why use (what are) a.out and ELF executable formats? To understand why FreeBSD uses the ELF format, you must first know a little about the 3 currently dominant executable formats for UNIX: Prior to FreeBSD 3.x, FreeBSD used the a.out format. a.out The oldest and classic unix object format. It uses a short and compact header with a magic number at the beginning that's often used to characterize the format (see a.out(5) for more details). It contains three loaded segments: .text, .data, and .bss plus a symbol table and a string table. COFF The SVR3 object format. The header now comprises a section table, so you can have more than just .text, .data, and .bss sections. ELF The successor to COFF, featuring Multiple sections and 32-bit or 64-bit possible values. One major drawback: ELF was also designed with the assumption that there would be only one ABI per system architecture. That assumption is actually quite incorrect, and not even in the commercial SYSV world (which has at least three ABIs: SVR4, Solaris, SCO) does it hold true. FreeBSD tries to work around this problem somewhat by providing a utility for branding a known ELF executable with information about the ABI it's compliant with. See the man page for brandelf for more information. FreeBSD comes from the classic camp and has traditionally used the a.out format, a technology tried and proven through many generations of BSD releases. Though it has also been possible for some time to build and run native ELF binaries (and kernels) on a FreeBSD system, FreeBSD initially resisted the push to switch to ELF as the default format. Why? Well, when the Linux camp made their painful transition to ELF, it was not so much to flee the a.out executable format as it was their inflexible jump-table based shared library mechanism, which made the construction of shared libraries very difficult for vendors and developers alike. Since the ELF tools available offered a solution to the shared library problem and were generally seen as the way forward anyway, the migration cost was accepted as necessary and the transition made. In FreeBSD's case, our shared library mechanism is based more closely on Sun's SunOS-style shared library mechanism and, as such, is very easy to use. However, starting with 3.0, FreeBSD officially supports ELF binaries as the default format. Even though the a.out executable format has served us well, the GNU people, who author the compiler tools we use, have dropped support for the a.out format. This has forced us to maintain a divergent version of the compler and linker, and has kept us from reaping the benefits of the latest GNU development efforts. Also the demands of ISO-C++, notably contstructors and destructors, has also led to native ELF support in future FreeBSD releases. Yes, but why are there so many different formats? Back in the dim, dark past, there was simple hardware. This simple hardware supported a simple, small system. a.out was completely adequate for the job of representing binaries on this simple system (a PDP-11). As people ported unix from this simple system, they retained the a.out format because it was sufficient for the early ports of unix to architectures like the Motorola 68k, VAXen, etc. Then some bright hardware engineer decided that if he could force software to do some sleazy tricks, then he'd be able to shave a few gates off the design and allow his CPU core to run faster. While it was made to work with this new kind of hardware (known these days as RISC), a.out was ill-suited for this hardware, so many formats were developed to get to a better performance from this hardware than the limited, simple a.out format could offer. Things like COFF, ECOFF, and a few obscure others were invented and their limitations explored before things seemed to settle on ELF. In addition, program sizes were getting huge and disks (and physical memory) were still relatively small so the concept of a shared library was born. The VM system also became more sophisticated. While each one of these advancements was done using the a.out format, its usefulness was stretched more and more with each new feature. In addition, people wanted to dynamically load things at run time, or to junk parts of their program after the init code had run to save in core memory and/or swap space. Languages became more sophistocated and people wanted code called before main automatically. Lots of hacks were done to the a.out format to allow all of these things to happen, and they basically worked for a time. In time, a.out wasn't up to handling all these problems without an ever increasing overhead in code and complexity. While ELF solved many of these problems, it would be painful to switch from the system that basically worked. So ELF had to wait until it was more painful to