diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/printing/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/printing/chapter.sgml index 89ed7a371b..158d7070b8 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/printing/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/printing/chapter.sgml @@ -1,4624 +1,4624 @@ Printing Contributed by &a.kelly;, 30 September 1995. Restructured and updated by &a.jim;, March 2000. Synopsis LPD spooling system printing In order to use printers with FreeBSD, you will need to set them up to work with the Berkeley line printer spooling system, also known as the LPD spooling system. It is the standard printer control system in FreeBSD. This chapter introduces the LPD spooling system, often simply called LPD, and will guide you through its configuration. If you are already familiar with LPD or another printer spooling system, you may wish to skip to section Setting up the spooling system. Introduction LPD controls everything about a host's printers. It is responsible for a number of things: It controls access to attached printers and printers attached to other hosts on the network. print jobs It enables users to submit files to be printed; these submissions are known as jobs. It prevents multiple users from accessing a printer at the same time by maintaining a queue for each printer. It can print header pages (also known as banner or burst pages) so users can easily find jobs they have printed in a stack of printouts. It takes care of communications parameters for printers connected on serial ports. It can send jobs over the network to a LPD spooler on another host. It can run special filters to format jobs to be printed for various printer languages or printer capabilities. It can account for printer usage. Through a configuration file (/etc/printcap), and by providing the special filter programs, you can enable the LPD system to do all or some subset of the above for a great variety of printer hardware. Why You Should Use the Spooler If you are the sole user of your system, you may be wondering why you should bother with the spooler when you do not need access control, header pages, or printer accounting. While it is possible to enable direct access to a printer, you should use the spooler anyway since: LPD prints jobs in the background; you do not have to wait for data to be copied to the printer. TeX LPD can conveniently run a job to be printed through filters to add date/time headers or convert a special file format (such as a TeX DVI file) into a format the printer will understand. You will not have to do these steps manually. Many free and commercial programs that provide a print feature usually expect to talk to the spooler on your system. By setting up the spooling system, you will more easily support other software you may later add or already have. Basic Setup To use printers with the LPD spooling system, you will need to set up both your printer hardware and the LPD software. This document describes two levels of setup: See section Simple Printer Setup to learn how to connect a printer, tell LPD how to communicate with it, and print plain text files to the printer. See section Advanced Printer Setup to find out how to print a variety of special file formats, to print header pages, to print across a network, to control access to printers, and to do printer accounting. Simple Printer Setup This section tells how to configure printer hardware and the LPD software to use the printer. It teaches the basics: Section Hardware Setup gives some hints on connecting the printer to a port on your computer. Section Software Setup shows how to setup the LPD spooler configuration file (/etc/printcap). If you are setting up a printer that uses a network protocol to accept data to print instead of a serial or parallel interface, see Printers With Networked Data Stream Interfaces. Although this section is called Simple Printer Setup, it is actually fairly complex. Getting the printer to work with your computer and the LPD spooler is the hardest part. The advanced options like header pages and accounting are fairly easy once you get the printer working. Hardware Setup This section tells about the various ways you can connect a printer to your PC. It talks about the kinds of ports and cables, and also the kernel configuration you may need to enable FreeBSD to speak to the printer. If you have already connected your printer and have successfully printed with it under another operating system, you can probably skip to section Software Setup. Ports and Cables Nearly all printers you can get for a PC today support one or both of the following interfaces: printerserial Serial interfaces use a serial port on your computer to send data to the printer. Serial interfaces are common in the computer industry and cables are readily available and also easy to construct. Serial interfaces sometimes need special cables and might require you to configure somewhat complex communications options. printerparallel Parallel interfaces use a parallel port on your computer to send data to the printer. Parallel interfaces are common in the PC market. Cables are readily available but more difficult to construct by hand. There are usually no communications options with parallel interfaces, making their configuration exceedingly simple. centronics (see parallel printers) Parallel interfaces are sometimes known as Centronics interfaces, named after the connector type on the printer. In general, serial interfaces are slower than parallel interfaces. Parallel interfaces usually offer just one-way communication (computer to printer) while serial gives you two-way. Many newer parallel ports and printers can communicate in both directions under FreeBSD when a IEEE1284 compliant cable is used. PostScript Usually, the only time you need two-way communication with the printer is if the printer speaks PostScript. PostScript printers can be very verbose. In fact, PostScript jobs are actually programs sent to the printer; they need not produce paper at all and may return results directly to the computer. PostScript also uses two-way communication to tell the computer about problems, such as errors in the PostScript program or paper jams. Your users may be appreciative of such information. Furthermore, the best way to do effective accounting with a PostScript printer requires two-way communication: you ask the printer for its page count (how many pages it has printed in its lifetime), then send the user's job, then ask again for its page count. Subtract the two values and you know how much paper to charge the user. Parallel Ports To hook up a printer using a parallel interface, connect the Centronics cable between the printer and the computer. The instructions that came with the printer, the computer, or both should give you complete guidance. Remember which parallel port you used on the computer. The first parallel port is /dev/lpt0 to FreeBSD; the second is /dev/lpt1, and so on. Serial Ports To hook up a printer using a serial interface, connect the proper serial cable between the printer and the computer. The instructions that came with the printer, the computer, or both should give you complete guidance. If you are unsure what the proper serial cable is, you may wish to try one of the following alternatives: A modem cable connects each pin of the connector on one end of the cable straight through to its corresponding pin of the connector on the other end. This type of cable is also known as a DTE-to-DCE cable. null-modem cable A null-modem cable connects some pins straight through, swaps others (send data to receive data, for example), and shorts some internally in each connector hood. This type of cable is also known as a DTE-to-DTE cable. A serial printer cable, required for some unusual printers, is like the null-modem cable, but sends some signals to their counterparts instead of being internally shorted. baud rate parity flow control protocol You should also set up the communications parameters for the printer, usually through front-panel controls or DIP switches on the printer. Choose the highest bps (bits per second, sometimes baud rate) rate that both your computer and the printer can support. Choose 7 or 8 data bits; none, even, or odd parity; and 1 or 2 stop bits. Also choose a flow control protocol: either none, or XON/XOFF (also known as in-band or software) flow control. Remember these settings for the software configuration that follows. Software Setup This section describes the software setup necessary to print with the LPD spooling system in FreeBSD. Here is an outline of the steps involved: Configure your kernel, if necessary, for the port you are using for the printer; section Kernel Configuration tells you what you need to do. Set the communications mode for the parallel port, if you are using a parallel port; section Setting the Communication Mode for the Parallel Port gives details. Test if the operating system can send data to the printer. Section Checking Printer Communications gives some suggestions on how to do this. Set up LPD for the printer by modifying the file /etc/printcap. You will find out how to do this later in this chapter. Kernel Configuration The operating system kernel is compiled to work with a specific set of devices. The serial or parallel interface for your printer is a part of that set. Therefore, it might be necessary to add support for an additional serial or parallel port if your kernel is not already configured for one. To find out if the kernel you are currently using supports a serial interface, type: &prompt.root; dmesg | grep sioN Where N is the number of the serial port, starting from zero. If you see output similar to the following: sio2 at 0x3e8-0x3ef irq 5 on isa sio2: type 16550A then the kernel supports the port. To find out if the kernel supports a parallel interface, type: &prompt.root; dmesg | grep lptN Where N is the number of the parallel port, starting from zero. If you see output similar to the following lpt0 at 0x378-0x37f on isa then the kernel supports the port. You might have to reconfigure your kernel in order for the operating system to recognize and use the parallel or serial port you are using for the printer. To add support for a serial port, see the section on kernel configuration. To add support for a parallel port, see that section and the section that follows. Adding <filename>/dev</filename> Entries for the Ports Even though the kernel may support communication along a serial or parallel port, you will still need a software interface through which programs running on the system can send and receive data. That is what entries in the /dev directory are for. To add a /dev entry for a port: Become root with the &man.su.1; command. Enter the root password when prompted. Change to the /dev directory: &prompt.root; cd /dev Type: &prompt.root; ./MAKEDEV port Where port is the device entry for the port you want to make. Use lpt0 for the first parallel port, lpt1 for the second, and so on; use ttyd0 for the first serial port, ttyd1 for the second, and so on. Type: &prompt.root; ls -l port to make sure the device entry got created. Setting the Communication Mode for the Parallel Port When you are using the parallel interface, you can choose whether FreeBSD should use interrupt-driven or polled communication with the printer. The interrupt-driven method is the default with the GENERIC kernel. With this method, the operating system uses an IRQ line to determine when the printer is ready for data. The polled method directs the operating system to repeatedly ask the printer if it is ready for more data. When it responds ready, the kernel sends more data. The interrupt-driven method is somewhat faster but uses up a precious IRQ line. You should use whichever one works. You can set the communications mode in two ways: by configuring the kernel or by using the &man.lptcontrol.8; program. To set the communications mode by configuring the kernel: Edit your kernel configuration file. Look for or add an lpt0 entry. If you are setting up the second parallel port, use lpt1 instead. Use lpt2 for the third port, and so on. If you want interrupt-driven mode, add the irq specifier: device lpt0 at isa? port? tty irq N vector lptintr Where N is the IRQ number for your computer's parallel port. If you want polled mode, do not add the irq specifier: device lpt0 at isa? port? tty vector lptintr Save the file. Then configure, build, and install the kernel, then reboot. See kernel configuration for more details. To set the communications mode with &man.lptcontrol.8;: Type: &prompt.root; lptcontrol -i -u N to set interrupt-driven mode for lptN. Type: &prompt.root; lptcontrol -p -u N to set polled-mode for lptN. You could put these commands in your /etc/rc.local file to set the mode each time your system boots. See &man.lptcontrol.8; for more information. Checking Printer Communications Before proceeding to configure the spooling system, you should make sure the operating system can successfully send data to your printer. It is a lot easier to debug printer communication and the spooling system separately. To test the printer, we will send some text to it. For printers that can immediately print characters sent to them, the program &man.lptest.1; is perfect: it generates all 96 printable ASCII characters in 96 lines. PostScript For a PostScript (or other language-based) printer, we will need a more sophisticated test. A small PostScript program, such as the following, will suffice: %!PS 100 100 moveto 300 300 lineto stroke 310 310 moveto /Helvetica findfont 12 scalefont setfont (Is this thing working?) show showpage The above PostScript code can be placed into a file and used as shown in the examples appearing in the following sections. PCL When this document refers to a printer language, it is assuming a language like PostScript, and not Hewlett Packard's PCL. Although PCL has great functionality, you can intermingle plain text with its escape sequences. PostScript cannot directly print plain text, and that is the kind of printer language for which we must make special accommodations. Checking a Parallel Printer printerparallel This section tells you how to check if FreeBSD can communicate with a printer connected to a parallel port. To test a printer on a parallel port: Become root with &man.su.1;. Send data to the printer. If the printer can print plain text, then use &man.lptest.1;. Type: &prompt.root; lptest > /dev/lptN Where N is the number of the parallel port, starting from zero. If the printer understands PostScript or other printer language, then send a small program to the printer. Type: &prompt.root; cat > /dev/lptN Then, line by line, type the program carefully as you cannot edit a line once you have pressed RETURN or ENTER. When you have finished entering the program, press CONTROL+D, or whatever your end of file key is. Alternatively, you can put the program in a file and type: &prompt.root; cat file > /dev/lptN Where file is the name of the file containing the program you want to send to the printer. You should see something print. Do not worry if the text does not look right; we will fix such things later. Checking a Serial Printer printerserial This section tells you how to check if FreeBSD can communicate with a printer on a serial port. To test a printer on a serial port: Become root with &man.su.1;. Edit the file /etc/remote. Add the following entry: printer:dv=/dev/port:br#bps-rate:pa=parity bits-per-second serial port parity Where port is the device entry for the serial port (ttyd0, ttyd1, etc.), bps-rate is the bits-per-second rate at which the printer communicates, and parity is the parity required by the printer (either even, odd, none, or zero). Here is a sample entry for a printer connected via a serial line to the third serial port at 19200 bps with no parity: printer:dv=/dev/ttyd2:br#19200:pa=none Connect to the printer with &man.tip.1;. Type: &prompt.root; tip printer If this step does not work, edit the file /etc/remote again and try using /dev/cuaaN instead of /dev/ttydN. Send data to the printer. If the printer can print plain text, then use &man.lptest.1;. Type: ~$lptest If the printer understands PostScript or other printer language, then send a small program to the printer. Type the program, line by line, very carefully as backspacing or other editing keys may be significant to the printer. You may also need to type a special end-of-file key for the printer so it knows it received the whole program. For PostScript printers, press CONTROL+D. Alternatively, you can put the program in a file and type: ~>file Where file is the name of the file containing the program. After &man.tip.1; sends the file, press any required end-of-file key. You should see something print. Do not worry if the text does not look right; we will fix that later. Enabling the Spooler: The <filename>/etc/printcap</filename> File At this point, your printer should be hooked up, your kernel configured to communicate with it (if necessary), and you have been able to send some simple data to the printer. Now, we are ready to configure LPD to control access to your printer. You configure LPD by editing the file /etc/printcap. The LPD spooling system reads this file each time the spooler is used, so updates to the file take immediate effect. printercapabilities The format of the &man.printcap.5; file is straightforward. Use your favorite text editor to make changes to /etc/printcap. The format is identical to other capability files like /usr/share/misc/termcap and /etc/remote. For complete information about the format, see the &man.cgetent.3;. The simple spooler configuration consists of the following steps: Pick a name (and a few convenient aliases) for the printer, and put them in the /etc/printcap file; see the Naming the Printer section for more information on naming. header pages Turn off header pages (which are on by default) by inserting the sh capability; see the Suppressing Header Pages section for more information. Make a spooling directory, and specify its location with the sd capability; see the Making the Spooling Directory section for more information. Set the /dev entry to use for the printer, and note it in /etc/printcap with the lp capability; see the Identifying the Printer Device for more information. Also, if the printer is on a serial port, set up the communication parameters with the fs, fc, xs, and xc capabilities; which is discussed in the Configuring Spooler Communications Parameters section. Install a plain text input filter; see the Installing the Text Filter section for details. Test the setup by printing something with the &man.lpr.1; command. More details are available in the Trying It Out and Troubleshooting sections. Language-based printers, such as PostScript printers, cannot directly print plain text. The simple setup outlined above and described in the following sections assumes that if you are installing such a printer you will print only files that the printer can understand. Users often expect that they can print plain text to any of the printers installed on your system. Programs that interface to LPD to do their printing usually make the same assumption. If you are installing such a printer and want to be able to print jobs in the printer language and print plain text jobs, you are strongly urged to add an additional step to the simple setup outlined above: install an automatic plain-text-to-PostScript (or other printer language) conversion program. The section entitled Accommodating Plain Text Jobs on PostScript Printers tells how to do this. Naming the Printer The first (easy) step is to pick a name for your printer It really does not matter whether you choose functional or whimsical names since you can also provide a number of aliases for the printer. At least one of the printers specified in the /etc/printcap should have the alias lp. This is the default printer's name. If users do not have the PRINTER environment variable nor specify a printer name on the command line of any of the LPD commands, then lp will be the default printer they get to use. Also, it is common practice to make the last alias for a printer be a full description of the printer, including make and model. Once you have picked a name and some common aliases, put them in the /etc/printcap file. The name of the printer should start in the leftmost column. Separate each alias with a vertical bar and put a colon after the last alias. In the following example, we start with a skeletal /etc/printcap that defines two printers (a Diablo 630 line printer and a Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript laser printer): # # /etc/printcap for host rose # rattan|line|diablo|lp|Diablo 630 Line Printer: bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4: In this example, the first printer is named rattan and has as aliases line, diablo, lp, and Diablo 630 Line Printer. Since it has the alias lp, it is also the default printer. The second is named bamboo, and has as aliases ps, PS, S, panasonic, and Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4. Suppressing Header Pages printingheader pages The LPD spooling system will by default print a header page for each job. The header page contains the user name who requested the job, the host from which the job came, and the name of the job, in nice large letters. Unfortunately, all this extra text gets in the way of debugging the simple printer setup, so we will suppress header pages. To suppress header pages, add the sh capability to the entry for the printer in /etc/printcap. Here is an example /etc/printcap with sh added: # # /etc/printcap for host rose - no header pages anywhere # rattan|line|diablo|lp|Diablo 630 Line Printer:\ :sh: bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4:\ :sh: Note how we used the correct format: the first line starts in the leftmost column, and subsequent lines are indented with a single TAB. Every line in an entry except the last ends in a backslash character. Making the Spooling Directory printer spool print jobs The next step in the simple spooler setup is to make a spooling directory, a directory where print jobs reside until they are printed, and where a number of other spooler support files live. Because of the variable nature of spooling directories, it is customary to put these directories under /var/spool. It is not necessary to backup the contents of spooling directories, either. Recreating them is as simple as running &man.mkdir.1;. It is also customary to make the directory with a name that is identical to the name of the printer, as shown below: &prompt.root; mkdir /var/spool/printer-name However, if you have a lot of printers on your network, you might want to put the spooling directories under a single directory that you reserve just for printing with LPD. We will do this for our two example printers rattan and bamboo: &prompt.root; mkdir /var/spool/lpd &prompt.root; mkdir /var/spool/lpd/rattan &prompt.root; mkdir /var/spool/lpd/bamboo If you are concerned about the privacy of jobs that users print, you might want to protect the spooling directory so it is not publicly accessible. Spooling directories should be owned and be readable, writable, and searchable by user daemon and group daemon, and no one else. We will do this for our example printers: &prompt.root; chown daemon:daemon /var/spool/lpd/rattan &prompt.root; chown daemon:daemon /var/spool/lpd/bamboo &prompt.root; chmod 770 /var/spool/lpd/rattan &prompt.root; chmod 770 /var/spool/lpd/bamboo Finally, you need to tell LPD about these directories using the /etc/printcap file. You specify the pathname of the spooling directory with the sd capability: # # /etc/printcap for host rose - added spooling directories # rattan|line|diablo|lp|Diablo 630 Line Printer:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/rattan: bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/bamboo: Note that the name of the printer starts in the first column but all other entries describing the printer should be indented with a tab and each line escaped with a backslash. If you do not specify a spooling directory with sd, the spooling system will use /var/spool/lpd as a default. Identifying the Printer Device In the Adding /dev Entries for the Ports section, we identified which entry in the /dev directory FreeBSD will use to communicate with the printer. Now, we tell LPD that information. When the spooling system has a job to print, it will open the specified device on behalf of the filter program (which is responsible for passing data to the printer). List the /dev entry pathname in the /etc/printcap file using the lp capability. In our running example, let us assume that rattan is on the first parallel port, and bamboo is on a sixth serial port; here are the additions to /etc/printcap: # # /etc/printcap for host rose - identified what devices to use # rattan|line|diablo|lp|Diablo 630 Line Printer:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/rattan:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0: bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/bamboo:\ :lp=/dev/ttyd5: If you do not specify the lp capability for a printer in your /etc/printcap file, LPD uses /dev/lp as a default. /dev/lp currently does not exist in FreeBSD. If the printer you are installing is connected to a parallel port, skip to the section entitled, Installing the Text Filter. Otherwise, be sure to follow the instructions in the next section. Configuring Spooler Communication Parameters printerserial For printers on serial ports, LPD can set up the bps rate, parity, and other serial communication parameters on behalf of the filter program that sends data to the printer. This is advantageous since: It lets you try different communication parameters by simply editing the /etc/printcap file; you do not have to recompile the filter program. It enables the spooling system to use the same filter program for multiple printers which may have different serial communication settings. The following /etc/printcap capabilities control serial communication parameters of the device listed in the lp capability: br#bps-rate Sets the communications speed of the device to bps-rate, where bps-rate can be 50, 75, 110, 134, 150, 200, 300, 600, 1200, 1800, 2400, 4800, 9600, 19200, or 38400 bits-per-second. fc#clear-bits Clears the flag bits clear-bits in the sgttyb structure after opening the device. fs#set-bits Sets the flag bits set-bits in the sgttyb structure. xc#clear-bits Clears local mode bits clear-bits after opening the device. xs#set-bits Sets local mode bits set-bits. For more information on the bits for the fc, fs, xc, and xs capabilities, see the file /usr/include/sys/ioctl_compat.h. When LPD opens the device specified by the lp capability, it reads the flag bits in the sgttyb structure; it clears any bits in the fc capability, then sets bits in the fs capability, then applies the resultant setting. It does the same for the local mode bits as well. Let us add to our example printer on the sixth serial port. We will set the bps rate to 38400. For the flag bits, we will set the TANDEM, ANYP, LITOUT, FLUSHO, and PASS8 flags. For the local mode bits, we will set the LITOUT and PASS8 flags: bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/bamboo:\ :lp=/dev/ttyd5:fs#0x82000c1:xs#0x820: Installing the Text Filter print filters We are now ready to tell LPD what text filter to use to send jobs to the printer. A text filter, also known as an input filter, is a program that LPD runs when it has a job to print. When LPD runs the text filter for a printer, it sets the filter's standard input to the job to print, and its standard output to the printer device specified with the lp capability. The filter is expected to read the job from standard input, perform any necessary translation for the printer, and write the results to standard output, which will get printed. For more information on the text filter, see the Filters section. For our simple printer setup, the text filter can be a small shell script that just executes /bin/cat to send the job to the printer. FreeBSD comes with another filter called lpf that handles backspacing and underlining for printers that might not deal with such character streams well. And, of course, you can use any other filter program you want. The filter lpf is described in detail in section entitled lpf: a Text Filter. First, let us make the shell script /usr/local/libexec/if-simple be a simple text filter. Put the following text into that file with your favorite text editor: #!