remain with a.out than it was to migrate to ELF. However, as time passed, the build tools that FreeBSD derived their build tools from (the assembler and loader especially) evolved in two parallel trees. The FreeBSD tree added shared libraries and fixed some bugs. The GNU folks that originally write these programs rewrote them and added simpler support for building cross compilers, plugging in different formats at will, etc. Since many people wanted to build cross compilers targeting FreeBSD, they were out of luck since the older sources that FreeBSD had for as and ld weren't up to the task. The new gnu tools chain (binutils) does support cross compiling, ELF, shared libraries, C++ extnensions, etc. In addition, many vendors are releasing ELF binaries, and it is a good thing for FreeBSD to run them. And if it is running ELF binaries, why bother having a.out any more? It is a tired old horse that has proven useful for a long time, but it is time to turn him out to pasture for his long, faithful years of service. ELF is more expressive than a.out and will allow more extensibility in the base system. The ELF tools are better maintained, and offer cross compilation support, which is important to many people. ELF may be a little slower than a.out, but trying to measure it can be difficult. There are also numerous details that are different between the two in how they map pages, handle init code, etc. None of these are very important, but they are differences. In time support for a.out will be moved out of the GENERIC kernel, and eventually removed from the kernel once the need to run legacy a.out programs is past. Why won't chmod change the permissions on symlinks? Symlinks do not have permissions, and by default, &man.chmod.1; will not follow symlinks to change the permissions on the target file. So if you have a file, foo, and a symlink to that file, bar, then this command will always succeed. &prompt.user; chmod g-w bar However, the permissions on foo will not have changed. You have to use either or together with the option to make this work. See the chmod and symlink man pages for more info. The option does a RECURSIVE chmod. Be careful about specifying directories or symlinks to directories to chmod. If you want to change the permissions of a directory referenced by a symlink, use chmod without any options and follow the symlink with a trailing slash (/). For example, if foo is a symlink to directory bar, and you want to change the permissions of foo (actually bar), you would do something like: &prompt.user; chmod 555 foo/ With the trailing slash, chmod will follow the symlink, foo, to change the permissions of the directory, bar. Why are login names still restricted to 8 characters? You'd think it'd be easy enough to change UT_NAMESIZE and rebuild the whole world, and everything would just work. Unfortunately there are often scads of applications and utilities (including system tools) that have hard-coded small numbers (not always 8 or 9, but oddball ones like 15 and 20) in structures and buffers. Not only will this get you log files which are trashed (due to variable-length records getting written when fixed records were expected), but it can break Sun's NIS clients and potentially cause other problems in interacting with other UNIX systems. In FreeBSD 3.0 and later, the maximum name length has been increased to 16 characters and those various utilities with hard-coded name sizes have been found and fixed. The fact that this touched so many areas of the system is why, in fact, the change was not made until 3.0. If you're absolutely confident in your ability to find and fix these sorts of problems for yourself when and if they pop up, you can increase the login name length in earlier releases by editing /usr/include/utmp.h and changing UT_NAMESIZE accordingly. You must also update MAXLOGNAME in /usr/include/sys/param.h to match the UT_NAMESIZE change. Finally, if you build from sources, don't forget that /usr/include is updated each time! Change the appropriate files in /usr/src/.. instead. Can I run DOS binaries under FreeBSD? Yes, starting with version 3.0 you can using BSDI's doscmd DOS emulation which has been integrated and enhanced. Send mail to The FreeBSD emulation discussion list if you're interested in joining this ongoing effort! For pre-3.0 systems, there is a neat utility called pcemu in the ports collection which emulates an 8088 and enough BIOS services to run DOS text mode applications. It requires the X Window System (provided as XFree86). What is sup, and how do I use it? SUP stands for Software Update Protocol, and was developed by CMU for keeping their development trees in sync. We used it to keep remote sites in sync with our central development sources. SUP is not bandwidth friendly, and has been retired. The current recommended method to keep your sources up to date is Handbook entry on CVSup How cool is FreeBSD? Q. Has anyone done any temperature testing while running FreeBSD? I know Linux runs cooler than dos, but have never seen a mention of FreeBSD. It seems to run really hot. A. No, but we have done numerous taste tests on blindfolded volunteers who have also had 250 micrograms of LSD-25 administered beforehand. 35% of the volunteers said that FreeBSD tasted sort of orange, whereas Linux tasted like purple haze. Neither group mentioned any particular variances in temperature that I can remember. We eventually had to throw the results of this survey out entirely anyway when we found that too many volunteers were wandering out of the room during the tests, thus skewing the results. I think most of the volunteers are at Apple now, working on their new scratch and sniff GUI. It's a funny old business we're in! Seriously, both FreeBSD and Linux use the HLT (halt) instruction when the system is idle thus lowering its energy consumption and therefore the heat it generates. Also if you have APM (advanced power management) configured, then FreeBSD can also put the CPU into a low power mode. Who's scratching in my memory banks?? Q. Is there anything odd that FreeBSD does when compiling the kernel which would cause the memory to make a scratchy sound? When compiling (and for a brief moment after recognizing the floppy drive upon startup, as well), a strange scratchy sound emanates from what appears to be the memory banks. A. Yes! You'll see frequent references to daemons in the BSD documentation, and what most people don't know is that this refers to genuine, non-corporeal entities that now possess your computer. The scratchy sound coming from your memory is actually high-pitched whispering exchanged among the daemons as they best decide how to deal with various system administration tasks. If the noise gets to you, a good fdisk /mbr from DOS will get rid of them, but don't be surprised if they react adversely and try to stop you. In fact, if at any point during the exercise you hear the satanic voice of Bill Gates coming from the built-in speaker, take off running and don't ever look back! Freed from the counterbalancing influence of the BSD daemons, the twin demons of DOS and Windows are often able to re-assert total control over your machine to the eternal damnation of your soul. Given a choice, I think I'd prefer to get used to the scratchy noises, myself! What does MFC mean? MFC is an acronym for Merged From -CURRENT. It's used in the CVS logs to denote when a change was migrated from the CURRENT to the STABLE branches. What does BSD mean? It stands for something in a secret language that only members can know. It doesn't translate literally but its ok to tell you that BSD's translation is something between, Formula-1 Racing Team, Penguins are tasty snacks, and We have a better sense of humor than Linux. :-) Seriously, BSD is an acronym for Berkeley Software Distribution, which is the name the Berkeley CSRG (Computer Systems Research Group) chose for their Unix distribution way back when. What is a repo-copy? A repo-copy (which is a short form of repository copy) refers to the direct copying of files within the CVS repository. Without a repo-copy, if a file needed to be copied or moved to another place in the repository, the committer would run cvs add to put the file in its new location, and then cvs rm on the old file if the old copy was being removed. The disadvantage of this method is that the history (i.e. the entries in the CVS logs) of the file would not be copied to the new location. As the FreeBSD Project considers this history very useful, a repository copy is often used instead. This is a process where one of the repository meisters will copy the files directly within the repository, rather than using the cvs program. Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? The really, really short answer is that you shouldn't. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed doesn't mean you should stop others from building one just because you don't like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change. The longer and more complete answer is that after a very long argument about whether &man.sleep.1; should take fractional second arguments, &a.phk; posted a long message entitled A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass.... The appropriate portions of that message are quoted below.