/bin/sh # # if-simple - Simple text input filter for lpd # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/if-simple # # Simply copies stdin to stdout. Ignores all filter arguments. /bin/cat && exit 0 exit 2 Make the file executable: &prompt.root; chmod 555 /usr/local/libexec/if-simple And then tell LPD to use it by specifying it with the if capability in /etc/printcap. We will add it to the two printers we have so far in the example /etc/printcap: # # /etc/printcap for host rose - added text filter # rattan|line|diablo|lp|Diablo 630 Line Printer:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/rattan:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/if-simple: bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/bamboo:\ :lp=/dev/ttyd5:fs#0x82000e1:xs#0x820:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/if-simple: Turn on LPD &man.lpd.8; is run from /etc/rc, controlled by the lpd_enable variable. This variable defaults to NO. If you have not done so already, add the line: lpd_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf, and then either restart your machine, or just run &man.lpd.8;. &prompt.root; lpd Trying It Out You have reached the end of the simple LPD setup. Unfortunately, congratulations are not quite yet in order, since we still have to test the setup and correct any problems. To test the setup, try printing something. To print with the LPD system, you use the command &man.lpr.1;, which submits a job for printing. You can combine &man.lpr.1; with the &man.lptest.1; program, introduced in section Checking Printer Communications to generate some test text. To test the simple LPD setup: Type: &prompt.root; lptest 20 5 | lpr -Pprinter-name Where printer-name is a the name of a printer (or an alias) specified in /etc/printcap. To test the default printer, type &man.lpr.1; without any argument. Again, if you are testing a printer that expects PostScript, send a PostScript program in that language instead of using &man.lptest.1;. You can do so by putting the program in a file and typing lpr file. For a PostScript printer, you should get the results of the program. If you are using &man.lptest.1;, then your results should look like the following: !"#$%&'()*+,-./01234 "#$%&'()*+,-./012345 #$%&'()*+,-./0123456 $%&'()*+,-./01234567 %&'()*+,-./012345678 To further test the printer, try downloading larger programs (for language-based printers) or running &man.lptest.1; with different arguments. For example, lptest 80 60 will produce 60 lines of 80 characters each. If the printer did not work, see the Troubleshooting section. Advanced Printer Setup This section describes filters for printing specially formatted files, header pages, printing across networks, and restricting and accounting for printer usage. Filters print filters Although LPD handles network protocols, queuing, access control, and other aspects of printing, most of the real work happens in the filters. Filters are programs that communicate with the printer and handle its device dependencies and special requirements. In the simple printer setup, we installed a plain text filter—an extremely simple one that should work with most printers (section Installing the Text Filter). However, in order to take advantage of format conversion, printer accounting, specific printer quirks, and so on, you should understand how filters work. It will ultimately be the filter's responsibility to handle these aspects. And the bad news is that most of the time you have to provide filters yourself. The good news is that many are generally available; when they are not, they are usually easy to write. Also, FreeBSD comes with one, /usr/libexec/lpr/lpf, that works with many printers that can print plain text. (It handles backspacing and tabs in the file, and does accounting, but that is about all it does.) There are also several filters and filter components in the FreeBSD ports collection. Here is what you will find in this section: Section How Filters Work, tries to give an overview of a filter's role in the printing process. You should read this section to get an understanding of what is happening under the hood when LPD uses filters. This knowledge could help you anticipate and debug problems you might encounter as you install more and more filters on each of your printers. LPD expects every printer to be able to print plain text by default. This presents a problem for PostScript (or other language-based printers) which cannot directly print plain text. Section Accommodating Plain Text Jobs on PostScript Printers tells you what you should do to overcome this problem. You should read this section if you have a PostScript printer. PostScript is a popular output format for many programs. Even some people (myself included) write PostScript code directly. But PostScript printers are expensive. Section Simulating PostScript on Non-PostScript Printers tells how you can further modify a printer's text filter to accept and print PostScript data on a non-PostScript printer. You should read this section if you do not have a PostScript printer. Section Conversion Filters tells about a way you can automate the conversion of specific file formats, such as graphic or typesetting data, into formats your printer can understand. After reading this section, you should be able to set up your printers such that users can type lpr -t to print troff data, or lpr -d to print TeX DVI data, or lpr -v to print raster image data, and so forth. I recommend reading this section. Section Output Filters tells all about a not often used feature of LPD: output filters. Unless you are printing header pages (see Header Pages), you can probably skip that section altogether. Section lpf: a Text Filter describes lpf, a fairly complete if simple text filter for line printers (and laser printers that act like line printers) that comes with FreeBSD. If you need a quick way to get printer accounting working for plain text, or if you have a printer which emits smoke when it sees backspace characters, you should definitely consider lpf. How Filters Work As mentioned before, a filter is an executable program started by LPD to handle the device-dependent part of communicating with the printer. When LPD wants to print a file in a job, it starts a filter program. It sets the filter's standard input to the file to print, its standard output to the printer, and its standard error to the error logging file (specified in the lf capability in /etc/printcap, or /dev/console by default). troff Which filter LPD starts and the filter's arguments depend on what is listed in the /etc/printcap file and what arguments the user specified for the job on the &man.lpr.1; command line. For example, if the user typed lpr -t, LPD would start the troff filter, listed in the tf capability for the destination printer. If the user wanted to print plain text, it would start the if filter (this is mostly true: see Output Filters for details). There are three kinds of filters you can specify in /etc/printcap: The text filter, confusingly called the input filter in LPD documentation, handles regular text printing. Think of it as the default filter. LPD expects every printer to be able to print plain text by default, and it is the text filter's job to make sure backspaces, tabs, or other special characters do not confuse the printer. If you are in an environment where you have to account for printer usage, the text filter must also account for pages printed, usually by counting the number of lines printed and comparing that to the number of lines per page the printer supports. The text filter is started with the following argument list: filter-name -c -wwidth -llength -iindent -n login -h host acct-file where appears if the job's submitted with lpr -l width is the value from the pw (page width) capability specified in /etc/printcap, default 132 length is the value from the pl (page length) capability, default 66 indent is the amount of the indentation from lpr -i, default 0 login is the account name of the user printing the file host is the host name from which the job was submitted acct-file is the name of the accounting file from the af capability. printerfilters A conversion filter converts a specific file format into one the printer can render onto paper. For example, ditroff typesetting data cannot be directly printed, but you can install a conversion filter for ditroff files to convert the ditroff data into a form the printer can digest and print. Section Conversion Filters tells all about them. Conversion filters also need to do accounting, if you need printer accounting. Conversion filters are started with the following arguments: filter-name -xpixel-width -ypixel-height -n login -h host acct-file where pixel-width is the value from the px capability (default 0) and pixel-height is the value from the py capability (default 0). The output filter is used only if there is no text filter, or if header pages are enabled. In my experience, output filters are rarely used. Section Output Filters describe them. There are only two arguments to an output filter: filter-name -wwidth -llength which are identical to the text filters and arguments. Filters should also exit with the following exit status: exit 0 If the filter printed the file successfully. exit 1 If the filter failed to print the file but wants LPD to try to print the file again. LPD will restart a filter if it exits with this status. exit 2 If the filter failed to print the file and does not want LPD to try again. LPD will throw out the file. The text filter that comes with the FreeBSD release, /usr/libexec/lpr/lpf, takes advantage of the page width and length arguments to determine when to send a form feed and how to account for printer usage. It uses the login, host, and accounting file arguments to make the accounting entries. If you are shopping for filters, see if they are LPD-compatible. If they are, they must support the argument lists described above. If you plan on writing filters for general use, then have them support the same argument lists and exit codes. Accommodating Plain Text Jobs on PostScript Printers print jobs If you are the only user of your computer and PostScript (or other language-based) printer, and you promise to never send plain text to your printer and to never use features of various programs that will want to send plain text to your printer, then you do not need to worry about this section at all. But, if you would like to send both PostScript and plain text jobs to the printer, then you are urged to augment your printer setup. To do so, we have the text filter detect if the arriving job is plain text or PostScript. All PostScript jobs must start with %! (for other printer languages, see your printer documentation). If those are the first two characters in the job, we have PostScript, and can pass the rest of the job directly. If those are not the first two characters in the file, then the filter will convert the text into PostScript and print the result. How do we do this? printerserial If you have got a serial printer, a great way to do it is to install lprps. lprps is a PostScript printer filter which performs two-way communication with the printer. It updates the printer's status file with verbose information from the printer, so users and administrators can see exactly what the state of the printer is (such as toner low or paper jam). But more importantly, it includes a program called psif which detects whether the incoming job is plain text and calls textps (another program that comes with lprps) to convert it to PostScript. It then uses lprps to send the job to the printer. lprps is part of the FreeBSD ports collection (see The Ports Collection). You can fetch, build and install it yourself, of course. After installing lprps, just specify the pathname to the psif program that is part of lprps. If you installed lprps from the ports collection, use the following in the serial PostScript printer's entry in /etc/printcap: :if=/usr/local/libexec/psif: You should also specify the rw capability; that tells LPD to open the printer in read-write mode. If you have a parallel PostScript printer (and therefore cannot use two-way communication with the printer, which lprps needs), you can use the following shell script as the text filter: #!/bin/sh # # psif - Print PostScript or plain text on a PostScript printer # Script version; NOT the version that comes with lprps # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/psif # read first_line first_two_chars=`expr "$first_line" : '\(..\)'` if [ "$first_two_chars" = "%!" ]; then # # PostScript job, print it. # echo "$first_line" && cat && printf "\004" && exit 0 exit 2 else # # Plain text, convert it, then print it. # ( echo "$first_line"; cat ) | /usr/local/bin/textps && printf "\004" && exit 0 exit 2 fi In the above script, textps is a program we installed separately to convert plain text to PostScript. You can use any text-to-PostScript program you wish. The FreeBSD ports collection (see The Ports Collection) includes a full featured text-to-PostScript program called a2ps that you might want to investigate. Simulating PostScript on Non-PostScript Printers PostScriptemulating Ghostscript PostScript is the de facto standard for high quality typesetting and printing. PostScript is, however, an expensive standard. Thankfully, Alladin Enterprises has a free PostScript work-alike called Ghostscript that runs with FreeBSD. Ghostscript can read most PostScript files and can render their pages onto a variety of devices, including many brands of non-PostScript printers. By installing Ghostscript and using a special text filter for your printer, you can make your non-PostScript printer act like a real PostScript printer. Ghostscript is in the FreeBSD ports collection, if you would like to install it from there. You can fetch, build, and install it quite easily yourself, as well. To simulate PostScript, we have the text filter detect if it is printing a PostScript file. If it is not, then the filter will pass the file directly to the printer; otherwise, it will use Ghostscript to first convert the file into a format the printer will understand. Here is an example: the following script is a text filter for Hewlett Packard DeskJet 500 printers. For other printers, substitute the argument to the gs (Ghostscript) command. (Type gs -h to get a list of devices the current installation of Ghostscript supports.) #!/bin/sh # # ifhp - Print Ghostscript-simulated PostScript on a DeskJet 500 # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/hpif # # Treat LF as CR+LF: # printf "\033&k2G" || exit 2 # # Read first two characters of the file # read first_line first_two_chars=`expr "$first_line" : '\(..\)'` if [ "$first_two_chars" = "%!" ]; then # # It is PostScript; use Ghostscript to scan-convert and print it. # # Note that PostScript files are actually interpreted programs, # and those programs are allowed to write to stdout, which will # mess up the printed output. So, we redirect stdout to stderr # and then make descriptor 3 go to stdout, and have Ghostscript # write its output there. Exercise for the clever reader: # capture the stderr output from Ghostscript and mail it back to # the user originating the print job. # exec 3>&1 1>&2 /usr/local/bin/gs -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=djet500 \ -sOutputFile=/dev/fd/3 - && exit 0 # /usr/local/bin/gs -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=djet500 -sOutputFile=- - \ && exit 0 else # # Plain text or HP/PCL, so just print it directly; print a form # at the end to eject the last page. # echo $first_line && cat && printf "\033&l0H" && exit 0 fi exit 2 Finally, you need to notify LPD of the filter via the if capability: :if=/usr/local/libexec/hpif: That is it. You can type lpr plain.text and lpr whatever.ps and both should print successfully. Conversion Filters After completing the simple setup described in Simple Printer Setup, the first thing you will probably want to do is install conversion filters for your favorite file formats (besides plain ASCII text). Why Install Conversion Filters? TeXprinting dvi files Conversion filters make printing various kinds of files easy. As an example, suppose we do a lot of work with the TeX typesetting system, and we have a PostScript printer. Every time we generate a DVI file from TeX, we cannot print it directly until we convert the DVI file into PostScript. The command sequence goes like this: &prompt.user; dvips seaweed-analysis.dvi &prompt.user; lpr seaweed-analysis.ps By installing a conversion filter for DVI files, we can skip the hand conversion step each time by having LPD do it for us. Now, each time we get a DVI file, we are just one step away from printing it: &prompt.user; lpr -d seaweed-analysis.dvi We got LPD to do the DVI file conversion for us by specifying the option. Section Formatting and Conversion Options lists the conversion options. For each of the conversion options you want a printer to support, install a conversion filter and specify its pathname in /etc/printcap. A conversion filter is like the text filter for the simple printer setup (see section Installing the Text Filter) except that instead of printing plain text, the filter converts the file into a format the printer can understand. Which Conversions Filters Should I Install? You should install the conversion filters you expect to use. If you print a lot of DVI data, then a DVI conversion filter is in order. If you have got plenty of troff to print out, then you probably want a troff filter. The following table summarizes the filters that LPD works with, their capability entries for the /etc/printcap file, and how to invoke them with the lpr command: File type /etc/printcap capability lpr option cifplot cf DVI df plot gf ditroff nf FORTRAN text rf troff rf raster vf plain text if none, , or In our example, using lpr -d means the printer needs a df capability in its entry in /etc/printcap. fortran Despite what others might contend, formats like FORTRAN text and plot are probably obsolete. At your site, you can give new meanings to these or any of the formatting options just by installing custom filters. For example, suppose you would like to directly print Printerleaf files (files from the Interleaf desktop publishing program), but will never print plot files. You could install a Printerleaf conversion filter under the gf capability and then educate your users that lpr -g mean print Printerleaf files. Installing Conversion Filters Since conversion filters are programs you install outside of the base FreeBSD installation, they should probably go under /usr/local. The directory /usr/local/libexec is a popular location, since they are specialized programs that only LPD will run; regular users should not ever need to run them. To enable a conversion filter, specify its pathname under the appropriate capability for the destination printer in /etc/printcap. In our example, we will add the DVI conversion filter to the entry for the printer named bamboo. Here is the example /etc/printcap file again, with the new df capability for the printer bamboo. # # /etc/printcap for host rose - added df filter for bamboo # rattan|line|diablo|lp|Diablo 630 Line Printer:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/rattan:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/if-simple: bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/bamboo:\ :lp=/dev/ttyd5:fs#0x82000e1:xs#0x820:rw:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/psif:\ :df=/usr/local/libexec/psdf: The DVI filter is a shell script named /usr/local/libexec/psdf. Here is that script: #!bin/sh # # psdf - DVI to PostScript printer filter # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/psdf # # Invoked by lpd when user runs lpr -d # exec /usr/local/bin/dvips -f | /usr/local/libexec/lprps "$@" This script runs dvips in filter mode (the argument) on standard input, which is the job to print. It then starts the PostScript printer filter lprps (see section Accommodating Plain Text Jobs on PostScript Printers) with the arguments LPD passed to this script. lprps will use those arguments to account for the pages printed. More Conversion Filter Examples Since there is no fixed set of steps to install conversion filters, let me instead provide more examples. Use these as guidance to making your own filters. Use them directly, if appropriate. This example script is a raster (well, GIF file, actually) conversion filter for a Hewlett Packard LaserJet III-Si printer: #!/bin/sh # # hpvf - Convert GIF files into HP/PCL, then print # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/hpvf PATH=/usr/X11R6/bin:$PATH; export PATH giftopnm | ppmtopgm | pgmtopbm | pbmtolj -resolution 300 \ && exit 0 \ || exit 2 It works by converting the GIF file into a portable anymap, converting that into a portable graymap, converting that into a portable bitmap, and converting that into LaserJet/PCL-compatible data. Here is the /etc/printcap file with an entry for a printer using the above filter: # # /etc/printcap for host orchid # teak|hp|laserjet|Hewlett Packard LaserJet 3Si:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/teak:mx#0:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/hpif:\ :vf=/usr/local/libexec/hpvf: The following script is a conversion filter for troff data from the groff typesetting system for the PostScript printer named bamboo: #!