&a.phk; on freebsd-hackers, October 2, 1999 What is it about this bike shed? Some of you have asked me. It's a long story, or rather it's an old story, but it is quite short actually. C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a book in the early 1960'ies, called Parkinson's Law, which contains a lot of insight into the dynamics of management. [snip a bit of commentary on the book] In the specific example involving the bike shed, the other vital component is an atomic power-plant, I guess that illustrates the age of the book. Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions. Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books. A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here. In Denmark we call it setting your fingerprint. It is about personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and say There! I did that. It is a strong trait in politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just think about footsteps in wet cement.
How many FreeBSD hackers does it take to change a lightbulb? One thousand, one hundred and seventy-two: Twenty-three to complain to -CURRENT about the lights being out; Four to claim that it is a configuration problem, and that such matters really belong on -questions; Three to submit PRs about it, one of which is misfiled under doc and consists only of "it's dark"; One to commit an untested lightbulb which breaks buildworld, then back it out five minutes later; Eight to flame the PR originators for not including patches in their PRs; Five to complain about buildworld being broken; Thirty-one to answer that it works for them, and they must have cvsupped at a bad time; One to post a patch for a new lightbulb to -hackers; One to complain that he had patches for this three years ago, but when he sent them to -CURRENT they were just ignored, and he has had bad experiences with the PR system; besides, the proposed new lightbulb is non-reflexive; Thirty-seven to scream that lightbulbs do not belong in the base system, that committers have no right to do things like this without consulting the Community, and WHAT IS -CORE DOING ABOUT IT!? Two hundred to complain about the color of the bicycle shed; Three to point out that the patch breaks style(9); Seventeen to complain that the proposed new lightbulb is under GPL; Five hundred and eighty-six to engage in a flame war about the comparative advantages of the GPL, the BSD license, the MIT license, the NPL, and the personal hygiene of unnamed FSF founders; Seven to move various portions of the thread to -chat and -advocacy; One to commit the suggested lightbulb, even though it shines dimmer than the old one; Two to back it out with a furious flame of a commit message, arguing that FreeBSD is better off in the dark than with a dim lightbulb; Forty-six to argue vociferously about the backing out of the dim lightbulb and demanding a statement from -core; Eleven to request a smaller lightbulb so it will fit their Tamagotchi if we ever decide to port FreeBSD to that platform; Seventy-three to complain about the SNR on -hackers and -chat and unsubscribe in protest; Thirteen to post "unsubscribe", "How do I unsubscribe?", or "Please remove me from the list", followed by the usual footer; One to commit a working lightbulb while everybody is too busy flaming everybody else to notice; Thirty-one to point out that the new lightbulb would shine 0.364% brighter if compiled with TenDRA (although it will have to be reshaped into a cube), and that FreeBSD should therefore switch to TenDRA instead of EGCS; One to complain that the new lightbulb lacks fairings; Nine (including the PR originators) to ask "what is MFC?"; Fifty-seven to complain about the lights being out two weeks after the bulb has been changed. &a.nik; adds: I was laughing quite hard at this. And then I thought, "Hang on, shouldn't there be '1 to document it.' in that list somewhere?" And then I was enlightened :-) This entry is Copyright (c) 1999 &a.des;. Please do not reproduce without attribution. For serious FreeBSD hackers only What are SNAPs and RELEASEs? There are currently three active/semi-active branches in the FreeBSD CVS Repository (the RELENG_2 branch is probably only changed twice a year, which is why there are only three active branches of development): RELENG_2_2 AKA 2.2-STABLE RELENG_3 AKA 3.X-STABLE RELENG_4 AKA 4-STABLE HEAD AKA -CURRENT AKA 5.0-CURRENT HEAD is not an actual branch tag, like the other two; it's simply a symbolic constant for the current, non-branched development stream which we simply refer to as -CURRENT. Right now, -CURRENT is the 5.0 development stream and the 4-STABLE branch, RELENG_4, forked off from -CURRENT in Mar 2000. The 2.2-STABLE branch, RELENG_2_2, departed -CURRENT in November 1996, and has pretty much been retired. How do I make my own custom release? To make a release you need to do three things: First, you need to be running a kernel with the vn driver configured in. Add this to your kernel config file and build a new kernel: pseudo-device vn #Vnode driver (turns a file into a device) Second, you