/bin/sh # # pstf - Convert groff's troff data into PS, then print. # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/pstf # exec grops | /usr/local/libexec/lprps "$@" The above script makes use of lprps again to handle the communication with the printer. If the printer were on a parallel port, we would use this script instead: #!/bin/sh # # pstf - Convert groff's troff data into PS, then print. # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/pstf # exec grops That is it. Here is the entry we need to add to /etc/printcap to enable the filter: :tf=/usr/local/libexec/pstf: Here is an example that might make old hands at FORTRAN blush. It is a FORTRAN-text filter for any printer that can directly print plain text. We will install it for the printer teak: #!/bin/sh # # hprf - FORTRAN text filter for LaserJet 3si: # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/hprf # printf "\033&k2G" && fpr && printf "\033&l0H" && exit 0 exit 2 And we will add this line to the /etc/printcap for the printer teak to enable this filter: :rf=/usr/local/libexec/hprf: Here is one final, somewhat complex example. We will add a DVI filter to the LaserJet printer teak introduced earlier. First, the easy part: updating /etc/printcap with the location of the DVI filter: :df=/usr/local/libexec/hpdf: Now, for the hard part: making the filter. For that, we need a DVI-to-LaserJet/PCL conversion program. The FreeBSD ports collection (see The Ports Collection) has one: dvi2xx is the name of the package. Installing this package gives us the program we need, dvilj2p, which converts DVI into LaserJet IIp, LaserJet III, and LaserJet 2000 compatible codes. dvilj2p makes the filter hpdf quite complex since dvilj2p cannot read from standard input. It wants to work with a filename. What is worse, the filename has to end in .dvi so using /dev/fd/0 for standard input is problematic. We can get around that problem by linking (symbolically) a temporary file name (one that ends in .dvi) to /dev/fd/0, thereby forcing dvilj2p to read from standard input. The only other fly in the ointment is the fact that we cannot use /tmp for the temporary link. Symbolic links are owned by user and group bin. The filter runs as user daemon. And the /tmp directory has the sticky bit set. The filter can create the link, but it will not be able clean up when done and remove it since the link will belong to a different user. Instead, the filter will make the symbolic link in the current working directory, which is the spooling directory (specified by the sd capability in /etc/printcap). This is a perfect place for filters to do their work, especially since there is (sometimes) more free disk space in the spooling directory than under /tmp. Here, finally, is the filter: #!/bin/sh # # hpdf - Print DVI data on HP/PCL printer # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/hpdf PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH; export PATH # # Define a function to clean up our temporary files. These exist # in the current directory, which will be the spooling directory # for the printer. # cleanup() { rm -f hpdf$$.dvi } # # Define a function to handle fatal errors: print the given message # and exit 2. Exiting with 2 tells LPD to do not try to reprint the # job. # fatal() { echo "$@" 1>&2 cleanup exit 2 } # # If user removes the job, LPD will send SIGINT, so trap SIGINT # (and a few other signals) to clean up after ourselves. # trap cleanup 1 2 15 # # Make sure we are not colliding with any existing files. # cleanup # # Link the DVI input file to standard input (the file to print). # ln -s /dev/fd/0 hpdf$$.dvi || fatal "Cannot symlink /dev/fd/0" # # Make LF = CR+LF # printf "\033&k2G" || fatal "Cannot initialize printer" # # Convert and print. Return value from dvilj2p does not seem to be # reliable, so we ignore it. # dvilj2p -M1 -q -e- dfhp$$.dvi # # Clean up and exit # cleanup exit 0 Automated Conversion: An Alternative To Conversion Filters All these conversion filters accomplish a lot for your printing environment, but at the cost forcing the user to specify (on the &man.lpr.1; command line) which one to use. If your users are not particularly computer literate, having to specify a filter option will become annoying. What is worse, though, is that an incorrectly specified filter option may run a filter on the wrong type of file and cause your printer to spew out hundreds of sheets of paper. Rather than install conversion filters at all, you might want to try having the text filter (since it is the default filter) detect the type of file it has been asked to print and then automatically run the right conversion filter. Tools such as file can be of help here. Of course, it will be hard to determine the differences between some file types—and, of course, you can still provide conversion filters just for them. apsfilter printerfiltersapsfilter The FreeBSD ports collection has a text filter that performs automatic conversion called apsfilter. It can detect plain text, PostScript, and DVI files, run the proper conversions, and print. Output Filters The LPD spooling system supports one other type of filter that we have not yet explored: an output filter. An output filter is intended for printing plain text only, like the text filter, but with many simplifications. If you are using an output filter but no text filter, then: LPD starts an output filter once for the entire job instead of once for each file in the job. LPD does not make any provision to identify the start or the end of files within the job for the output filter. LPD does not pass the user's login or host to the filter, so it is not intended to do accounting. In fact, it gets only two arguments: filter-name -wwidth -llength Where width is from the pw capability and length is from the pl capability for the printer in question. Do not be seduced by an output filter's simplicity. If you would like each file in a job to start on a different page an output filter will not work. Use a text filter (also known as an input filter); see section Installing the Text Filter. Furthermore, an output filter is actually more complex in that it has to examine the byte stream being sent to it for special flag characters and must send signals to itself on behalf of LPD. However, an output filter is necessary if you want header pages and need to send escape sequences or other initialization strings to be able to print the header page. (But it is also futile if you want to charge header pages to the requesting user's account, since LPD does not give any user or host information to the output filter.) On a single printer, LPD allows both an output filter and text or other filters. In such cases, LPD will start the output filter to print the header page (see section Header Pages) only. LPD then expects the output filter to stop itself by sending two bytes to the filter: ASCII 031 followed by ASCII 001. When an output filter sees these two bytes (031, 001), it should stop by sending SIGSTOP to itself. When LPD's done running other filters, it will restart the output filter by sending SIGCONT to it. If there is an output filter but no text filter and LPD is working on a plain text job, LPD uses the output filter to do the job. As stated before, the output filter will print each file of the job in sequence with no intervening form feeds or other paper advancement, and this is probably not what you want. In almost all cases, you need a text filter. The program lpf, which we introduced earlier as a text filter, can also run as an output filter. If you need a quick-and-dirty output filter but do not want to write the byte detection and signal sending code, try lpf. You can also wrap lpf in a shell script to handle any initialization codes the printer might require. <command>lpf</command>: a Text Filter The program /usr/libexec/lpr/lpf that comes with FreeBSD binary distribution is a text filter (input filter) that can indent output (job submitted with lpr -i), allow literal characters to pass (job submitted with lpr -l), adjust the printing position for backspaces and tabs in the job, and account for pages printed. It can also act like an output filter. lpf is suitable for many printing environments. And although it has no capability to send initialization sequences to a printer, it is easy to write a shell script to do the needed initialization and then execute lpf. page accounting accountingprinter In order for lpf to do page accounting correctly, it needs correct values filled in for the pw and pl capabilities in the /etc/printcap file. It uses these values to determine how much text can fit on a page and how many pages were in a user's job. For more information on printer accounting, see Accounting for Printer Usage. Header Pages If you have lots of users, all of them using various printers, then you probably want to consider header pages as a necessary evil. banner pages (see header pages) header pages Header pages, also known as banner or burst pages identify to whom jobs belong after they are printed. They are usually printed in large, bold letters, perhaps with decorative borders, so that in a stack of printouts they stand out from the real documents that comprise users' jobs. They enable users to locate their jobs quickly. The obvious drawback to a header page is that it is yet one more sheet that has to be printed for every job, their ephemeral usefulness lasting not more than a few minutes, ultimately finding themselves in a recycling bin or rubbish heap. (Note that header pages go with each job, not each file in a job, so the paper waste might not be that bad.) The LPD system can provide header pages automatically for your printouts if your printer can directly print plain text. If you have a PostScript printer, you will need an external program to generate the header page; see Header Pages on PostScript Printers. Enabling Header Pages In the Simple Printer Setup, we turned off header pages by specifying sh (meaning suppress header) in the /etc/printcap file. To enable header pages for a printer, just remove the sh capability. Sounds too easy, right? You are right. You might have to provide an output filter to send initialization strings to the printer. Here is an example output filter for Hewlett Packard PCL-compatible printers: #!/bin/sh # # hpof - Output filter for Hewlett Packard PCL-compatible printers # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/hpof printf "\033&k2G" || exit 2 exec /usr/libexec/lpr/lpf Specify the path to the output filter in the of capability. See Output Filters for more information. Here is an example /etc/printcap file for the printer teak that we introduced earlier; we enabled header pages and added the above output filter: # # /etc/printcap for host orchid # teak|hp|laserjet|Hewlett Packard LaserJet 3Si:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/var/spool/lpd/teak:mx#0:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/hpif:\ :vf=/usr/local/libexec/hpvf:\ :of=/usr/local/libexec/hpof: Now, when users print jobs to teak, they get a header page with each job. If users want to spend time searching for their printouts, they can suppress header pages by submitting the job with lpr -h; see Header Page Options for more &man.lpr.1; options. LPD prints a form feed character after the header page. If your printer uses a different character or sequence of characters to eject a page, specify them with the ff capability in /etc/printcap. Controlling Header Pages By enabling header pages, LPD will produce a long header, a full page of large letters identifying the user, host, and job. Here is an example (kelly printed the job named outline from host rose): k ll ll k l l k l l k k eeee l l y y k k e e l l y y k k eeeeee l l y y kk k e l l y y k k e e l l y yy k k eeee lll lll yyy y y y y yyyy ll t l i t l oooo u u ttttt l ii n nnn eeee o o u u t l i nn n e e o o u u t l i n n eeeeee o o u u t l i n n e o o u uu t t l i n n e e oooo uuu u tt lll iii n n eeee r rrr oooo ssss eeee rr r o o s s e e r o o ss eeeeee r o o ss e r o o s s e e r oooo ssss eeee Job: outline Date: Sun Sep 17 11:04:58 1995 LPD appends a form feed after this text so the job starts on a new page (unless you have sf (suppress form feeds) in the destination printer's entry in /etc/printcap). If you prefer, LPD can make a short header; specify sb (short banner) in the /etc/printcap file. The header page will look like this: rose:kelly Job: outline Date: Sun Sep 17 11:07:51 1995 Also by default, LPD prints the header page first, then the job. To reverse that, specify hl (header last) in /etc/printcap. Accounting for Header Pages Using LPD's built-in header pages enforces a particular paradigm when it comes to printer accounting: header pages must be free of charge. Why? Because the output filter is the only external program that will have control when the header page is printed that could do accounting, and it is not provided with any user or host information or an accounting file, so it has no idea whom to charge for printer use. It is also not enough to just add one page to the text filter or any of the conversion filters (which do have user and host information) since users can suppress header pages with lpr -h. They could still be charged for header pages they did not print. Basically, lpr -h will be the preferred option of environmentally-minded users, but you cannot offer any incentive to use it. It is still not enough to have each of the filters generate their own header pages (thereby being able to charge for them). If users wanted the option of suppressing the header pages with lpr -h, they will still get them and be charged for them since LPD does not pass any knowledge of the option to any of the filters. So, what are your options? You can: Accept LPD's paradigm and make header pages free. Install an alternative to LPD, such as LPRng. Section Alternatives to the Standard Spooler tells more about other spooling software you can substitute for LPD. Write a smart output filter. Normally, an output filter is not meant to do anything more than initialize a printer or do some simple character conversion. It is suited for header pages and plain text jobs (when there is no text (input) filter). But, if there is a text filter for the plain text jobs, then LPD will start the output filter only for the header pages. And the output filter can parse the header page text that LPD generates to determine what user and host to charge for the header page. The only other problem with this method is that the output filter still does not know what accounting file to use (it is not passed the name of the file from the af capability), but if you have a well-known accounting file, you can hard-code that into the output filter. To facilitate the parsing step, use the sh (short header) capability in /etc/printcap. Then again, all that might be too much trouble, and users will certainly appreciate the more generous system administrator who makes header pages free. Header Pages on PostScript Printers As described above, LPD can generate a plain text header page suitable for many printers. Of course, PostScript cannot directly print plain text, so the header page feature of LPD is useless—or mostly so. One obvious way to get header pages is to have every conversion filter and the text filter generate the header page. The filters should use the user and host arguments to generate a suitable header page. The drawback of this method is that users will always get a header page, even if they submit jobs with lpr -h. Let us explore this method. The following script takes three arguments (user login name, host name, and job name) and makes a simple PostScript header page: #!/bin/sh # # make-ps-header - make a PostScript header page on stdout # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/make-ps-header # # # These are PostScript units (72 to the inch). Modify for A4 or # whatever size paper you are using: # page_width=612 page_height=792 border=72 # # Check arguments # if [ $# -ne 3 ]; then echo "Usage: `basename $0` <user> <host> <job>" 1>&2 exit 1 fi # # Save these, mostly for readability in the PostScript, below. # user=$1 host=$2 job=$3 date=`date` # # Send the PostScript code to stdout. # exec cat <<EOF %!PS % % Make sure we do not interfere with user's job that will follow % save % % Make a thick, unpleasant border around the edge of the paper. % $border $border moveto $page_width $border 2 mul sub 0 rlineto 0 $page_height $border 2 mul sub rlineto currentscreen 3 -1 roll pop 100 3 1 roll setscreen $border 2 mul $page_width sub 0 rlineto closepath 0.8 setgray 10 setlinewidth stroke 0 setgray % % Display user's login name, nice and large and prominent % /Helvetica-Bold findfont 64 scalefont setfont $page_width ($user) stringwidth pop sub 2 div $page_height 200 sub moveto ($user) show % % Now show the boring particulars % /Helvetica findfont 14 scalefont setfont /y 200 def [ (Job:) (Host:) (Date:) ] { 200 y moveto show /y y 18 sub def } forall /Helvetica-Bold findfont 14 scalefont setfont /y 200 def [ ($job) ($host) ($date) ] { 270 y moveto show /y y 18 sub def } forall % % That is it % restore showpage EOF Now, each of the conversion filters and the text filter can call this script to first generate the header page, and then print the user's job. Here is the DVI conversion filter from earlier in this document, modified to make a header page: #!/bin/sh # # psdf - DVI to PostScript printer filter # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/psdf # # Invoked by lpd when user runs lpr -d # orig_args="$@" fail() { echo "$@" 1>&2 exit 2 } while getopts "x:y:n:h:" option; do case $option in x|y) ;; # Ignore n) login=$OPTARG ;; h) host=$OPTARG ;; *) echo "LPD started `basename $0` wrong." 1>&2 exit 2 ;; esac done [ "$login" ] || fail "No login name" [ "$host" ] || fail "No host name" ( /usr/local/libexec/make-ps-header $login $host "DVI File" /usr/local/bin/dvips -f ) | eval /usr/local/libexec/lprps $orig_args Notice how the filter has to parse the argument list in order to determine the user and host name. The parsing for the other conversion filters is identical. The text filter takes a slightly different set of arguments, though (see section How Filters Work). As we have mentioned before, the above scheme, though fairly simple, disables the suppress header page option (the option) to lpr. If users wanted to save a tree (or a few pennies, if you charge for header pages), they would not be able to do so, since every filter's going to print a header page with every job. To allow users to shut off header pages on a per-job basis, you will need to use the trick introduced in section Accounting for Header Pages: write an output filter that parses the LPD-generated header page and produces a PostScript version. If the user submits the job with lpr -h, then LPD will not generate a header page, and neither will your output filter. Otherwise, your output filter will read the text from LPD and send the appropriate header page PostScript code to the printer. If you have a PostScript printer on a serial line, you can make use of lprps, which comes with an output filter, psof, which does the above. Note that psof does not charge for header pages. Networked Printing printernetwork network printing FreeBSD supports networked printing: sending jobs to remote printers. Networked printing generally refers to two different things: Accessing a printer attached to a remote host. You install a printer that has a conventional serial or parallel interface on one host. Then, you set up LPD to enable access to the printer from other hosts on the network. Section Printers Installed on Remote Hosts tells how to do this. Accessing a printer attached directly to a network. The printer has a network interface in addition (or in place of) a more conventional serial or parallel interface. Such a printer might work as follows: It might understand the LPD protocol and can even queue jobs from remote hosts. In this case, it acts just like a regular host running LPD. Follow the same procedure in section Printers Installed on Remote Hosts to set up such a printer. It might support a data stream network connection. In this case, you attach the printer to one host on the network by making that host responsible for spooling jobs and sending them to the printer. Section Printers with Networked Data Stream Interfaces gives some suggestions on installing such printers. Printers Installed on Remote Hosts The LPD spooling system has built-in support for sending jobs to other hosts also running LPD (or are compatible with LPD). This feature enables you to install a printer on one host and make it accessible from other hosts. It also works with printers that have network interfaces that understand the LPD protocol. To enable this kind of remote printing, first install a printer on one host, the printer host, using the simple printer setup described in Simple Printer Setup. Do any advanced setup in Advanced Printer Setup that you need. Make sure to test the printer and see if it works with the features of LPD you have enabled. Also ensure that the local host has authorization to use the LPD service in the remote host (see Restricting Jobs from Remote Printers). printernetwork network printing If you are using a printer with a network interface that is compatible with LPD, then the printer host in the discussion below is the printer itself, and the printer name is the name you configured for the printer. See the documentation that accompanied your printer and/or printer-network interface. If you are using a Hewlett Packard Laserjet then the printer name text will automatically perform the LF to CRLF conversion for you, so you will not require the hpif script. Then, on the other hosts you want to have access to the printer, make an entry in their /etc/printcap files with the following: Name the entry anything you want. For simplicity, though, you probably want to use the same name and aliases as on the printer host. Leave the lp capability blank, explicitly (:lp=:). Make a spooling directory and specify its location in the sd capability. LPD will store jobs here before they get sent to the printer host. Place the name of the printer host in the rm capability. Place the printer name on the printer host in the rp capability. That is it. You do not need to list conversion filters, page dimensions, or anything else in the /etc/printcap file. Here is an example. The host rose has two printers, bamboo and rattan. We will enable users on the host orchid to print to those printers. Here is the /etc/printcap file for orchid (back from section Enabling Header Pages). It already had the entry for the printer teak; we have added entries for the two printers on the host rose: # # /etc/printcap for host orchid - added (remote) printers on rose # # # teak is local; it is connected directly to orchid: # teak|hp|laserjet|Hewlett Packard LaserJet 3Si:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/var/spool/lpd/teak:mx#0:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/ifhp:\ :vf=/usr/local/libexec/vfhp:\ :of=/usr/local/libexec/ofhp: # # rattan is connected to rose; send jobs for rattan to rose: # rattan|line|diablo|lp|Diablo 630 Line Printer:\ :lp=:rm=rose:rp=rattan:sd=/var/spool/lpd/rattan: # # bamboo is connected to rose as well: # bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4:\ :lp=:rm=rose:rp=bamboo:sd=/var/spool/lpd/bamboo: Then, we just need to make spooling directories on orchid: &prompt.root; mkdir -p /var/spool/lpd/rattan /var/spool/lpd/bamboo &prompt.root; chmod 770 /var/spool/lpd/rattan /var/spool/lpd/bamboo &prompt.root; chown daemon:daemon /var/spool/lpd/rattan /var/spool/lpd/bamboo Now, users on orchid can print to rattan and bamboo. If, for example, a user on orchid typed &prompt.user; lpr -P bamboo -d sushi-review.dvi the LPD system on orchid would copy the job to the spooling directory /var/spool/lpd/bamboo and note that it was a DVI job. As soon as the host rose has room in its bamboo spooling directory, the two LPDs would transfer the file to rose. The file would wait in rose's queue until it was finally printed. It would be converted from DVI to PostScript (since bamboo is a PostScript printer) on rose. Printers with Networked Data Stream Interfaces Often, when you buy a network interface card for a printer, you can get two versions: one which emulates a spooler (the more expensive version), or one which just lets you send data to it as if you were using a serial or parallel port (the cheaper version). This section tells how to use the cheaper version. For the more expensive one, see the previous section Printers Installed on Remote Hosts. The format of the /etc/printcap file lets you specify what serial or parallel interface to use, and (if you are using a serial interface), what baud rate, whether to use flow control, delays for tabs, conversion of newlines, and more. But there is no way to specify a connection to a printer that is listening on a TCP/IP or other network port. To send data to a networked printer, you need to develop a communications program that can be called by the text and conversion filters. Here is one such example: the script netprint takes all data on standard input and sends it to a network-attached printer. We specify the hostname of the printer as the first argument and the port number to which to connect as the second argument to netprint. Note that this supports one-way communication only (FreeBSD to printer); many network printers support two-way communication, and you might want to take advantage of that (to get printer status, perform accounting, etc.). #!/usr/bin/perl # # netprint - Text filter for printer attached to network # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/netprint # $#ARGV eq 1 || die "Usage: $0 <printer-hostname> <port-number>"; $printer_host = $ARGV[0]; $printer_port = $ARGV[1]; require 'sys/socket.ph'; ($ignore, $ignore, $protocol) = getprotobyname('tcp'); ($ignore, $ignore, $ignore, $ignore, $address) = gethostbyname($printer_host); $sockaddr = pack('S n a4 x8', &AF_INET, $printer_port, $address); socket(PRINTER, &PF_INET, &SOCK_STREAM, $protocol) || die "Can't create TCP/IP stream socket: $!"; connect(PRINTER, $sockaddr) || die "Can't contact $printer_host: $!"; while (<STDIN>) { print PRINTER; } exit 0; We can then use this script in various filters. Suppose we had a Diablo 750-N line printer connected to the network. The printer accepts data to print on port number 5100. The host name of the printer is scrivener. Here is the text filter for the printer: #!/bin/sh # # diablo-if-net - Text filter for Diablo printer `scrivener' listening # on port 5100. Installed in /usr/local/libexec/diablo-if-net # exec /usr/libexec/lpr/lpf "$@" | /usr/local/libexec/netprint scrivener 5100 Restricting Printer Usage This section gives information on restricting printer usage. The printerrestricting access to LPD system lets you control who can access a printer, both locally or remotely, whether they can print multiple copies, how large their jobs can be, and how large the printer queues can get. Restricting Multiple Copies The LPD system makes it easy for users to print multiple copies of a file. Users can print jobs with lpr -#5 (for example) and get five copies of each file in the job. Whether this is a good thing is up to you. If you feel multiple copies cause unnecessary wear and tear on your printers, you can disable the option to &man.lpr.1; by adding the sc capability to the /etc/printcap file. When users submit jobs with the option, they will see: lpr: multiple copies are not allowed Note that if you have set up access to a printer remotely (see section Printers Installed on Remote Hosts), you need the sc capability on the remote /etc/printcap files as well, or else users will still be able to submit multiple-copy jobs by using another host. Here is an example. This is the /etc/printcap file for the host rose. The printer rattan is quite hearty, so we will allow multiple copies, but the laser printer bamboo's a bit more delicate, so we will disable multiple copies by adding the sc capability: # # /etc/printcap for host rose - restrict multiple copies on bamboo # rattan|line|diablo|lp|Diablo 630 Line Printer:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/rattan:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/if-simple: bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/bamboo:sc:\ :lp=/dev/ttyd5:fs#0x82000e1:xs#0x820:rw:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/psif:\ :df=/usr/local/libexec/psdf: Now, we also need to add the sc capability on the host orchid's /etc/printcap (and while we are at it, let us disable multiple copies for the printer teak): # # /etc/printcap for host orchid - no multiple copies for local # printer teak or remote printer bamboo teak|hp|laserjet|Hewlett Packard LaserJet 3Si:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/var/spool/lpd/teak:mx#0:sc:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/ifhp:\ :vf=/usr/local/libexec/vfhp:\ :of=/usr/local/libexec/ofhp: rattan|line|diablo|lp|Diablo 630 Line Printer:\ :lp=:rm=rose:rp=rattan:sd=/var/spool/lpd/rattan: bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4:\ :lp=:rm=rose:rp=bamboo:sd=/var/spool/lpd/bamboo:sc: By using the sc capability, we prevent the use of lpr -#, but that still does not prevent users from running &man.lpr.1; multiple times, or from submitting the same file multiple times in one job like this: &prompt.user; lpr forsale.sign forsale.sign forsale.sign forsale.sign forsale.sign There are many ways to prevent this abuse (including ignoring it) which you are free to explore. Restricting Access To Printers You can control who can print to what printers by using the UNIX group mechanism and the rg capability in /etc/printcap. Just place the users you want to have access to a printer in a certain group, and then name that group in the rg capability. Users outside the group (including root) will be greeted with lpr: Not a member of the restricted group if they try to print to the controlled printer. As with the sc (suppress multiple copies) capability, you need to specify rg on remote hosts that also have access to your printers, if you feel it is appropriate (see section Printers Installed on Remote Hosts). For example, we will let anyone access the printer rattan, but only those in group artists can use bamboo. Here is the familiar /etc/printcap for host rose: # # /etc/printcap for host rose - restricted group for bamboo # rattan|line|diablo|lp|Diablo 630 Line Printer:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/rattan:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/if-simple: bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/bamboo:sc:rg=artists:\ :lp=/dev/ttyd5:fs#0x82000e1:xs#0x820:rw:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/psif:\ :df=/usr/local/libexec/psdf: Let us leave the other example /etc/printcap file (for the host orchid) alone. Of course, anyone on orchid can print to bamboo. It might be the case that we only allow certain logins on orchid anyway, and want them to have access to the printer. Or not. There can be only one restricted group per printer. Controlling Sizes of Jobs Submitted print jobs If you have many users accessing the printers, you probably need to put an upper limit on the sizes of the files users can submit to print. After all, there is only so much free space on the filesystem that houses the spooling directories, and you also need to make sure there is room for the jobs of other users. print jobscontrolling LPD enables you to limit the maximum byte size a file in a job can be with the mx capability. The units are in BUFSIZ blocks, which are 1024 bytes. If you put a zero for this capability, there will be no limit on file size; however, if no mx capability is specified, then a default limit of 1000 blocks will be used. The limit applies to files in a job, and not the total job size. LPD will not refuse a file that is larger than the limit you place on a printer. Instead, it will queue as much of the file up to the limit, which will then get printed. The rest will be discarded. Whether this is correct behavior is up for debate. Let us add limits to our example printers rattan and bamboo. Since those artists' PostScript files tend to be large, we will limit them to five megabytes. We will put no limit on the plain text line printer: # # /etc/printcap for host rose # # # No limit on job size: # rattan|line|diablo|lp|Diablo 630 Line Printer:\ :sh:mx#0:sd=/var/spool/lpd/rattan:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/if-simple: # # Limit of five megabytes: # bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/bamboo:sc:rg=artists:mx#5000:\ :lp=/dev/ttyd5:fs#0x82000e1:xs#0x820:rw:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/psif:\ :df=/usr/local/libexec/psdf: Again, the limits apply to the local users only. If you have set up access to your printers remotely, remote users will not get those limits. You will need to specify the mx capability in the remote /etc/printcap files as well. See section Printers Installed on Remote Hosts for more information on remote printing. There is another specialized way to limit job sizes from remote printers; see section Restricting Jobs from Remote Printers. Restricting Jobs from Remote Printers The LPD spooling system provides several ways to restrict print jobs submitted from remote hosts: Host restrictions You can control from which remote hosts a local LPD accepts requests with the files /etc/hosts.equiv and /etc/hosts.lpd. LPD checks to see if an incoming request is from a host listed in either one of these files. If not, LPD refuses the request. The format of these files is simple: one host name per line. Note that the file /etc/hosts.equiv is also used by the &man.ruserok.3; protocol, and affects programs like &man.rsh.1; and &man.rcp.1;, so be careful. For example, here is the /etc/hosts.lpd file on the host rose: orchid violet madrigal.fishbaum.de This means rose will accept requests from the hosts orchid, violet, and madrigal.fishbaum.de. If any other host tries to access rose's LPD, the job will be refused. Size restrictions You can control how much free space there needs to remain on the filesystem where a spooling directory resides. Make a file called minfree in the spooling directory for the local printer. Insert in that file a number representing how many disk blocks (512 bytes) of free space there has to be for a remote job to be accepted. This lets you insure that remote users will not fill your filesystem. You can also use it to give a certain priority to local users: they will be able to queue jobs long after the free disk space has fallen below the amount specified in the minfree file. For example, let us add a minfree file for the printer bamboo. We examine /etc/printcap to find the spooling directory for this printer; here is bamboo's entry: bamboo|ps|PS|S|panasonic|Panasonic KX-P4455 PostScript v51.4:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/bamboo:sc:rg=artists:mx#5000:\ :lp=/dev/ttyd5:fs#0x82000e1:xs#0x820:rw:mx#5000:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/psif:\ :df=/usr/local/libexec/psdf: The spooling directory is the given in the sd capability. We will make three megabytes (which is 6144 disk blocks) the amount of free disk space that must exist on the filesystem for LPD to accept remote jobs: &prompt.root; echo 6144 > /var/spool/lpd/bam boo/minfree User restrictions You can control which remote users can print to local printers by specifying the rs capability in /etc/printcap. When rs appears in the entry for a locally-attached printer, LPD will accept jobs from remote hosts if the user submitting the job also has an account of the same login name on the local host. Otherwise, LPD refuses the job. This capability is particularly useful in an environment where there are (for example) different departments sharing a network, and some users transcend departmental boundaries. By giving them accounts on your systems, they can use your printers from their own departmental systems. If you would rather allow them to use only your printers and not your compute resources, you can give them token accounts, with no home directory and a useless shell like /usr/bin/false. Accounting for Printer Usage accountingprinter So, you need to charge for printouts. And why not? Paper and ink cost money. And then there are maintenance costs—printers are loaded with moving parts and tend to break down. You have examined your printers, usage patterns, and maintenance fees and have come up with a per-page (or per-foot, per-meter, or per-whatever) cost. Now, how do you actually start accounting for printouts? Well, the bad news is the LPD spooling system does not provide much help in this department. Accounting is highly dependent on the kind of printer in use, the formats being printed, and your requirements in charging for printer usage. To implement accounting, you have to modify a printer's text filter (to charge for plain text jobs) and the conversion filters (to charge for other file formats), to count pages or query the printer for pages printed. You cannot get away with using the simple output filter, since it cannot do accounting. See section Filters. Generally, there are two ways to do accounting: Periodic accounting is the more common way, possibly because it is easier. Whenever someone prints a job, the filter logs the user, host, and number of pages to an accounting file. Every month, semester, year, or whatever time period you prefer, you collect the accounting files for the various printers, tally up the pages printed by users, and charge for usage. Then you truncate all the logging files, starting with a clean slate for the next period. Timely accounting is less common, probably because it is more difficult. This method has the filters charge users for printouts as soon as they use the printers. Like disk quotas, the accounting is immediate. You can prevent users from printing when their account goes in the red, and might provide a way for users to check and adjust their print quotas. But this method requires some database code to track users and their quotas. The LPD spooling system supports both methods easily: since you have to provide the filters (well, most of the time), you also have to provide the accounting code. But there is a bright side: you have enormous flexibility in your accounting methods. For example, you choose whether to use periodic or timely accounting. You choose what information to log: user names, host names, job types, pages printed, square footage of paper used, how long the job took to print, and so forth. And you do so by modifying the filters to save this information. Quick and Dirty Printer Accounting FreeBSD comes with two programs that can get you set up with simple periodic accounting right away. They are the text filter lpf, described in section lpf: a Text Filter, and &man.pac.8;, a program to gather and total entries from printer accounting files. As mentioned in the section on filters (Filters), LPD starts the text and the conversion filters with the name of the accounting file to use on the filter command line. The filters can use this argument to know where to write an accounting file entry. The name of this file comes from the af capability in /etc/printcap, and if not specified as an absolute path, is relative to the spooling directory. LPD starts lpf with page width and length arguments (from the pw and pl capabilities). lpf uses these arguments to determine how much paper will be used. After sending the file to the printer, it then writes an accounting entry in the accounting file. The entries look like this: 2.00 rose:andy 3.00 rose:kelly 3.00 orchid:mary 5.00 orchid:mary 2.00 orchid:zhang You should use a separate accounting file for each printer, as lpf has no file locking logic built into it, and two lpfs might corrupt each other's entries if they were to write to the same file at the same time. A easy way to insure a separate accounting file for each printer is to use af=acct in /etc/printcap. Then, each accounting file will be in the spooling directory for a printer, in a file named acct. When you are ready to charge users for printouts, run the &man.pac.8; program. Just change to the spooling directory for the printer you want to collect on and type pac. You will get a dollar-centric summary like the following: Login pages/feet runs price orchid:kelly 5.00 1 $ 0.10 orchid:mary 31.00 3 $ 0.62 orchid:zhang 9.00 1 $ 0.18 rose:andy 2.00 1 $ 0.04 rose:kelly 177.00 104 $ 3.54 rose:mary 87.00 32 $ 1.74 rose:root 26.00 12 $ 0.52 total 337.00 154 $ 6.74 These are the arguments &man.pac.8; expects: Which printer to summarize. This option works only if there is an absolute path in the af capability in /etc/printcap. Sort the output by cost instead of alphabetically by user name. Ignore host name in the accounting files. With this option, user smith on host alpha is the same user smith on host gamma. Without, they are different users. Compute charges with price dollars per page or per foot instead of the price from the pc capability in /etc/printcap, or two cents (the default). You can specify price as a floating point number. Reverse the sort order. Make an accounting summary file and truncate the accounting file. name … Print accounting information for the given user names only. In the default summary that &man.pac.8; produces, you see the number of pages printed by each user from various hosts. If, at your site, host does not matter (because users can use any host), run pac -m, to produce the following summary: Login pages/feet runs price andy 2.00 1 $ 0.04 kelly 182.00 105 $ 3.64 mary 118.00 35 $ 2.36 root 26.00 12 $ 0.52 zhang 9.00 1 $ 0.18 total 337.00 154 $ 6.74 To compute the dollar amount due, &man.pac.8; uses the pc capability in the /etc/printcap file (default of 200, or 2 cents per page). Specify, in hundredths of cents, the price per page or per foot you want to charge for printouts in this capability. You can override this value when you run &man.pac.8; with the option. The units for the option are in dollars, though, not hundredths of cents. For example, &prompt.root; pac -p1.50 makes each page cost one dollar and fifty cents. You can really rake in the profits by using this option. Finally, running pac -s will save the summary information in a summary accounting file, which is named the same as the printer's accounting file, but with _sum appended to the name. It then truncates the accounting file. When you run &man.pac.8; again, it rereads the summary file to get starting totals, then adds information from the regular accounting file. How Can You Count Pages Printed? In order to perform even remotely accurate accounting, you need to be able to determine how much paper a job uses. This is the essential problem of printer accounting. For plain text jobs, the problem is not that hard to solve: you count how many lines are in a job and compare it to how many lines per page your printer supports. Do not forget to take into account backspaces in the file which overprint lines, or long logical lines that wrap onto one or more additional physical lines. The text filter lpf (introduced in lpf: a Text Filter) takes into account these things when it does accounting. If you are writing a text filter which needs to do accounting, you might want to examine lpf's source code. How do you handle other file formats, though? Well, for DVI-to-LaserJet or DVI-to-PostScript conversion, you can have your filter parse the diagnostic output of dvilj or dvips and look to see how many pages were converted. You might be able to do similar things with other file formats and conversion programs. But these methods suffer from the fact that the printer may not actually print all those pages. For example, it could jam, run out of toner, or explode—and the user would still get charged. So, what can you do? There is only one sure way to do accurate accounting. Get a printer that can tell you how much paper it uses, and attach it via a serial line or a network connection. Nearly all PostScript printers support this notion. Other makes and models do as well (networked Imagen laser printers, for example). Modify the filters for these printers to get the page usage after they print each job and have them log accounting information based on that value only. There is no line counting nor error-prone file examination required. Of course, you can always be generous and make all printouts free. Using Printers printerusage This section tells you how to use printers you have setup with FreeBSD. Here is an overview of the user-level commands: &man.lpr.1; Print jobs &man.lpq.1; Check printer queues &man.lprm.1; Remove jobs from a printer's queue There is also an administrative command, &man.lpc.8;, described in the section Administrating the LPD Spooler, used to control printers and their queues. All three of the commands &man.lpr.1;, &man.lprm.1;, and &man.lpq.1; accept an option to specify on which printer/queue to operate, as listed in the /etc/printcap file. This enables you to submit, remove, and check on jobs for various printers. If you do not use the option, then these commands use the printer specified in the PRINTER environment variable. Finally, if you do not have a PRINTER environment variable, these commands default to the printer named lp. Hereafter, the terminology default printer means the printer named in the PRINTER environment variable, or the printer named lp when there is no PRINTER environment variable. Printing Jobs To print files, type: &prompt.user; lpr filename ... printing This prints each of the listed files to the default printer. If you list no files, &man.lpr.1; reads data to print from standard input. For example, this command prints some important system files: &prompt.user; lpr /etc/host.conf /etc/hosts.equiv To select a specific printer, type: &prompt.user; lpr -P printer-name filename ... This example prints a long listing of the current directory to the printer named rattan: &prompt.user; ls -l | lpr -P rattan Because no files were listed for the &man.lpr.1; command, lpr read the data to print from standard input, which was the output of the ls -l command. The &man.lpr.1; command can also accept a wide variety of options to control formatting, apply file conversions, generate multiple copies, and so forth. For more information, see the section Printing Options. Checking Jobs print jobs When you print with &man.lpr.1;, the data you wish to print is put together in a package called a print job, which is sent to the LPD spooling system. Each printer has a queue of jobs, and your job waits in that queue along with other jobs from yourself and from other users. The printer prints those jobs in a first-come, first-served order. To display the queue for the default printer, type &man.lpq.1;. For a specific printer, use the option. For example, the command &prompt.user; lpq -P bamboo shows the queue for the printer named bamboo. Here is an example of the output of the lpq command: bamboo is ready and printing Rank Owner Job Files Total Size active kelly 9 /etc/host.conf, /etc/hosts.equiv 88 bytes 2nd kelly 10 (standard input) 1635 bytes 3rd mary 11 ... 78519 bytes This shows three jobs in the queue for bamboo. The first job, submitted by user kelly, got assigned job number 9. Every job for a printer gets a unique job number. Most of the time you can ignore the job number, but you will need it if you want to cancel the job; see section Removing Jobs for details. Job number nine consists of two files; multiple files given on the &man.lpr.1; command line are treated as part of a single job. It is the currently active job (note the word active under the Rank column), which means the printer should be currently printing that job. The second job consists of data passed as the standard input to the &man.lpr.1; command. The third job came from user mary; it is a much larger job. The pathname of the files she's trying to print is too long to fit, so the &man.lpq.1; command just shows three dots. The very first line of the output from &man.lpq.1; is also useful: it tells what the printer is currently doing (or at least what LPD thinks the printer is doing). The &man.lpq.1; command also support a option to generate a detailed long listing. Here is an example of lpq -l: waiting for bamboo to become ready (offline ?) kelly: 1st [job 009rose] /etc/host.conf 73 bytes /etc/hosts.equiv 15 bytes kelly: 2nd [job 010rose] (standard input) 1635 bytes mary: 3rd [job 011rose] /home/orchid/mary/research/venus/alpha-regio/mapping 78519 bytes Removing Jobs If you change your mind about printing a job, you can remove the job from the queue with the &man.lprm.1; command. Often, you can even use &man.lprm.1; to remove an active job, but some or all of the job might still get printed. To remove a job from the default printer, first use &man.lpq.1; to find the job number. Then type: &prompt.user; lprm job-number To remove the job from a specific printer, add the option. The following command removes job number 10 from the queue for the printer bamboo: &prompt.user; lprm -P bamboo 10 The &man.lprm.1; command has a few shortcuts: lprm - Removes all jobs (for the default printer) belonging to you. lprm user Removes all jobs (for the default printer) belonging to user. The superuser can remove other users' jobs; you can remove only your own jobs. lprm With no job number, user name, or appearing on the command line, &man.lprm.1; removes the currently active job on the default printer, if it belongs to you. The superuser can remove any active job. Just use the option with the above shortcuts to operate on a specific printer instead of the default. For example, the following command removes all jobs for the current user in the queue for the printer named rattan: &prompt.user; lprm -P rattan - If you are working in a networked environment, &man.lprm.1; will let you remove jobs only from the host from which the jobs were submitted, even if the same printer is available from other hosts. The following command sequence demonstrates this: &prompt.user; lpr -P rattan myfile &prompt.user; rlogin orchid &prompt.user; lpq -P rattan Rank Owner Job Files Total Size active seeyan 12 ... 