have to have the whole CVS repository at hand. To get this you can use CVSUP but in your supfile set the release name to cvs and remove any tag or date fields: *default prefix=/home/ncvs *default base=/a *default host=cvsup.FreeBSD.org *default release=cvs *default delete compress use-rel-suffix ## Main Source Tree src-all src-eBones src-secure # Other stuff ports-all www doc-all Then run cvsup -g supfile to suck all the good bits onto your box... Finally, you need a chunk of empty space to build into. Let's say it's in /some/big/filesystem, and from the example above you've got the CVS repository in /home/ncvs: &prompt.root; setenv CVSROOT /home/ncvs # or export CVSROOT=/home/ncvs &prompt.root; cd /usr/src &prompt.root; make buildworld &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/release &prompt.root; make release BUILDNAME=3.0-MY-SNAP CHROOTDIR=/some/big/filesystem/release
Please note that you do not need to build world if you already have a populated /usr/obj.
An entire release will be built in /some/big/filesystem/release and you will have a full FTP-type installation in /some/big/filesystem/release/R/ftp when you're done. If you want to build your SNAP along some other branch than -CURRENT, you can also add RELEASETAG=SOMETAG to the make release command line above, e.g. RELEASETAG=RELENG_2_2 would build an up-to-the- minute 2.2-STABLE snapshot. How do I create customized installation disks? The entire process of creating installation disks and source and binary archives is automated by various targets in /usr/src/release/Makefile. The information there should be enough to get you started. However, it should be said that this involves doing a make world and will therefore take up a lot of time and disk space. make world clobbers my existing installed binaries. Yes, this is the general idea; as its name might suggest, make world rebuilds every system binary from scratch, so you can be certain of having a clean and consistent environment at the end (which is why it takes so long). If the environment variable DESTDIR is defined while running make world or make install, the newly-created binaries will be deposited in a directory tree identical to the installed one, rooted at ${DESTDIR}. Some random combination of shared libraries modifications and program rebuilds can cause this to fail in make world however. When my system boots, it says (bus speed defaulted). The Adaptec 1542 SCSI host adapters allow the user to configure their bus access speed in software. Previous versions of the 1542 driver tried to determine the fastest usable speed and set the adapter to that. We found that this breaks some users' systems, so you now have to define the TUNE_1542 kernel configuration option in order to have this take place. Using it on those systems where it works may make your disks run faster, but on those systems where it doesn't, your data could be corrupted. Can I follow current with limited Internet access? Yes, you can do this without downloading the whole source tree by using the CTM facility. How did you split the distribution into 240k files? Newer BSD based systems have a option to split that allows them to split files on arbitrary byte boundaries. Here is an example from /usr/src/Makefile. bin-tarball: (cd ${DISTDIR}; \ tar cf - . \ gzip --no-name -9 -c | \ split -b 240640 - \ ${RELEASEDIR}/tarballs/bindist/bin_tgz.) I've written a kernel extension, who do I send it to? Please take a look at The Handbook entry on how to submit code. And thanks for the thought! How are Plug N Play ISA cards detected and initialized? By: Frank Durda IV In a nutshell, there a few I/O ports that all of the PnP boards respond to when the host asks if anyone is out there. So when the PnP probe routine starts, he asks if there are any PnP boards present, and all the PnP boards respond with their model # to a I/O read of the same port, so the probe routine gets a wired-OR yes to that question. At least one bit will be on in that reply. Then the probe code is able to cause boards with board model IDs (assigned by Microsoft/Intel) lower than X to go off-line. It then looks to see if any boards are still responding to the query. If the answer was 0, then there are no boards with IDs above X. Now probe asks if there are any boards below X. If so, probe knows there are boards with a model numbers below X. Probe then asks for boards greater than X-(limit/4) to go off-line. If repeats the query. By repeating this semi-binary search of IDs-in-range enough times, the probing code will eventually identify all PnP boards present in a given machine with a number of iterations that is much lower than what 2^64 would take. The IDs are two 32-bit fields (hence 2ˆ64) + 8 bit checksum. The first 32 bits are a vendor identifier. They never come out and say it, but it appears to be assumed that different types of boards from the same vendor could have different 32-bit vendor ids. The idea of needing 32 bits just for unique manufacturers is a bit excessive. The lower 32 bits are a serial #, ethernet address, something that makes this one board unique. The vendor must never produce a second board that has the same lower 32 bits unless the upper 32 bits are also different. So you can have multiple boards of the same type in the machine and the full 64 bits will still be unique. The 32 bit groups can never be all zero. This allows the wired-OR to show non-zero bits during the initial binary search. Once the system has identified all the board IDs present, it will reactivate each board, one at a time (via the same I/O ports), and find out what resources the given board needs, what interrupt choices are available, etc. A scan is made over all the boards to collect this information. This info is then combined with info from any ECU files on the hard disk or wired into the MLB BIOS. The ECU and BIOS PnP support for hardware on the MLB is usually synthetic, and the peripherals don't really do genuine PnP. However by examining the BIOS info plus the ECU info, the probe routines can cause the devices that are PnP to avoid those devices the probe code cannot relocate. Then the PnP devices are visited once more and given their I/O, DMA, IRQ and Memory-map address assignments. The devices will then appear at those locations and remain there until the next reboot, although there is nothing that says you can't move them around whenever you want. There is a lot of oversimplification above, but you should get the general idea. Microsoft took over some of the primary printer status ports to do PnP, on the logic that no boards decoded those addresses for the opposing I/O cycles. I found a genuine IBM printer board that did decode writes of the status port during the early PnP proposal review period, but MS said tough. So they do a write to the printer status port for setting addresses, plus that use that address + 0x800, and a third I/O port for reading that can be located anywhere between 0x200 and 0x3ff. Does FreeBSD support architectures other than the x86? Several groups of people have expressed interest in working on multi-architecture ports for FreeBSD and the FreeBSD/AXP (ALPHA) port is one such effort which has been quite successful, now available at ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/alpha. The ALPHA port currently runs on a growing number of ALPHA machine types, among them the AlphaStation, AXPpci, PC164, Miata and Multia models. For status information, please join the freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.org mailing list. Interest has also been expressed in a port of FreeBSD to the SPARC architecture, join the freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.org mailing list if you are interested in joining that project. Most recent additions to the list of upcoming plaforms are IA-64 and PowerPC, join the freebsd-ia64@FreeBSD.org or/and freebsd-ppc@FreeBSD.org mailing lists for more information. For general discussion on new architectures, join the freebsd-platforms@FreeBSD.org mailing list. I need a major number for a device driver I've written. This depends on whether or not you plan on making the driver publicly available. If you do, then please send us a copy of the driver source code, plus the appropriate modifications to files.i386, a sample configuration file entry, and the appropriate MAKEDEV code to create any special files your device uses. If you do not, or are unable to because of licensing restrictions, then character major number 32 and block major number 8 have been reserved specifically for this purpose; please use them. In any case, we'd appreciate hearing about your driver on freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org. Alternative layout policies for directories In answer to the question of alternative layout policies for directories, the scheme that is currently in use is unchanged from what I wrote in 1983. I wrote that policy for the original fast filesystem, and never revisited it. It works well at keeping cylinder groups from filling up. As several of you have noted, it works poorly for find. Most filesystems are created from archives that were created by a depth first search (aka ftw). These directories end up being striped across the cylinder groups thus creating a worst possible senario for future depth first searches. If one knew the total number of directories to be created, the solution would be to create (total / fs_ncg) per cylinder group before moving on. Obviously, one would have to create some heuristic to guess at this number. Even using a small fixed number like say 10 would