49123 bytes 2nd kelly 13 myfile 12 bytes &prompt.user; lprm -P rattan 13 rose: Permission denied &prompt.user; logout &prompt.user; lprm -P rattan 13 dfA013rose dequeued cfA013rose dequeued Beyond Plain Text: Printing Options The &man.lpr.1; command supports a number of options that control formatting text, converting graphic and other file formats, producing multiple copies, handling of the job, and more. This section describes the options. Formatting and Conversion Options The following &man.lpr.1; options control formatting of the files in the job. Use these options if the job does not contain plain text or if you want plain text formatted through the &man.pr.1; utility. TeX For example, the following command prints a DVI file (from the TeX typesetting system) named fish-report.dvi to the printer named bamboo: &prompt.user; lpr -P bamboo -d fish-report.dvi These options apply to every file in the job, so you cannot mix (say) DVI and ditroff files together in a job. Instead, submit the files as separate jobs, using a different conversion option for each job. All of these options except and require conversion filters installed for the destination printer. For example, the option requires the DVI conversion filter. Section Conversion Filters gives details. Print cifplot files. Print DVI files. Print FORTRAN text files. Print plot data. Indent the output by number columns; if you omit number, indent by 8 columns. This option works only with certain conversion filters. Do not put any space between the and the number. Print literal text data, including control characters. Print ditroff (device independent troff) data. -p Format plain text with &man.pr.1; before printing. See &man.pr.1; for more information. Use title on the &man.pr.1; header instead of the file name. This option has effect only when used with the option. Print troff data. Print raster data. Here is an example: this command prints a nicely formatted version of the &man.ls.1; manual page on the default printer: &prompt.user; zcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz | troff -t -man | lpr -t The &man.zcat.1; command uncompresses the source of the &man.ls.1; manual page and passes it to the &man.troff.1; command, which formats that source and makes GNU troff output and passes it to &man.lpr.1;, which submits the job to the LPD spooler. Because we used the option to &man.lpr.1;, the spooler will convert the GNU troff output into a format the default printer can understand when it prints the job. Job Handling Options The following options to &man.lpr.1; tell LPD to handle the job specially: -# copies Produce a number of copies of each file in the job instead of just one copy. An administrator may disable this option to reduce printer wear-and-tear and encourage photocopier usage. See section Restricting Multiple Copies. This example prints three copies of parser.c followed by three copies of parser.h to the default printer: &prompt.user; lpr -#3 parser.c parser.h -m Send mail after completing the print job. With this option, the LPD system will send mail to your account when it finishes handling your job. In its message, it will tell you if the job completed successfully or if there was an error, and (often) what the error was. -s Do not copy the files to the spooling directory, but make symbolic links to them instead. If you are printing a large job, you probably want to use this option. It saves space in the spooling directory (your job might overflow the free space on the filesystem where the spooling directory resides). It saves time as well since LPD will not have to copy each and every byte of your job to the spooling directory. There is a drawback, though: since LPD will refer to the original files directly, you cannot modify or remove them until they have been printed. If you are printing to a remote printer, LPD will eventually have to copy files from the local host to the remote host, so the option will save space only on the local spooling directory, not the remote. It is still useful, though. -r Remove the files in the job after copying them to the spooling directory, or after printing them with the option. Be careful with this option! Header Page Options These options to &man.lpr.1; adjust the text that normally appears on a job's header page. If header pages are suppressed for the destination printer, these options have no effect. See section Header Pages for information about setting up header pages. -C text Replace the hostname on the header page with text. The hostname is normally the name of the host from which the job was submitted. -J text Replace the job name on the header page with text. The job name is normally the name of the first file of the job, or stdin if you are printing standard input. -h Do not print any header page. At some sites, this option may have no effect due to the way header pages are generated. See Header Pages for details. Administrating Printers As an administrator for your printers, you have had to install, set up, and test them. Using the &man.lpc.8; command, you can interact with your printers in yet more ways. With &man.lpc.8;, you can Start and stop the printers Enable and disable their queues Rearrange the order of the jobs in each queue. First, a note about terminology: if a printer is stopped, it will not print anything in its queue. Users can still submit jobs, which will wait in the queue until the printer is started or the queue is cleared. If a queue is disabled, no user (except root) can submit jobs for the printer. An enabled queue allows jobs to be submitted. A printer can be started for a disabled queue, in which case it will continue to print jobs in the queue until the queue is empty. In general, you have to have root privileges to use the &man.lpc.8; command. Ordinary users can use the &man.lpc.8; command to get printer status and to restart a hung printer only. Here is a summary of the &man.lpc.8; commands. Most of the commands takes a printer-name argument to tell on which printer to operate. You can use all for the printer-name to mean all printers listed in /etc/printcap. abort printer-name Cancel the current job and stop the printer. Users can still submit jobs if the queue's enabled. clean printer-name Remove old files from the printer's spooling directory. Occasionally, the files that make up a job are not properly removed by LPD, particularly if there have been errors during printing or a lot of administrative activity. This command finds files that do not belong in the spooling directory and removes them. disable printer-name Disable queuing of new jobs. If the printer's started, it will continue to print any jobs remaining in the queue. The superuser (root) can always submit jobs, even to a disabled queue. This command is useful while you are testing a new printer or filter installation: disable the queue and submit jobs as root. Other users will not be able to submit jobs until you complete your testing and re-enable the queue with the enable command. down printer-name message Take a printer down. Equivalent to disable followed by stop. The message appears as the printer's status whenever a user checks the printer's queue with &man.lpq.1; or status with lpc status. enable printer-name Enable the queue for a printer. Users can submit jobs but the printer will not print anything until it is started. help command-name Print help on the command command-name. With no command-name, print a summary of the commands available. restart printer-name Start the printer. Ordinary users can use this command if some extraordinary circumstance hangs LPD, but they cannot start a printer stopped with either the stop or down commands. The restart command is equivalent to abort followed by start. start printer-name Start the printer. The printer will print jobs in its queue. stop printer-name Stop the printer. The printer will finish the current job and will not print anything else in its queue. Even though the printer is stopped, users can still submit jobs to an enabled queue. topq printer-name job-or-username Rearrange the queue for printer-name by placing the jobs with the listed job numbers or the jobs belonging to username at the top of the queue. For this command, you cannot use all as the printer-name. up printer-name Bring a printer up; the opposite of the down command. Equivalent to start followed by enable. &man.lpc.8; accepts the above commands on the command line. If you do not enter any commands, &man.lpc.8; enters an interactive mode, where you can enter commands until you type exit, quit, or end-of-file. Alternatives to the Standard Spooler If you have been reading straight through this manual, by now you have learned just about everything there is to know about the LPD spooling system that comes with FreeBSD. You can probably appreciate many of its shortcomings, which naturally leads to the question: What other spooling systems are out there (and work with FreeBSD)? LPRng LPRng LPRng, which purportedly means LPR: the Next Generation is a complete rewrite of PLP. Patrick Powell and Justin Mason (the principal maintainer of PLP) collaborated to make LPRng. The main site for LPRng is http://www.astart.com/lprng/LPRng.html. Troubleshooting After performing the simple test with &man.lptest.1;, you might have gotten one of the following results instead of the correct printout: It worked, after awhile; or, it did not eject a full sheet. The printer printed the above, but it sat for awhile and did nothing. In fact, you might have needed to press a PRINT REMAINING or FORM FEED button on the printer to get any results to appear. If this is the case, the printer was probably waiting to see if there was any more data for your job before it printed anything. To fix this problem, you can have the text filter send a FORM FEED character (or whatever is necessary) to the printer. This is usually sufficient to have the printer immediately print any text remaining in its internal buffer. It is also useful to make sure each print job ends on a full sheet, so the next job does not start somewhere on the middle of the last page of the previous job. The following replacement for the shell script /usr/local/libexec/if-simple prints a form feed after it sends the job to the printer: #!/bin/sh # # if-simple - Simple text input filter for lpd # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/if-simple # # Simply copies stdin to stdout. Ignores all filter arguments. # Writes a form feed character (\f) after printing job. /bin/cat && printf "\f" && exit 0 exit 2 It produced the staircase effect. You got the following on paper: !"#$%&'()*+,-./01234 "#$%&'()*+,-./012345 #$%&'()*+,-./0123456 - DOS + MS-DOS OS/2 ASCII You have become another victim of the staircase effect, caused by conflicting interpretations of what characters should indicate a new line. UNIX-style operating systems use a single character: ASCII code 10, the line feed (LF). MS-DOS, OS/2, and others uses a pair of characters, ASCII code 10 and ASCII code 13 (the carriage return or CR). Many printers use the MS-DOS convention for representing new-lines. When you print with FreeBSD, your text used just the line feed character. The printer, upon seeing a line feed character, advanced the paper one line, but maintained the same horizontal position on the page for the next character to print. That is what the carriage return is for: to move the location of the next character to print to the left edge of the paper. Here is what FreeBSD wants your printer to do: Printer received CR Printer prints CR Printer received LF Printer prints CR + LF Here are some ways to achieve this: Use the printer's configuration switches or control panel to alter its interpretation of these characters. Check your printer's manual to find out how to do this. If you boot your system into other operating systems besides FreeBSD, you may have to reconfigure the printer to use a an interpretation for CR and LF characters that those other operating systems use. You might prefer one of the other solutions, below. Have FreeBSD's serial line driver automatically convert LF to CR+LF. Of course, this works with printers on serial ports only. To enable this feature, set the CRMOD bit in fs capability in the /etc/printcap file for the printer. Send an escape code to the printer to have it temporarily treat LF characters differently. Consult your printer's manual for escape codes that your printer might support. When you find the proper escape code, modify the text filter to send the code first, then send the print job. PCL Here is an example text filter for printers that understand the Hewlett-Packard PCL escape codes. This filter makes the printer treat LF characters as a LF and CR; then it sends the job; then it sends a form feed to eject the last page of the job. It should work with nearly all Hewlett Packard printers. #!/bin/sh # # hpif - Simple text input filter for lpd for HP-PCL based printers # Installed in /usr/local/libexec/hpif # # Simply copies stdin to stdout. Ignores all filter arguments. # Tells printer to treat LF as CR+LF. Ejects the page when done. printf "\033&k2G" && cat && printf "\033&l0H" && exit 0 exit 2 Here is an example /etc/printcap from a host called orchid. It has a single printer attached to its first parallel port, a Hewlett Packard LaserJet 3Si named teak. It is using the above script as its text filter: # # /etc/printcap for host orchid # teak|hp|laserjet|Hewlett Packard LaserJet 3Si:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/teak:mx#0:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/hpif: It overprinted each line. The printer never advanced a line. All of the lines of text were printed on top of each other on one line. This problem is the opposite of the staircase effect, described above, and is much rarer. Somewhere, the LF characters that FreeBSD uses to end a line are being treated as CR characters to return the print location to the left edge of the paper, but not also down a line. Use the printer's configuration switches or control panel to enforce the following interpretation of LF and CR characters: Printer receives Printer prints CR CR LF CR + LF The printer lost characters. While printing, the printer did not print a few characters in each line. The problem might have gotten worse as the printer ran, losing more and more characters. The problem is that the printer cannot keep up with the speed at which the computer sends data over a serial line (this problem should not occur with printers on parallel ports). There are two ways to overcome the problem: If the printer supports XON/XOFF flow control, have FreeBSD use it by specifying the TANDEM bit in the fs capability. If the printer supports carrier flow control, specify the MDMBUF bit in the fs capability. Make sure the cable connecting the printer to the computer is correctly wired for carrier flow control. If the printer does not support any flow control, use some combination of the NLDELAY, TBDELAY, CRDELAY, VTDELAY, and BSDELAY bits in the fs capability to add appropriate delays to the stream of data sent to the printer. It printed garbage. The printer printed what appeared to be random garbage, but not the desired text. This is usually another symptom of incorrect communications parameters with a serial printer. Double-check the bps rate in the br capability, and the parity bits in the fs and fc capabilities; make sure the printer is using the same settings as specified in the /etc/printcap file. Nothing happened. If nothing happened, the problem is probably within FreeBSD and not the hardware. Add the log file (lf) capability to the entry for the printer you are debugging in the /etc/printcap file. For example, here is the entry for rattan, with the lf capability: rattan|line|diablo|lp|Diablo 630 Line Printer:\ :sh:sd=/var/spool/lpd/rattan:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/if-simple:\ :lf=/var/log/rattan.log Then, try printing again. Check the log file (in our example, /var/log/rattan.log) to see any error messages that might appear. Based on the messages you see, try to correct the problem. If you do not specify a lf capability, LPD uses /dev/console as a default. diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/security/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/security/chapter.sgml index 83894eefd6..bca6ced3a6 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/security/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/security/chapter.sgml @@ -1,3033 +1,3037 @@ Security security Much of this chapter has been taken from the &man.security.7; man page, originally written by &a.dillon;. Synopsis The following chapter will provide a basic introduction to system security concepts, some general good rules of thumb, and some advanced topics such as S/Key, OpenSSL, Kerberos, and others. Introduction Security is a function that begins and ends with the system administrator. While all BSD UNIX multi-user systems have some inherent security, the job of building and maintaining additional security mechanisms to keep those users honest is probably one of the single largest undertakings of the sysadmin. Machines are only as secure as you make them, and security concerns are ever competing with the human necessity for convenience. UNIX systems, in general, are capable of running a huge number of simultaneous processes and many of these processes operate as servers – meaning that external entities can connect and talk to them. As yesterday's mini-computers and mainframes become today's desktops, and as computers become networked and internetworked, security becomes an ever bigger issue. Security is best implemented through a layered onion approach. In a nutshell, what you want to do is to create as many layers of security as are convenient and then carefully monitor the system for intrusions. You do not want to overbuild your security or you will interfere with the detection side, and detection is one of the single most important aspects of any security mechanism. For example, it makes little sense to set the schg flags (see &man.chflags.1;) on every system binary because while this may temporarily protect the binaries, it prevents an attacker who has broken in from making an easily detectable change that may result in your security mechanisms not detecting the attacker at all. System security also pertains to dealing with various forms of attack, including attacks that attempt to crash or otherwise make a system unusable but do not attempt to break root. Security concerns can be split up into several categories: Denial of service attacks. User account compromises. Root compromise through accessible servers. Root compromise via user accounts. Backdoor creation. DOS attacks security DOS attacks Denial of Service A denial of service attack is an action that deprives the machine of needed resources. Typically, D.O.S. attacks are brute-force mechanisms that attempt to crash or otherwise make a machine unusable by overwhelming its servers or network stack. Some D.O.S. attacks try to take advantages of bugs in the networking stack to crash a machine with a single packet. The latter can only be fixed by applying a bug fix to the kernel. Attacks on servers can often be fixed by properly specifying options to limit the load the servers incur on the system under adverse conditions. Brute-force network attacks are harder to deal with. A spoofed-packet attack, for example, is nearly impossible to stop short of cutting your system off from the Internet. It may not be able to take your machine down, but it can saturate your Internet connection. security account compromises A user account compromise is even more common than a D.O.S. attack. Many sysadmins still run standard telnetd, rlogind, rshd, and ftpd servers on their machines. These servers, by default, do not operate over encrypted connections. The result is that if you have any moderate-sized user base, one or more of your users logging into your system from a remote location (which is the most common and convenient way to login to a system) will have his or her password sniffed. The attentive system admin will analyze his remote access logs looking for suspicious source addresses even for successful logins. One must always assume that once an attacker has access to a user account, the attacker can break root. However, the reality is that in a well secured and maintained system, access to a user account does not necessarily give the attacker access to root. The distinction is important because without access to root the attacker cannot generally hide his tracks and may, at best, be able to do nothing more than mess with the user's files or crash the machine. User account compromises are very common because users tend not to take the precautions that sysadmins take. security backdoors System administrators must keep in mind that there are potentially many ways to break root on a machine. The attacker may know the root password, the attacker may find a bug in a root-run server and be able to break root over a network connection to that server, or the attacker may know of a bug in an suid-root program that allows the attacker to break root once he has broken into a user's account. If an attacker has found a way to break root on a machine, the attacker may not have a need to install a backdoor. Many of the root holes found and closed to date involve a considerable amount of work by the attacker to cleanup after himself, so most attackers install backdoors. Backdoors provide the attacker with a way to easily regain root access to the system, but it also gives the smart system administrator a convenient way to detect the intrusion. Making it impossible for an attacker to install a backdoor may actually be detrimental to your security because it will not close off the hole the attacker found to break in the first place. Security remedies should always be implemented with a multi-layered onion peel approach and can be categorized as follows: Securing root and staff accounts. Securing root – root-run servers and suid/sgid binaries. Securing user accounts. Securing the password file. Securing the kernel core, raw devices, and filesystems. Quick detection of inappropriate changes made to the system. Paranoia. The next section of this chapter will cover the above bullet items in greater depth. security securing Securing FreeBSD The sections that follow will cover the methods of securing your FreeBSD system that were mentioned in the last section of this chapter. Securing the root account and staff accounts su First off, do not bother securing staff accounts if you have not secured the root account. Most systems have a password assigned to the root account. The first thing you do is assume that the password is always compromised. This does not mean that you should remove the password. The password is almost always necessary for console access to the machine. What it does mean is that you should not make it possible to use the password outside of the console or possibly even with the &man.su.1; command. For example, make sure that your pty's are specified as being unsecure in the /etc/ttys file so that direct root logins via telnet or rlogin are disallowed. If using other login services such as sshd, make sure that direct root logins are disabled there as well. Consider every access method – services such as FTP often fall through the cracks. Direct root logins should only be allowed via the system console. wheel Of course, as a sysadmin you have to be able to get to root, so we open up a few holes. But we make sure these holes require additional password verification to operate. One way to make root accessible is to add appropriate staff accounts to the wheel group (in /etc/group). The staff members placed in the wheel group are allowed to su to root. You should never give staff members native wheel access by putting them in the wheel group in their password entry. Staff accounts should be placed in a staff group, and then added to the wheel group via the /etc/group file. Only those staff members who actually need to have root access should be placed in the wheel group. It is also possible, when using an authentication method such as kerberos, to use kerberos' .k5login file in the root account to allow a &man.ksu.1; to root without having to place anyone at all in the wheel group. This may be the better solution since