make an order of magnitude improvement. To differentiate restores from normal operation (when the current algorithm is probably more sensible), you could use the clustering of up to 10 if they were all done within a ten second window. Anyway, my conclusion is that this is an area ripe for experimentation. Kirk McKusick, September 1998 Making the most of a kernel panic [This section was extracted from a mail written by &a.wpaul; on the freebsd-current mailing list by &a.des;, who fixed a few typos and added the bracketed comments] From: Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> Subject: Re: the fs fun never stops To: ben@rosengart.com Date: Sun, 20 Sep 1998 15:22:50 -0400 (EDT) Cc: current@FreeBSD.org [<ben@rosengart.com> posted the following panic message] > Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode > fault virtual address = 0x40 > fault code = supervisor read, page not present > instruction pointer = 0x8:0xf014a7e5 ^^^^^^^^^^ > stack pointer = 0x10:0xf4ed6f24 > frame pointer = 0x10:0xf4ed6f28 > code segment = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b > = DPL 0, pres 1, def32 1, gran 1 > processor eflags = interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL = 0 > current process = 80 (mount) > interrupt mask = > trap number = 12 > panic: page fault [When] you see a message like this, it's not enough to just reproduce it and send it in. The instruction pointer value that I highlighted up there is important; unfortunately, it's also configuration dependent. In other words, the value varies depending on the exact kernel image that you're using. If you're using a GENERIC kernel image from one of the snapshots, then it's possible for somebody else to track down the offending function, but if you're running a custom kernel then only you can tell us where the fault occured. What you should do is this: Write down the instruction pointer value. Note that the 0x8: part at the begining is not significant in this case: it's the 0xf0xxxxxx part that we want. When the system reboots, do the following: &prompt.user; nm -n /kernel.that.caused.the.panic | grep f0xxxxxx where f0xxxxxx is the instruction pointer value. The odds are you will not get an exact match since the symbols in the kernel symbol table are for the entry points of functions and the instruction pointer address will be somewhere inside a function, not at the start. If you don't get an exact match, omit the last digit from the instruction pointer value and try again, i.e.: &prompt.user; nm -n /kernel.that.caused.the.panic | grep f0xxxxx If that doesn't yield any results, chop off another digit. Repeat until you get some sort of output. The result will be a possible list of functions which caused the panic. This is a less than exact mechanism for tracking down the point of failure, but it's better than nothing. I see people constantly show panic messages like this but rarely do I see someone take the time to match up the instruction pointer with a function in the kernel symbol table. The best way to track down the cause of a panic is by capturing a crash dump, then using gdb(1) to to a stack trace on the crash dump. Of course, this depends on gdb(1) in -CURRENT working correctly, which I can't guarantee (I recall somebody saying that the new ELF-ized gdb(1) didn't handle kernel crash dumps correctly: somebody should check this before 3.0 goes out of beta or there'll be a lot of red faces after the CDs ship). In any case, the method I normally use is this: Set up a kernel config file, optionally adding options DDB if you think you need the kernel debugger for something. (I use this mainly for setting beakpoints if I suspect an infinite loop condition of some kind.) Use config -g KERNELCONFIG to set up the build directory. cd /sys/compile/ KERNELCONFIG; make Wait for kernel to finish compiling. make install reboot The &man.make.1; process will have built two kernels. kernel and kernel.debug. kernel was installed as /kernel, while kernel.debug can be used as the source of debugging symbols for gdb(1). To make sure you capture a crash dump, you need edit /etc/rc.conf and set dumpdev to point to your swap partition. This will cause the rc(8) scripts to use the dumpon(8) command to enable crash dumps. You can also run dumpon(8) manually. After a panic, the crash dump can be recovered using savecore(8); if dumpdev is set in /etc/rc.conf, the rc(8) scripts will run savecore(8) automatically and put the crash dump in /var/crash. FreeBSD crash dumps are usually the same size as the physical RAM size of your machine. That is, if you have 64MB of RAM, you will get a 64MB crash dump. Therefore you must make sure there's enough space in /var/crash to hold the dump. Alternatively, you run savecore(8) manually and have it recover the crash