the wheel mechanism still allows an intruder to break root if the intruder has gotten hold of your password file and can break into a staff account. While having the wheel mechanism is better than having nothing at all, it is not necessarily the safest option. An indirect way to secure staff accounts, and ultimately root access is to use an alternative login access method and do what is known as *'ing out the crypted password for the staff accounts. Using the &man.vipw.8; command, one can replace each instance of a crypted password with a single * character. This command will update the /etc/master.passwd file and user/password database to disable password-authenticated logins. A staff account entry such as: foobar:R9DT/Fa1/LV9U:1000:1000::0:0:Foo Bar:/home/foobar:/usr/local/bin/tcsh Should be changed to this : foobar:*:1000:1000::0:0:Foo Bar:/home/foobar:/usr/local/bin/tcsh This change will prevent normal logins from occurring, since the encrypted password will never match *. With this done, staff members must use another mechanism to authenticate themselves such as &man.kerberos.1; or &man.ssh.1; using a public/private key pair. When using something like kerberos, one generally must secure the machines which run the kerberos servers and your desktop workstation. When using a public/private key pair with ssh, one must generally secure the machine used to login from (typically one's workstation). An additional layer of protection can be added to the key pair by password protecting the key pair when creating it with &man.ssh-keygen.1;. Being able to * out the passwords for staff accounts also guarantees that staff members can only login through secure access methods that you have setup. This forces all staff members to use secure, encrypted connections for all of their sessions which closes an important hole used by many intruders: That of sniffing the network from an unrelated, less secure machine. The more indirect security mechanisms also assume that you are logging in from a more restrictive server to a less restrictive server. For example, if your main box is running all sorts of servers, your workstation should not be running any. In order for your workstation to be reasonably secure you should run as few servers as possible, up to and including no servers at all, and you should run a password-protected screen blanker. Of course, given physical access to a workstation an attacker can break any sort of security you put on it. This is definitely a problem that you should consider but you should also consider the fact that the vast majority of break-ins occur remotely, over a network, from people who do not have physical access to your workstation or servers. Kerberos Using something like kerberos also gives you the ability to disable or change the password for a staff account in one place and have it immediately effect all the machine the staff member may have an account on. If a staff member's account gets compromised, the ability to instantly change his password on all machines should not be underrated. With discrete passwords, changing a password on N machines can be a mess. You can also impose re-passwording restrictions with kerberos: not only can a kerberos ticket be made to timeout after a while, but the kerberos system can require that the user choose a new password after a certain period of time (say, once a month). Securing Root-run Servers and SUID/SGID Binaries ntalk comsat finger sandboxes sshd telnetd rshd rlogind The prudent sysadmin only runs the servers he needs to, no more, no less. Be aware that third party servers are often the most bug-prone. For example, running an old version of imapd or popper is like giving a universal root ticket out to the entire world. Never run a server that you have not checked out carefully. Many servers do not need to be run as root. For example, the ntalk, comsat, and finger daemons can be run in special user sandboxes. A sandbox isn't perfect unless you go to a large amount of trouble, but the onion approach to security still stands: If someone is able to break in through a server running in a sandbox, they still have to break out of the sandbox. The more layers the attacker must break through, the lower the likelihood of his success. Root holes have historically been found in virtually every server ever run as root, including basic system servers. If you are running a machine through which people only login via sshd and never login via telnetd or rshd or rlogind, then turn off those services! FreeBSD now defaults to running ntalkd, comsat, and finger in a sandbox. Another program which may be a candidate for running in a sandbox is &man.named.8;. /etc/defaults/rc.conf includes the arguments necessary to run named in a sandbox in a commented-out form. Depending on whether you are installing a new system or upgrading an existing system, the special user accounts used by these sandboxes may not be installed. The prudent sysadmin would research and implement sandboxes for servers whenever possible. sendmail There are a number of other servers that typically do not run in sandboxes: sendmail, popper, imapd, ftpd, and others. There are alternatives to some of these, but installing them may require more work than you are willing to perform (the convenience factor strikes again). You may have to run these servers as root and rely on other mechanisms to detect break-ins that might occur through them. The other big potential root hole in a system are the suid-root and sgid binaries installed on the system. Most of these binaries, such as rlogin, reside in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, or /usr/sbin. While nothing is 100% safe, the system-default suid and sgid binaries can be considered reasonably safe. Still, root holes are occasionally found in these binaries. A root hole was found in Xlib in 1998 that made xterm (which is typically suid) vulnerable. It is better to be safe than sorry and the prudent sysadmin will restrict suid binaries that only staff should run to a special group that only staff can access, and get rid of (chmod 000) any suid binaries that nobody uses. A server with no display generally does not need an xterm binary. Sgid binaries can be almost as dangerous. If an intruder can break an sgid-kmem binary the intruder might be able to read /dev/kmem and thus read the crypted password file, potentially compromising any passworded account. Alternatively an intruder who breaks group kmem can monitor keystrokes sent through pty's, including pty's used by users who login through secure methods. An intruder that breaks the tty group can write to almost any user's tty. If a user is running a terminal program or emulator with a keyboard-simulation feature, the intruder can potentially generate a data stream that causes the user's terminal to echo a command, which is then run as that user. Securing User Accounts User accounts are usually the most difficult to secure. While you can impose Draconian access restrictions on your staff and * out their passwords, you may not be able to do so with any general user accounts you might have. If you do have sufficient control then you may win out and be able to secure the user accounts properly. If not, you simply have to be more vigilant in your monitoring of those accounts. Use of ssh and kerberos for user accounts is more problematic due to the extra administration and technical support required, but still a very good solution compared to a crypted password file. Securing the Password File The only sure fire way is to * out as many passwords as you can and use ssh or kerberos for access to those accounts. Even though the crypted password file (/etc/spwd.db) can only be read by root, it may be possible for an intruder to obtain read access to that file even if the attacker cannot obtain root-write access. Your security scripts should always check for and report changes to the password file (see Checking file integrity below). Securing the Kernel Core, Raw Devices, and Filesystems If an attacker breaks root he can do just about anything, but there are certain conveniences. For example, most modern kernels have a packet sniffing device driver built in. Under FreeBSD it is called the bpf device. An intruder will commonly attempt to run a packet sniffer on a compromised machine. You do not need to give the intruder the capability and most systems should not have the bpf device compiled in. sysctl But even if you turn off the bpf device, you still have /dev/mem and /dev/kmem to worry about. For that matter, the intruder can still write to raw disk devices. Also, there is another kernel feature called the module loader, &man.kldload.8;. An enterprising intruder can use a KLD module to install his own bpf device or other sniffing device on a running kernel. To avoid these problems you have to run the kernel at a higher secure level, at least securelevel 1. The securelevel can be set with a sysctl on the kern.securelevel variable. Once you have set the securelevel to 1, write access to raw devices will be denied and special chflags flags, such as schg, will be enforced. You must also ensure that the schg flag is set on critical startup binaries, directories, and script files – everything that gets run up to the point where the securelevel is set. This might be overdoing it, and upgrading the system is much more difficult when you operate at a higher secure level. You may compromise and run the system at a higher secure level but not set the schg flag for every system file and directory under the sun. Another possibility is to simply mount / and /usr read-only. It should be noted that being too draconian in what you attempt to protect may prevent the all-important detection of an intrusion. Checking File Integrity: Binaries, Configuration Files, Etc. When it comes right down to it, you can only protect your core system configuration and control files so much before the convenience factor rears its ugly head. For example, using chflags to set the schg bit on most of the files in / and /usr is probably counterproductive because while it may protect the files, it also closes a detection window. The last layer of your security onion is perhaps the most important – detection. The rest of your security is pretty much useless (or, worse, presents you with a false sense of safety) if you cannot detect potential incursions. Half the job of the onion is to slow down the attacker rather than stop him in order to give the detection side of the equation a chance to catch him in the act. The best way to detect an incursion is to look for modified, missing, or unexpected files. The best way to look for modified files is from another (often centralized) limited-access system. Writing your security scripts on the extra-secure limited-access system makes them mostly invisible to potential attackers, and this is important. In order to take maximum advantage you generally have to give the limited-access box significant access to the other machines in the business, usually either by doing a read-only NFS export of the other machines to the limited-access box, or by setting up ssh key-pairs to allow the limit-access box to ssh to the other machines. Except for its network traffic, NFS is the least visible method – allowing you to monitor the filesystems on each client box virtually undetected. If your limited-access server is connected to the client boxes through a switch, the NFS method is often the better choice. If your limited-access server is connected to the client boxes through a hub or through several layers of routing, the NFS method may be too insecure (network-wise) and using ssh may be the better choice even with the audit-trail tracks that ssh lays. Once you give a limit-access box at least read access to the client systems it is supposed to monitor, you must write scripts to do the actual monitoring. Given an NFS mount, you can write scripts out of simple system utilities such as &man.find.1; and &man.md5.1;. It is best to physically md5 the client-box files boxes at least once a day, and to test control files such as those found in /etc and /usr/local/etc even more often. When mismatches are found relative to the base md5 information the limited-access machine knows is valid, it should scream at a sysadmin to go check it out. A good security script will also check for inappropriate suid binaries and for new or deleted files on system partitions such as / and /usr. When using ssh rather than NFS, writing the security script is much more difficult. You essentially have to scp the scripts to the client box in order to run them, making them visible, and for safety you also need to scp the binaries (such as find) that those scripts use. The ssh daemon on the client box may already be compromised. All in all, using ssh may be necessary when running over unsecure links, but it's also a lot harder to deal with. A good security script will also check for changes to user and staff members access configuration files: .rhosts, .shosts, .ssh/authorized_keys and so forth… files that might fall outside the purview of the MD5 check. If you have a huge amount of user disk space it may take too long to run through every file on those partitions. In this case, setting mount flags to disallow suid binaries and devices on those partitions is a good idea. The nodev and nosuid options (see &man.mount.8;) are what you want to look into. You should probably scan them anyway at least once a week, since the object of this layer is to detect a break-in whether or not the break-in is effective. Process accounting (see &man.accton.8;) is a relatively low-overhead feature of the operating system which might help as a post-break-in evaluation mechanism. It is especially useful in tracking down how an intruder has actually broken into a system, assuming the file is still intact after the break-in occurs. Finally, security scripts should process the log files and the logs themselves should be generated in as secure a manner as possible – remote syslog can be very useful. An intruder tries to cover his tracks, and log files are critical to the sysadmin trying to track down the time and method of the initial break-in. One way to keep a permanent record of the log files is to run the system console to a serial port and collect the information on a continuing basis through a secure machine monitoring the consoles. Paranoia A little paranoia never hurts. As a rule, a sysadmin can add any number of security features as long as they do not effect convenience, and can add security features that do effect convenience with some added thought. Even more importantly, a security administrator should mix it up a bit – if you use recommendations such as those given by this document verbatim, you give away your methodologies to the prospective attacker who also has access to this document. Denial of Service Attacks DOS attacks This section covers Denial of Service attacks. A DOS attack is typically a packet attack. While there is not much you can do about modern spoofed packet attacks that saturate your network, you can generally limit the damage by ensuring that the attacks cannot take down your servers. Limiting server forks. Limiting springboard attacks (ICMP response attacks, ping broadcast, etc.). Kernel Route Cache. A common DOS attack is against a forking server that attempts to cause the server to eat processes, file descriptors, and memory until the machine dies. Inetd (see &man.inetd.8;) has several options to limit this sort of attack. It should be noted that while it is possible to prevent a machine from going down it is not generally possible to prevent a service from being disrupted by the attack. Read the inetd manual page carefully and pay specific attention to the , , and options. Note that spoofed-IP attacks will circumvent the option to inetd, so typically a combination of options must be used. Some standalone servers have self-fork-limitation parameters. Sendmail has its option which tends to work much better than trying to use sendmail's load limiting options due to the load lag. You should specify a MaxDaemonChildren parameter when you start sendmail high enough to handle your expected load but no so high that the computer cannot handle that number of sendmails without falling on its face. It is also prudent to run sendmail in queued mode () and to run the daemon (sendmail -bd) separate from the queue-runs (sendmail -q15m). If you still want real-time delivery you can run the queue at a much lower interval, such as , but be sure to specify a reasonable MaxDaemonChildren option for that sendmail to prevent cascade failures. Syslogd can be attacked directly and it is strongly recommended that you use the option whenever possible, and the option otherwise. You should also be fairly careful with connect-back services such as tcpwrapper's reverse-identd, which can be attacked directly. You generally do not want to use the reverse-ident feature of tcpwrappers for this reason. It is a very good idea to protect internal services from external access by firewalling them off at your border routers. The idea here is to prevent saturation attacks from outside your LAN, not so much to protect internal services from network-based root compromise. Always configure an exclusive firewall, i.e., firewall everything except ports A, B, C, D, and M-Z. This way you can firewall off all of your low ports except for certain specific services such as named (if you are primary for a zone), ntalkd, sendmail, and other Internet-accessible services. If you try to configure the firewall the other way – as an inclusive or permissive firewall, there is a good chance that you will forget to close a couple of services or that you will add a new internal service and forget to update the firewall. You can still open up the high-numbered port range on the firewall to allow permissive-like operation without compromising your low ports. Also take note that FreeBSD allows you to control the range of port numbers used for dynamic binding via the various net.inet.ip.portrange sysctl's (sysctl -a | fgrep portrange), which can also ease the complexity of your firewall's configuration. For example, you might use a normal first/last range of 4000 to 5000, and a hiport range of 49152 to 65535, then block everything under 4000 off in your firewall (except for certain specific Internet-accessible ports, of course). ICMP_BANDLIM Another common DOS attack is called a springboard attack – to attack a server in a manner that causes the server to generate responses which then overload the server, the local network, or some other machine. The most common attack of this nature is the ICMP ping broadcast attack. The attacker spoofs ping packets sent to your LAN's broadcast address with the source IP address set to the actual machine they wish to attack. If your border routers are not configured to stomp on ping's to broadcast addresses, your LAN winds up generating sufficient responses to the spoofed source address to saturate the victim, especially when the attacker uses the same trick on several dozen broadcast addresses over several dozen different networks at once. Broadcast attacks of over a hundred and twenty megabits have been measured. A second common springboard attack is against the ICMP error reporting system. By constructing packets that generate ICMP error responses, an attacker can saturate a server's incoming network and cause the server to saturate its outgoing network with ICMP responses. This type of attack can also crash the server by running it out of mbuf's, especially if the server cannot drain the ICMP responses it generates fast enough. The FreeBSD kernel has a new kernel compile option called ICMP_BANDLIM which limits the effectiveness of these sorts of attacks. The last major class of springboard attacks is related to certain internal inetd services such as the udp echo service. An attacker simply spoofs a UDP packet with the source address being server A's echo port, and the destination address being server B's echo port, where server A and B are both on your LAN. The two servers then bounce this one packet back and forth between each other. The attacker can overload both servers and their LANs simply by injecting a few packets in this manner. Similar problems exist with the internal chargen port. A competent sysadmin will turn off all of these inetd-internal test services. Spoofed packet attacks may also be used to overload the kernel route cache. Refer to the net.inet.ip.rtexpire, rtminexpire, and rtmaxcache sysctl parameters. A spoofed packet attack that uses a random source IP will cause the kernel to generate a temporary cached route in the route table, viewable with netstat -rna | fgrep W3. These routes typically timeout in 1600 seconds or so. If the kernel detects that the cached route table has gotten too big it will dynamically reduce the rtexpire but will never decrease it to less than rtminexpire. There are two problems: The kernel does not react quickly enough when a lightly loaded server is suddenly attacked. The rtminexpire is not low enough for the kernel to survive a sustained attack. If your servers are connected to the Internet via a T3 or better it may be prudent to manually override both rtexpire and rtminexpire via &man.sysctl.8;. Never set either parameter to zero (unless you want to crash the machine :-). Setting both parameters to 2 seconds should be sufficient to protect the route table from attack. Access Issues with Kerberos and SSH SSH Kerberos There are a few issues with both kerberos and ssh that need to be addressed if you intend to use them. Kerberos V is an excellent authentication protocol but there are bugs in the kerberized telnet and rlogin applications that make them unsuitable for dealing with binary streams. Also, by default kerberos does not encrypt a session unless you use the option. ssh encrypts everything by default. ssh works quite well in every respect except that it forwards encryption keys by default. What this means is that if you have a secure workstation holding keys that give you access to the rest of the system, and you ssh to an unsecure machine, your keys becomes exposed. The actual keys themselves are not exposed, but ssh installs a forwarding port for the duration of your login and if a attacker has broken root on the unsecure machine he can utilize that port to use your keys to gain access to any other machine that your keys unlock. We recommend that you use ssh in combination with kerberos whenever possible for staff logins. ssh can be compiled with kerberos support. This reduces your reliance on potentially exposable ssh keys while at the same time protecting passwords via kerberos. ssh keys should only be used for automated tasks from secure machines (something that kerberos is unsuited to). We also recommend that you either turn off key-forwarding in the ssh configuration, or that you make use of the from=IP/DOMAIN option that ssh allows in its authorized_keys file to make the key only usable to entities logging in from specific machines. DES, MD5, and Crypt security crypt crypt DES MD5 Parts rewritten and updated by &a.unfurl;, 21 March 2000. Every user on a UNIX system has a password associated with their account. It seems obvious that these passwords need to be known only to the user and the actual operating system. In order to keep these passwords secret, they are encrypted with what is known as a one-way hash, that is, they can only be easily encrypted but not decrypted. In other words, what we told you a moment ago was obvious is not even true: the operating system itself does not really know the password. It only knows the encrypted form of the password. The only way to get the plain-text password is by a brute force search of the space of possible passwords. Unfortunately the only secure way to encrypt passwords when UNIX came into being was based on DES, the Data Encryption Standard. This is not such a problem for users that live in the US, but since the source code for DES could not be exported outside the US, FreeBSD had to find a way to both comply with US law and retain compatibility with all the other UNIX variants that still use DES. The solution was to divide up the encryption libraries so that US users could install the DES libraries and use DES but international users still had an encryption method that could be exported abroad. This is how FreeBSD came to use MD5 as its default encryption method. MD5 is believed to be more secure than DES, so installing DES is offered primarily for compatibility reasons. Recognizing your crypt mechanism It is pretty easy to identify which encryption method FreeBSD is set up to use. Examining the encrypted passwords in the /etc/master.passwd file is one way. Passwords encrypted with the MD5 hash are longer than those with encrypted with the DES hash and also begin with the characters $1$. DES password strings do not have