dump to another directory where you have more room. It's possible to limit the size of the crash dump by using options MAXMEM=(foo) to set the amount of memory the kernel will use to something a little more sensible. For example, if you have 128MB of RAM, you can limit the kernel's memory usage to 16MB so that your crash dump size will be 16MB instead of 128MB. Once you have recovered the crash dump, you can get a stack trace with gdb(1) as follows: &prompt.user; gdb -k /sys/compile/KERNELCONFIG/kernel.debug /var/crash/vmcore.0 (gdb) where Note that there may be several screens worth of information; ideally you should use script(1) to capture all of them. Using the unstripped kernel image with all the debug symbols should show the exact line of kernel source code where the panic occured. Usually you have to read the stack trace from the bottom up in order to trace the exact sequence of events that lead to the crash. You can also use gdb(1) to print out the contents of various variables or structures in order to examine the system state at the time of the crash. Now, if you're really insane and have a second computer, you can also configure gdb(1) to do remote debugging such that you can use gdb(1) on one system to debug the kernel on another system, including setting breakpoints, single-stepping through the kernel code, just like you can do with a normal user-mode program. I haven't played with this yet as I don't often have the chance to set up two machines side by side for debugging purposes. [Bill adds: "I forgot to mention one thing: if you have DDB enabled and the kernel drops into the debugger, you can force a panic (and a crash dump) just by typing 'panic' at the ddb prompt. It may stop in the debugger again during the panic phase. If it does, type 'continue' and it will finish the crash dump." -ed] dlsym() stopped working for ELF executables! The ELF toolchain does not, by default, make the symbols defined in an executable visible to the dynamic linker. Consequently dlsym() searches on handles obtained from calls to dlopen(NULL, flags) will fail to find such symbols. If you want to search, using dlsym(), for symbols present in the main executable of a process, you need to link the executable using the option to the ELF linker. Increasing or reducing the kernel address space By default, the kernel address space is 256 MB on FreeBSD 3.x and 1 GB on FreeBSD 4.x. If you run a network-intensive server (e.g. a large FTP or HTTP server), you might find that 256 MB is not enough. So how do you increase the address space? There are two aspects to this. First, you need to tell the kernel to reserve a larger portion of the address space for itself. Second, since the kernel is loaded at the top of the address space, you need to lower the load address so it doesn't bump its head against the ceiling. The first goal is achieved by increasing the value of NKPDE in src/sys/i386/include/pmap.h. Here's what it looks like for a 1 GB address space: #ifndef NKPDE #ifdef SMP #define NKPDE 254 /* addressable number of page tables/pde's */ #else #define NKPDE 255 /* addressable number of page tables/pde's */ #endif /* SMP */ #endif To find the correct value of NKPDE, divide the desired address space size (in megabytes) by four, then subtract one for UP and two for SMP. To achieve the second goal, you need to compute the correct load address: simply subtract the address space size (in bytes) from 0x100100000; the result is 0xc0100000 for a 1 GB address space. Set LOAD_ADDRESS in src/sys/i386/conf/Makefile.i386 to that value; then set the location counter in the beginning of the section listing in src/sys/i386/conf/kernel.script to the same value, as follows: OUTPUT_FORMAT("elf32-i386", "elf32-i386", "elf32-i386") OUTPUT_ARCH(i386) ENTRY(btext) SEARCH_DIR(/usr/lib); SEARCH_DIR(/usr/obj/elf/home/src/tmp/usr/i386-unknown-freebsdelf/lib); SECTIONS { /* Read-only sections, merged into text segment: */ . = 0xc0100000 + SIZEOF_HEADERS; .interp : { *(.interp) } Then reconfig and rebuild your kernel. You will probably have problems with ps(1), top(1) and the like; make world should take care of it (or a manual rebuild of libkvm, ps and top after copying the patched pmap.h to /usr/include/vm/. NOTE: the size of the kernel address space must be a multiple of four megabytes. [&a.dg; adds: I think the kernel address space needs to be a power of two, but I'm not certain about that. The old(er) boot code used to monkey with the high order address bits and I think expected at least 256MB granularity.] Acknowledgments
FreeBSD Core Team If you see a problem with this FAQ, or wish to submit an entry, please mail the &a.faq;. We appreciate your feedback, and cannot make this a better FAQ without your help!
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