any particular identifying characteristics, but they are shorter than MD5 passwords, and are coded in a 64-character alphabet which does not include the $ character, so a relatively short string which does not begin with a dollar sign is very likely a DES password. The libraries can identify the passwords this way as well. As a result, the DES libraries are able to identify MD5 passwords, and use MD5 to check passwords that were encrypted that way, and DES for the rest. They are able to do this because the DES libraries also contain MD5. Unfortunately, the reverse is not true, so the MD5 libraries cannot authenticate passwords that were encrypted with DES. Identifying which library is being used by the programs on your system is easy as well. Any program that uses crypt is linked against libcrypt which for each type of library is a symbolic link to the appropriate implementation. For example, on a system using the DES versions: &prompt.user; ls -l /usr/lib/libcrypt* lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 13 Mar 19 06:56 libcrypt.a -> libdescrypt.a lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 18 Mar 19 06:56 libcrypt.so.2.0 -> libdescrypt.so.2.0 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 15 Mar 19 06:56 libcrypt_p.a -> libdescrypt_p.a On a system using the MD5-based libraries, the same links will be present, but the target will be libscrypt rather than libdescrypt. If you have installed the DES-capable crypt library libdescrypt (e.g. by installing the "crypto" distribution), then which password format will be used for new passwords is controlled by the passwd_format login capability in /etc/login.conf, which takes values of either des or md5. See the &man.login.conf.5; manpage for more information about login capabilities. S/Key S/Key security S/Key S/Key is a one-time password scheme based on a one-way hash function. FreeBSD uses the MD4 hash for compatibility but other systems have used MD5 and DES-MAC. S/Key has been part of the FreeBSD base system since version 1.1.5 and is also used on a growing number of other operating systems. S/Key is a registered trademark of Bell Communications Research, Inc. There are three different sorts of passwords which we will talk about in the discussion below. The first is your usual UNIX-style or Kerberos password; we will call this a UNIX password. The second sort is the one-time password which is generated by the S/Key key program and accepted by the keyinit program and the login prompt; we will call this a one-time password. The final sort of password is the secret password which you give to the key program (and sometimes the keyinit program) which it uses to generate one-time passwords; we will call it a secret password or just unqualified password. The secret password does not have anything to do with your UNIX password; they can be the same but this is not recommended. S/Key secret passwords are not limited to 8 characters like UNIX passwords, they can be as long as you like. Passwords of six or seven word long phrases are fairly common. For the most part, the S/Key system operates completely independently of the UNIX password system. Besides the password, there are two other pieces of data that are important to S/Key. One is what is known as the seed or key and consists of two letters and five digits. The other is what is called the iteration count and is a number between 1 and 100. S/Key creates the one-time password by concatenating the seed and the secret password, then applying the MD4 hash as many times as specified by the iteration count and turning the result into six short English words. These six English words are your one-time password. The login and su programs keep track of the last one-time password used, and the user is authenticated if the hash of the user-provided password is equal to the previous password. Because a one-way hash is used it is impossible to generate future one-time passwords if a successfully used password is captured; the iteration count is decremented after each successful login to keep the user and the login program in sync. When the iteration count gets down to 1 S/Key must be reinitialized. There are four programs involved in the S/Key system which we will discuss below. The key program accepts an iteration count, a seed, and a secret password, and generates a one-time password. The keyinit program is used to initialized S/Key, and to change passwords, iteration counts, or seeds; it takes either a secret password, or an iteration count, seed, and one-time password. The keyinfo program examines the /etc/skeykeys file and prints out the invoking user's current iteration count and seed. Finally, the login and su programs contain the necessary logic to accept S/Key one-time passwords for authentication. The login program is also capable of disallowing the use of UNIX passwords on connections coming from specified addresses. There are four different sorts of operations we will cover. The first is using the keyinit program over a secure connection to set up S/Key for the first time, or to change your password or seed. The second operation is using the keyinit program over an insecure connection, in conjunction with the key program over a secure connection, to do the same. The third is using the key program to log in over an insecure connection. The fourth is using the key program to generate a number of keys which can be written down or printed out to carry with you when going to some location without secure connections to anywhere. Secure connection initialization To initialize S/Key for the first time, change your password, or change your seed while logged in over a secure connection (e.g., on the console of a machine or via ssh), use the keyinit command without any parameters while logged in as yourself: &prompt.user; keyinit Adding unfurl: Reminder - Only use this method if you are directly connected. If you are using telnet or rlogin exit with no password and use keyinit -s. Enter secret password: Again secret password: ID unfurl s/key is 99 to17757 DEFY CLUB PRO NASH LACE SOFT At the Enter secret password: prompt you should enter a password or phrase. Remember, this is not the password that you will use to login with, this is used to generate your one-time login keys. The ID line gives the parameters of your particular S/Key instance; your login name, the iteration count, and seed. When logging in with S/Key, the system will remember these parameters and present them back to you so you do not have to remember them. The last line gives the particular one-time password which corresponds to those parameters and your secret password; if you were to re-login immediately, this one-time password is the one you would use. Insecure connection initialization To initialize S/Key or change your secret password over an insecure connection, you will need to already have a secure connection to some place where you can run the key program; this might be in the form of a desk accessory on a Macintosh, or a shell prompt on a machine you trust. You will also need to make up an iteration count (100 is probably a good value), and you may make up your own seed or use a randomly-generated one. Over on the insecure connection (to the machine you are initializing), use the keyinit -s command: &prompt.user; keyinit -s Updating unfurl: Old key: to17758 Reminder you need the 6 English words from the key command. Enter sequence count from 1 to 9999: 100 Enter new key [default to17759]: s/key 100 to 17759 s/key access password: To accept the default seed (which the keyinit program confusingly calls a key), press return. Then before entering an access password, move over to your secure connection or S/Key desk accessory, and give it the same parameters: &prompt.user; key 100 to17759 Reminder - Do not use this program while logged in via telnet or rlogin. Enter secret password: <secret password> CURE MIKE BANE HIM RACY GORE Now switch back over to the insecure connection, and copy the one-time password generated by key over to the keyinit program: s/key access password:CURE MIKE BANE HIM RACY GORE ID unfurl s/key is 100 to17759 CURE MIKE BANE HIM RACY GORE The rest of the description from the previous section applies here as well. Generating a single one-time password Once you've initialized S/Key, when you login you will be presented with a prompt like this: &prompt.user; telnet example.com Trying 10.0.0.1... Connected to example.com Escape character is '^]'. FreeBSD/i386 (example.com) (ttypa) login: <username> s/key 97 fw13894 Password: As a side note, the S/Key prompt has a useful feature (not shown here): if you press return at the password prompt, the login program will turn echo on, so you can see what you are typing. This can be extremely useful if you are attempting to type in an S/Key by hand, such as from a printout. Also, if this machine were configured to disallow UNIX passwords over a connection from the source machine, the prompt would have also included the annotation (s/key required), indicating that only S/Key one-time passwords will be accepted. + MS-DOS + Windows + MacOS + At this point you need to generate your one-time password to answer this login prompt. This must be done on a trusted system that you can run the key command on. (There - are versions of the key program from DOS, + are versions of the key program for MS-DOS, Windows and MacOS as well.) The key program needs both the iteration count and the seed as command line options. You can cut-and-paste these right from the login prompt on the machine that you are logging in to. On the trusted system: &prompt.user; key 97 fw13894 Reminder - Do not use this program while logged in via telnet or rlogin. Enter secret password: WELD LIP ACTS ENDS ME HAAG Now that you have your one-time password you can continue logging in: login: <username> s/key 97 fw13894 Password: <return to enable echo> s/key 97 fw13894 Password [echo on]: WELD LIP ACTS ENDS ME HAAG Last login: Tue Mar 21 11:56:41 from 10.0.0.2 ... This is the easiest mechanism if you have a trusted machine. There is a Java S/Key key applet, The Java OTP Calculator, that you can download and run locally on any Java supporting browser. Generating multiple one-time passwords Sometimes you have to go places where you do not have access to a trusted machine or secure connection. In this case, it is possible to use the key command to generate a number of one-time passwords before hand to be printed out and taken with you. For example: &prompt.user; key -n 5 30 zz99999 Reminder - Do not use this program while logged in via telnet or rlogin. Enter secret password: <secret password> 26: SODA RUDE LEA LIND BUDD SILT 27: JILT SPY DUTY GLOW COWL ROT 28: THEM OW COLA RUNT BONG SCOT 29: COT MASH BARR BRIM NAN FLAG 30: CAN KNEE CAST NAME FOLK BILK The requests five keys in sequence, the specifies what the last iteration number should be. Note that these are printed out in reverse order of eventual use. If you are really paranoid, you might want to write the results down by hand; otherwise you can cut-and-paste into lpr. Note that each line shows both the iteration count and the one-time password; you may still find it handy to scratch off passwords as you use them. Restricting use of UNIX passwords Restrictions can be placed on the use of UNIX passwords based on the host name, user name, terminal port, or IP address of a login session. These restrictions can be found in the configuration file /etc/skey.access. The &man.skey.access.5; manual page has more info on the complete format of the file and also details some security cautions to be aware of before depending on this file for security. If there is no /etc/skey.access file (this is the FreeBSD default), then all users will be allowed to use UNIX passwords. If the file exists, however, then all users will be required to use S/Key unless explicitly permitted to do otherwise by configuration statements in the skey.access file. In all cases, UNIX passwords are permitted on the console. Here is a sample configuration file which illustrates the three most common sorts of configuration statements: permit internet 192.168.0.0 255.255.0.0 permit user fnord permit port ttyd0 The first line (permit internet) allows users whose IP source address (which is vulnerable to spoofing) matches the specified value and mask, to use UNIX passwords. This should not be considered a security mechanism, but rather, a means to remind authorized users that they are using an insecure network and need to use S/Key for authentication. The second line (permit user) allows the specified username, in this case fnord, to use UNIX passwords at any time. Generally speaking, this should only be used for people who are either unable to use the key program, like those with dumb terminals, or those who are uneducable. The third line (permit port) allows all users logging in on the specified terminal line to use UNIX passwords; this would be used for dial-ups. Kerberos Kerberos Contributed by &a.markm; (based on contribution by &a.md;). Kerberos is a network add-on system/protocol that allows users to authenticate themselves through the services of a secure server. Services such as remote login, remote copy, secure inter-system file copying and other high-risk tasks are made considerably safer and more controllable. The following instructions can be used as a guide on how to set up Kerberos as distributed for FreeBSD. However, you should refer to the relevant manual pages for a complete description. 4.4BSD-Lite In FreeBSD, the Kerberos is not that from the original 4.4BSD-Lite, distribution, but eBones, which had been previously ported to FreeBSD 1.1.5.1, and was sourced from outside the USA/Canada, and was thus available to system owners outside those countries during the era of restrictive export controls on cryptographic code from the USA. Creating the initial database This is done on the Kerberos server only. First make sure that you do not have any old Kerberos databases around. You should change to the directory /etc/kerberosIV and check that only the following files are present: &prompt.root; cd /etc/kerberosIV &prompt.root; ls README krb.conf krb.realms If any additional files (such as principal.* or master_key) exist, then use the kdb_destroy command to destroy the old Kerberos database, of if Kerberos is not running, simply delete the extra files. You should now edit the krb.conf and krb.realms files to define your Kerberos realm. In this case the realm will be GRONDAR.ZA and the server is grunt.grondar.za. We edit or create the krb.conf file: &prompt.root; cat krb.conf GRONDAR.ZA GRONDAR.ZA grunt.grondar.za admin server CS.BERKELEY.EDU okeeffe.berkeley.edu ATHENA.MIT.EDU kerberos.mit.edu ATHENA.MIT.EDU kerberos-1.mit.edu ATHENA.MIT.EDU kerberos-2.mit.edu ATHENA.MIT.EDU kerberos-3.mit.edu LCS.MIT.EDU kerberos.lcs.mit.edu TELECOM.MIT.EDU bitsy.mit.edu ARC.NASA.GOV trident.arc.nasa.gov In this case, the other realms do not need to be there. They are here as an example of how a machine may be made aware of multiple realms. You may wish to not include them for simplicity. The first line names the realm in which this system works. The other lines contain realm/host entries. The first item on a line is a realm, and the second is a host in that realm that is acting as a key distribution center. The words admin server following a hosts name means that host also provides an administrative database server. For further explanation of these terms, please consult the Kerberos man pages. Now we have to add grunt.grondar.za to the GRONDAR.ZA realm and also add an entry to put all hosts in the .grondar.za domain in the GRONDAR.ZA realm. The krb.realms file would be updated as follows: &prompt.root; cat krb.realms grunt.grondar.za GRONDAR.ZA .grondar.za GRONDAR.ZA .berkeley.edu CS.BERKELEY.EDU .MIT.EDU ATHENA.MIT.EDU .mit.edu ATHENA.MIT.EDU Again, the other realms do not need to be there. They are here as an example of how a machine may be made aware of multiple realms. You may wish to remove them to simplify things. The first line puts the specific system into the named realm. The rest of the lines show how to default systems of a particular subdomain to a named realm. Now we are ready to create the database. This only needs to run on the Kerberos server (or Key Distribution Center). Issue the kdb_init command to do this: &prompt.root; kdb_init Realm name [default ATHENA.MIT.EDU ]: GRONDAR.ZA You will be prompted for the database Master Password. It is important that you NOT FORGET this password. Enter Kerberos master key: Now we have to save the key so that servers on the local machine can pick it up. Use the kstash command to do this. &prompt.root; kstash Enter Kerberos master key: Current Kerberos master key version is 1. Master key entered. BEWARE! This saves the encrypted master password in /etc/kerberosIV/master_key. Making it all run Two principals need to be added to the database for each system that will be secured with Kerberos. Their names are kpasswd and rcmd These two principals are made for each system, with the instance being the name of the individual system. These daemons, kpasswd and rcmd allow other systems to change Kerberos passwords and run commands like rcp, rlogin and rsh. Now let's add these entries: &prompt.root; kdb_edit Opening database... Enter Kerberos master key: Current Kerberos master key version is 1. Master key entered. BEWARE! Previous or default values are in [brackets] , enter return to leave the same, or new value. Principal name: passwd Instance: grunt <Not found>, Create [y] ? y Principal: passwd, Instance: grunt, kdc_key_ver: 1 New Password: <---- enter RANDOM here Verifying password New Password: <---- enter RANDOM here Random password [y] ? y Principal's new key version = 1 Expiration date (enter yyyy-mm-dd) [ 2000-01-01 ] ? Max ticket lifetime (*5 minutes) [ 255 ] ? Attributes [ 0 ] ? Edit O.K. Principal name: rcmd Instance: grunt <Not found>, Create [y] ? Principal: rcmd, Instance: grunt, kdc_key_ver: 1 New Password: <---- enter RANDOM here Verifying password New Password: <---- enter RANDOM here Random password [y] ? Principal's new key version = 1 Expiration date (enter yyyy-mm-dd) [ 2000-01-01 ] ? Max ticket lifetime (*5 minutes) [ 255 ] ? Attributes [ 0 ] ? Edit O.K. Principal name: <---- null entry here will cause an exit Creating the server file We now have to extract all the instances which define the services on each machine. For this we use the ext_srvtab command. This will create a file which must be copied or moved by secure means to each Kerberos client's /etc/kerberosIV directory. This file must be present on each server and client, and is crucial to the operation of Kerberos. &prompt.root; ext_srvtab grunt Enter Kerberos master key: Current Kerberos master key version is 1. Master key entered. BEWARE! Generating 'grunt-new-srvtab'.... Now, this command only generates a temporary file which must be renamed to srvtab so that all the server can pick it up. Use the mv command to move it into place on the original system: &prompt.root; mv grunt-new-srvtab srvtab If the file is for a client system, and the network is not deemed safe, then copy the client-new-srvtab to removable media and transport it by secure physical means. Be sure to rename it to srvtab in the client's /etc/kerberosIV directory, and make sure it is mode 600: &prompt.root; mv grumble-new-srvtab srvtab &prompt.root; chmod 600 srvtab Populating the database We now have to add some user entries into the database. First let's create an entry for the user jane. Use the kdb_edit command to do this: &prompt.root; kdb_edit Opening database... Enter Kerberos master key: Current Kerberos master key version is 1. Master key entered. BEWARE! Previous or default values are in [brackets] , enter return to leave the same, or new value. Principal name: jane Instance: <Not found>, Create [y] ? y Principal: jane, Instance: , kdc_key_ver: 1 New Password: <---- enter a secure password here Verifying password New Password: <---- re-enter the password here Principal's new key version = 1 Expiration date (enter yyyy-mm-dd) [ 2000-01-01 ] ? Max ticket lifetime (*5 minutes) [ 255 ] ? Attributes [ 0 ] ? Edit O.K. Principal name: <---- null entry here will cause an exit Testing it all out First we have to start the Kerberos daemons. NOTE that if you have correctly edited your /etc/rc.conf then this will happen automatically when you reboot. This is only necessary on the Kerberos server. Kerberos clients will automagically get what they need from the /etc/kerberosIV directory. &prompt.root; kerberos & Kerberos server starting Sleep forever on error Log file is /var/log/kerberos.log Current Kerberos master key version is 1. Master key entered. BEWARE! Current Kerberos master key version is 1 Local realm: GRONDAR.ZA &prompt.root; kadmind -n & KADM Server KADM0.0A initializing Please do not use 'kill -9' to kill this job, use a regular kill instead Current Kerberos master key version is 1. Master key entered. BEWARE! Now we can try using the kinit command to get a ticket for the id jane that we created above: &prompt.user; kinit jane MIT Project Athena (grunt.grondar.za) Kerberos Initialization for "jane" Password: Try listing the tokens using klist to see if we really have them: &prompt.user; klist Ticket file: /tmp/tkt245 Principal: jane@GRONDAR.ZA Issued Expires Principal Apr 30 11:23:22 Apr 30 19:23:22 krbtgt.GRONDAR.ZA@GRONDAR.ZA Now try changing the password using passwd to check if the kpasswd daemon can get authorization to the Kerberos database: &prompt.user; passwd realm GRONDAR.ZA Old password for jane: New Password for jane: Verifying password New Password for jane: Password changed. Adding <command>su</command> privileges Kerberos allows us to give each user who needs root privileges their own separate supassword. We could now add an id which is authorized to su to root. This is controlled by having an instance of root associated with a principal. Using kdb_edit we can create the entry jane.root in the Kerberos database: &prompt.root; kdb_edit Opening database... Enter Kerberos master key: Current Kerberos master key version is 1. Master key entered. BEWARE! Previous or default values are in [brackets] , enter return to leave the same, or new value. Principal name: jane Instance: root <Not found>, Create [y] ? y Principal: jane, Instance: root, kdc_key_ver: 1 New Password: <---- enter a SECURE password here Verifying password New Password: <---- re-enter the password here Principal's new key version = 1 Expiration date (enter yyyy-mm-dd) [ 2000-01-01 ] ? Max ticket lifetime (*5 minutes) [ 255 ] ? 12 <--- Keep this short! Attributes [ 0 ] ? Edit O.K. Principal name: <---- null entry here will cause an exit Now try getting tokens for it to make sure it works: &prompt.root; kinit jane.root MIT Project Athena (grunt.grondar.za) Kerberos Initialization for "jane.root" Password: Now we need to add the user to root's .klogin file: &prompt.root; cat /root/.klogin jane.root@GRONDAR.ZA Now try doing the su: &prompt.user; su Password: and take a look at what tokens we have: &prompt.root; klist Ticket file: /tmp/tkt_root_245 Principal: jane.root@GRONDAR.ZA Issued Expires Principal May 2 20:43:12 May 3 04:43:12 krbtgt.GRONDAR.ZA@GRONDAR.ZA Using other commands In an earlier example, we created a principal called jane with an instance root. This was based on a user with the same name as the principal, and this is a Kerberos default; that a <principal>.<instance> of the form <username>.root will allow that <username> to su to root if the necessary entries are in the .klogin file in root's home directory: &prompt.root; cat /root/.klogin jane.root@GRONDAR.ZA Likewise, if a user has in their own home directory lines of the form: &prompt.user; cat ~/.klogin jane@GRONDAR.ZA jack@GRONDAR.ZA This allows anyone in the GRONDAR.ZA realm who has authenticated themselves to jane or jack (via kinit, see above) access to rlogin to jane's account or files on this system (grunt) via rlogin, rsh or rcp. For example, Jane now logs into another system, using Kerberos: &prompt.user; kinit MIT Project Athena (grunt.grondar.za) Password: &prompt.user; rlogin grunt Last login: Mon May 1 21:14:47 from grumble Copyright (c) 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. FreeBSD BUILT-19950429 (GR386) #0: Sat Apr 29 17:50:09 SAT 1995 Or Jack logs into Jane's account on the same machine (Jane having set up the .klogin file as above, and the person in charge of Kerberos having set up principal jack with a null instance: &prompt.user; kinit &prompt.user; rlogin grunt -l jane MIT Project Athena (grunt.grondar.za) Password: Last login: Mon May 1 21:16:55 from grumble Copyright (c) 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. FreeBSD BUILT-19950429 (GR386) #0: Sat Apr 29 17:50:09 SAT 1995 Firewalls firewalls security firewalls Contributed by &a.gpalmer; and Alex Nash. Firewalls are an area of increasing interest for people who are connected to the Internet, and are even finding applications on private networks to provide enhanced security. This section will hopefully explain what firewalls are, how to use them, and how to use the facilities provided in the FreeBSD kernel to implement them. People often think that having a firewall between your internal network and the Big Bad Internet will solve all your security problems. It may help, but a poorly setup firewall system is more of a security risk than not having one at all. A firewall can add another layer of security to your systems, but it cannot stop a really determined cracker from penetrating your internal network. If you let internal security lapse because you believe your firewall to be impenetrable, you have just made the crackers job that much easier. What is a firewall? There are currently two distinct types of firewalls in common use on the Internet today. The first type is more properly called a packet filtering router, where the kernel on a multi-homed machine chooses whether to forward or block packets based on a set of rules. The second type, known as a proxy server, relies on daemons to provide authentication and to forward packets, possibly on a multi-homed machine which has kernel packet forwarding disabled. Sometimes sites combine the two types of firewalls, so that only a certain machine (known as a bastion host) is allowed to send packets through a packet filtering router onto an internal network. Proxy services are run on the bastion host, which are generally more secure than normal authentication mechanisms. FreeBSD comes with a kernel packet filter (known as IPFW), which is what the rest of this section will concentrate on. Proxy servers can be built on FreeBSD from third party software, but there is such a variety of proxy servers available that it would be impossible to cover them in this document. Packet filtering routers A router is a machine which forwards packets between two or more networks. A packet filtering router has an extra piece of code in its kernel which compares each packet to a list of rules before deciding if it should be forwarded or not. Most modern IP routing software has packet filtering code within it that defaults to forwarding all packets. To enable the filters, you need to define a set of rules for the filtering code so it can decide if the packet should be allowed to pass or not. To decide whether a packet should be passed on, the code looks through its set of rules for a rule which matches the contents of this packets headers. Once a match is found, the rule action is obeyed. The rule action could be to drop the packet, to forward the packet, or even to send an ICMP message back to the originator. Only the first match counts, as the rules are searched in order. Hence, the list of rules can be referred to as a rule chain. The packet matching criteria varies depending on the software used, but typically you can specify rules which depend on the source IP address of the packet, the destination IP address, the source port number, the destination port number (for protocols which support ports), or even the packet type (UDP, TCP, ICMP, etc). Proxy servers Proxy servers are machines which have had the normal system daemons (telnetd, ftpd, etc) replaced with special servers. These servers are called proxy servers as they normally only allow onward connections to be made. This enables you to run (for example) a proxy telnet server on your firewall host, and people can telnet in to your firewall from the outside, go through some authentication mechanism, and then gain access to the internal network (alternatively, proxy servers can be used for signals coming from the internal network and heading out). Proxy servers are normally more secure than normal servers, and often have a wider variety of authentication mechanisms available, including one-shot password systems so that even if someone manages to discover what password you used, they will not be able to use it to gain access to your systems as the password instantly expires. As they do not actually give users access to the host machine, it becomes a lot more difficult for someone to install backdoors around your security system. Proxy servers often have ways of restricting access further, so that only certain hosts can gain access to the servers, and often they can be set up so that you can limit which users can talk to which destination machine. Again, what facilities are available depends largely on what proxy software you choose. What does IPFW allow me to do? ipfw IPFW, the software supplied with FreeBSD, is a packet filtering and accounting system which resides in the kernel, and has a user-land control utility, &man.ipfw.8;. Together, they allow you to define and query the rules currently used by the kernel in its routing decisions. There are two related parts to IPFW. The firewall section allows you to perform packet filtering. There is also an IP accounting section which allows you to track usage of your router, based on similar rules to the firewall section. This allows you to see (for example) how much traffic your router is getting from a certain machine, or how much WWW (World Wide Web) traffic it is forwarding. As a result of the way that IPFW is designed, you can use IPFW on non-router machines to perform packet filtering on incoming and outgoing connections. This is a special case of the more general use of IPFW, and the same commands and techniques should be used in this situation. Enabling IPFW on FreeBSD ipfw enabling As the main part of the IPFW system lives in the kernel, you will need to add one or more options to your kernel configuration file, depending on what facilities you want, and recompile your kernel. See reconfiguring the kernel for more details on how to recompile your kernel. There are currently three kernel configuration options relevant to IPFW: options IPFIREWALL Compiles into the kernel the code for packet filtering. options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE Enables code to allow logging of packets through &man.syslogd.8;. Without this option, even if you specify that packets should be logged in the filter rules, nothing will happen. options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE_LIMIT=10 Limits the number of packets logged through &man.syslogd.8; on a per entry basis. You may wish to use this option in hostile environments in which you want to log firewall activity, but do not want to be open to a denial of service attack via syslog flooding. When a chain entry reaches the packet limit specified, logging is turned off for that particular entry. To resume logging, you will need to reset the associated counter using the &man.ipfw.8; utility: &prompt.root; ipfw zero 4500 Where 4500 is the chain entry you wish to continue logging. Previous versions of FreeBSD contained an IPFIREWALL_ACCT option. This is now obsolete as the firewall code automatically includes accounting facilities. Configuring IPFW ipfw configuring The configuration of the IPFW software is done through the &man.ipfw.8; utility. The syntax for this command looks quite complicated, but it is relatively simple once you understand its structure. There are currently four different command categories used by the utility: addition/deletion, listing, flushing, and clearing. Addition/deletion is used to build the rules that control how packets are accepted, rejected, and logged. Listing is used to examine the contents of your rule set (otherwise known as the chain) and packet counters (accounting). Flushing is used to remove all entries from the chain. Clearing is used to zero out one or more accounting entries. Altering the IPFW rules The syntax for this form of the command is: ipfw -N command index action log protocol addresses options There is one valid flag when using this form of the command: -N Resolve addresses and service names in output. The command given can be shortened to the shortest unique form. The valid commands are: add Add an entry to the firewall/accounting rule list delete Delete an entry from the firewall/accounting rule list Previous versions of IPFW used separate firewall and accounting entries. The present version provides packet accounting with each firewall entry. If an index value is supplied, it used to place the entry at a specific point in the chain. Otherwise, the entry is placed at the end of the chain at an index 100 greater than the last chain entry (this does not include the default policy, rule 65535, deny). The log option causes matching rules to be output to the system console if the kernel was compiled with IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE. Valid actions are: reject Drop the packet, and send an ICMP host or port unreachable (as appropriate) packet to the source. allow Pass the packet on as normal. (aliases: pass and accept) deny Drop the packet. The source is not notified via an ICMP message (thus it appears that the packet never arrived at the destination). count Update packet counters but do not allow/deny the packet based on this rule. The search continues with the next chain entry. Each action will be recognized by the shortest unambiguous prefix. The protocols which can be specified are: all Matches any IP packet icmp Matches ICMP packets tcp Matches TCP packets udp Matches UDP packets The address specification is: from address/maskport to address/maskport via interface You can only specify port in conjunction with protocols which support ports (UDP and TCP). The is optional and may specify the IP address or domain name of a local IP interface, or an interface name (e.g. ed0) to match only packets coming through this interface. Interface unit numbers can be specified with an optional wildcard. For example, ppp* would match all kernel PPP interfaces. The syntax used to specify an address/mask is: address or address/mask-bits or address:mask-pattern A valid hostname may be specified in place of the IP address. is a decimal number representing how many bits in the address mask should be set. e.g. specifying 192.216.222.1/24 will create a mask which will allow any address in a class C subnet (in this case, 192.216.222) to be matched. is an IP address which will be logically AND'ed with the address given. The keyword any may be used to specify any IP address. The port numbers to be blocked are specified as: port,port,port… to specify either a single port or a list of ports, or port-port to specify a range of ports. You may also combine a single range with a list, but the range must always be specified first. The options available are: frag Matches if the packet is not the first fragment of the datagram. in Matches if the packet is on the way in. out Matches if the packet is on the way out. ipoptions spec Matches if the IP header contains the comma separated list of options specified in spec. The supported list of IP options are: ssrr (strict source route), lsrr (loose source route), rr (record packet route), and ts (time stamp). The absence of a particular option may be denoted with a leading !. established Matches if the packet is part of an already established TCP connection (i.e. it has the RST or ACK bits set). You can optimize the performance of the firewall by placing established rules early in the chain. setup Matches if the packet is an attempt to establish a TCP connection (the SYN bit set is set but the ACK bit is not). tcpflags flags Matches if the TCP header contains the comma separated list of flags. The supported flags are fin, syn, rst, psh, ack, and urg. The absence of a particular flag may be indicated by a leading !. icmptypes types Matches if the ICMP type is present in the list types. The list may be specified as any combination of ranges and/or individual types separated by commas. Commonly used ICMP types are: 0 echo reply (ping reply), 3 destination unreachable, 5 redirect, 8 echo request (ping request), and 11 time exceeded (used to indicate TTL expiration as with &man.traceroute.8;). Listing the IPFW rules The syntax for this form of the command is: ipfw -a -t -N l There are three valid flags when using this form of the command: -a While listing, show counter values. This option is the only way to see accounting counters. -t Display the last match times for each chain entry. The time listing is incompatible with the input syntax used by the &man.ipfw.8; utility. -N Attempt to resolve given addresses and service names. Flushing the IPFW rules The syntax for flushing the chain is: ipfw flush This causes all entries in the firewall chain to be removed except the fixed default policy enforced by the kernel (index 65535). Use caution when flushing rules, the default deny policy will leave your system cut off from the network until allow entries are added to the chain. Clearing the IPFW packet counters The syntax for clearing one or more packet counters is: ipfw zero index When used without an index argument, all packet counters are cleared. If an index is supplied, the clearing operation only affects a specific chain entry. Example commands for ipfw This command will deny all packets from the host evil.crackers.org to the telnet port of the host nice.people.org: &prompt.root ipfw add deny tcp from evil.crackers.org to nice.people.org 23 The next example denies and logs any TCP traffic from the entire crackers.org network (a class C) to the nice.people.org machine (any port). &prompt.root; ipfw add deny log tcp from evil.crackers.org/24 to nice.people.org If you do not want people sending X sessions to your internal network (a subnet of a class C), the following command will do the necessary filtering: &prompt.root; ipfw add deny tcp from any to my.org/28 6000 setup To see the accounting records: &prompt.root; ipfw -a list or in the short form &prompt.root; ipfw -a l You can also see the last time a chain entry was matched with: &prompt.root; ipfw -at l Building a packet filtering firewall The following suggestions are just that: suggestions. The requirements of each firewall are different and we cannot tell you how to build a firewall to meet your particular requirements. When initially setting up your firewall, unless you have a test bench setup where you can configure your firewall host in a controlled environment, it is strongly recommend you use the logging version of the commands and enable logging in the kernel. This will allow you to quickly identify problem areas and cure them without too much disruption. Even after the initial setup phase is complete, I recommend using the logging for `deny' as it allows tracing of possible attacks and also modification of the firewall rules if your requirements alter. If you use the logging versions of the accept command, it can generate large amounts of log data as one log line will be generated for every packet that passes through the firewall, so large ftp/http transfers, etc, will really slow the system down. It also increases the latencies on those packets as it requires more work to be done by the kernel before the packet can be passed on. syslogd with also start using up a lot more processor time as it logs all the extra data to disk, and it could quite easily fill the partition /var/log is located on. You should enable your firewall from /etc/rc.conf.local or /etc/rc.conf. The associated man page explains which knobs to fiddle and lists some preset firewall configurations. If you do not use a preset configuration, ipfw list will output the current ruleset into a file that you can pass to rc.conf. If you do not use /etc/rc.conf.local or /etc/rc.conf to enable your firewall, it is important to make sure your firewall is enabled before any IP interfaces are configured. The next problem is what your firewall should actually do! This is largely dependent on what access to your network you want to allow from the outside, and how much access to the outside world you want to allow from the inside. Some general rules are: Block all incoming access to ports below 1024 for TCP. This is where most of the security sensitive services are, like finger, SMTP (mail) and telnet. Block all incoming UDP traffic. There are very few useful services that travel over UDP, and what useful traffic there is normally a security threat (e.g. Suns RPC and NFS protocols). This has its disadvantages also, since UDP is a connectionless protocol, denying incoming UDP traffic also blocks the replies to outgoing UDP traffic. This can cause a problem for people (on the inside) using external archie (prospero) servers. If you want to allow access to archie, you'll have to allow packets coming from ports 191 and 1525 to any internal UDP port through the firewall. ntp is another service you may consider allowing through, which comes from port 123. Block traffic to port 6000 from the outside. Port 6000 is the port used for access to X11 servers, and can be a security threat (especially if people are in the habit of doing xhost + on their workstations). X11 can actually use a range of ports starting at 6000, the upper limit being how many X displays you can run on the machine. The upper limit as defined by RFC 1700 (Assigned Numbers) is 6063. Check what ports any internal servers use (e.g. SQL servers, etc). It is probably a good idea to block those as well, as they normally fall outside the 1-1024 range specified above. Another checklist for firewall configuration is available from CERT at http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/packet_filtering.html As stated above, these are only guidelines. You will have to decide what filter rules you want to use on your firewall yourself. We cannot accept ANY responsibility if someone breaks into your network, even if you follow the advice given above. OpenSSL security OpenSSL OpenSSL As of FreeBSD 4.0, the OpenSSL toolkit is a part of the base system. OpenSSL provides a general-purpose cryptography library, as well as the Secure Sockets Layer v2/v3 (SSLv2/SSLv3) and Transport Layer Security v1 (TLSv1) network security protocols. However, one of the algorithms (specifically IDEA) included in OpenSSL is protected by patents in the USA and elsewhere, and is not available for unrestricted use. IDEA is included in the OpenSSL sources in FreeBSD, but it is not built by default. If you wish to use it, and you comply with the license terms, enable the MAKE_IDEA switch in /etc/make.conf and rebuild your sources using 'make world'. Today, the RSA algorithm is free for use in USA and other countries. In the past it was protected by a patent. OpenSSL install Source Code Installations OpenSSL is part of the src-crypto and src-secure cvsup collections. See the Obtaining FreeBSD section for more information about obtaining and updating FreeBSD source code. IPsec IPsec security IPsec Contributed by &a.shin;, 5 March 2000. The IPsec mechanism provides secure communication either for IP layer and socket layer communication. This section should explain how to use them. For implementation details, please refer to The Developers' Handbook. The current IPsec implementation supports both transport mode and tunnel mode. However, tunnel mode comes with some restrictions. http://www.kame.net/newsletter/ has more comprehensive examples. Please be aware that in order to use this functionality, you must have the following options compiled into your kernel: options IPSEC #IP security options IPSEC_ESP #IP security (crypto; define w/IPSEC) Transport mode example with IPv4 Let's setup security association to deploy a secure channel between HOST A (10.2.3.4) and HOST B (10.6.7.8). Here we show a little complicated example. From HOST A to HOST B, only old AH is used. From HOST B to HOST A, new AH and new ESP are combined. Now we should choose algorithm to be used corresponding to "AH"/"new AH"/"ESP"/"new ESP". Please refer to the &man.setkey.8; man page to know algorithm names. Our choice is MD5 for AH, new-HMAC-SHA1 for new AH, and new-DES-expIV with 8 byte IV for new ESP. Key length highly depends on each algorithm. For example, key length must be equal to 16 bytes for MD5, 20 for new-HMAC-SHA1, and 8 for new-DES-expIV. Now we choose "MYSECRETMYSECRET", "KAMEKAMEKAMEKAMEKAME", "PASSWORD", respectively. OK, let's assign SPI (Security Parameter Index) for each protocol. Please note that we need 3 SPIs for this secure channel since three security headers are produced (one for from HOST A to HOST B, two for from HOST B to HOST A). Please also note that SPI MUST be greater than or equal to 256. We choose, 1000, 2000, and 3000, respectively. (1) HOST A ------> HOST B (1)PROTO=AH ALG=MD5(RFC1826) KEY=MYSECRETMYSECRET SPI=1000 (2.1) HOST A <------ HOST B <------ (2.2) (2.1) PROTO=AH ALG=new-HMAC-SHA1(new AH) KEY=KAMEKAMEKAMEKAMEKAME SPI=2000 (2.2) PROTO=ESP ALG=new-DES-expIV(new ESP) IV length = 8 KEY=PASSWORD SPI=3000 Now, let's setup security association. Execute &man.setkey.8; on both HOST A and B: &prompt.root; setkey -c add 10.2.3.4 10.6.7.8 ah-old 1000 -m transport -A keyed-md5 "MYSECRETMYSECRET" ; add 10.6.7.8 10.2.3.4 ah 2000 -m transport -A hmac-sha1 "KAMEKAMEKAMEKAMEKAME" ; add 10.6.7.8 10.2.3.4 esp 3000 -m transport -E des-cbc "PASSWORD" ; ^D Actually, IPsec communication doesn't process until security policy entries will be defined. In this case, you must setup each host. At A: &prompt.root; setkey -c spdadd 10.2.3.4 10.6.7.8 any -P out ipsec ah/transport/10.2.3.4-10.6.7.8/require ; ^D At B: &prompt.root; setkey -c spdadd 10.6.7.8 10.2.3.4 any -P out ipsec esp/transport/10.6.7.8-10.2.3.4/require ; spdadd 10.6.7.8 10.2.3.4 any -P out ipsec ah/transport/10.6.7.8-10.2.3.4/require ; ^D HOST A --------------------------------------> HOST E 10.2.3.4 10.6.7.8 | | ========== old AH keyed-md5 ==========> <========= new AH hmac-sha1 =========== <========= new ESP des-cbc ============ Transport mode example with IPv6 Another example using IPv6. ESP transport mode is recommended for TCP port number 110 between Host-A and Host-B. ============ ESP ============ | | Host-A Host-B fec0::10 -------------------- fec0::11 Encryption algorithm is blowfish-cbc whose key is "kamekame", and authentication algorithm is hmac-sha1 whose key is "this is the test key". Configuration at Host-A: &prompt.root; setkey -c <<EOF spdadd fec0::10[any] fec0::11[110] tcp -P out ipsec esp/transport/fec0::10-fec0::11/use ; spdadd fec0::11[110] fec0::10[any] tcp -P in ipsec esp/transport/fec0::11-fec0::10/use ; add fec0::10 fec0::11 esp 0x10001 -m transport -E blowfish-cbc "kamekame" -A hmac-sha1 "this is the test key" ; add fec0::11 fec0::10 esp 0x10002 -m transport -E blowfish-cbc "kamekame" -A hmac-sha1 "this is the test key" ; EOF and at Host-B: &prompt.root; setkey -c <<EOF spdadd fec0::11[110] fec0::10[any] tcp -P out ipsec esp/transport/fec0::11-fec0::10/use ; spdadd fec0::10[any] fec0::11[110] tcp -P in ipsec esp/transport/fec0::10-fec0::11/use ; add fec0::10 fec0::11 esp 0x10001 -m transport -E blowfish-cbc "kamekame" -A hmac-sha1 "this is the test key" ; add fec0::11 fec0::10 esp 0x10002 -m transport -E blowfish-cbc "kamekame" -A hmac-sha1 "this is the test key" ; EOF Note the direction of SP. Tunnel mode example with IPv4 Tunnel mode between two security gateways Security protocol is old AH tunnel mode, i.e. specified by RFC1826, with keyed-md5 whose key is "this is the test" as authentication algorithm. ======= AH ======= | | Network-A Gateway-A Gateway-B Network-B 10.0.1.0/24 ---- 172.16.0.1 ----- 172.16.0.2 ---- 10.0.2.0/24 Configuration at Gateway-A: &prompt.root; setkey -c <<EOF spdadd 10.0.1.0/24 10.0.2.0/24 any -P out ipsec ah/tunnel/172.16.0.1-172.16.0.2/require ; spdadd 10.0.2.0/24 10.0.1.0/24 any -P in ipsec ah/tunnel/172.16.0.2-172.16.0.1/require ; add 172.16.0.1 172.16.0.2 ah-old 0x10003 -m any -A keyed-md5 "this is the test" ; add 172.16.0.2 172.16.0.1 ah-old 0x10004 -m any -A keyed-md5 "this is the test" ; EOF If port number field is omitted such above then "[any]" is employed. `-m' specifies the mode of SA to be used. "-m any" means wild-card of mode of security protocol. You can use this SA for both tunnel and transport mode. and at Gateway-B: &prompt.root; setkey -c <<EOF spdadd 10.0.2.0/24 10.0.1.0/24 any -P out ipsec ah/tunnel/172.16.0.2-172.16.0.1/require ; spdadd 10.0.1.0/24 10.0.2.0/24 any -P in ipsec ah/tunnel/172.16.0.1-172.16.0.2/require ; add 172.16.0.1 172.16.0.2 ah-old 0x10003 -m any -A keyed-md5 "this is the test" ; add 172.16.0.2 172.16.0.1 ah-old 0x10004 -m any -A keyed-md5 "this is the test" ; EOF Making SA bundle between two security gateways AH transport mode and ESP tunnel mode is required between Gateway-A and Gateway-B. In this case, ESP tunnel mode is applied first, and AH transport mode is next. ========== AH ========= | ======= ESP ===== | | | | | Network-A Gateway-A Gateway-B Network-B fec0:0:0:1::/64 --- fec0:0:0:1::1 ---- fec0:0:0:2::1 --- fec0:0:0:2::/64 Tunnel mode example with IPv6 Encryption algorithm is 3des-cbc, and authentication algorithm for ESP is hmac-sha1. Authentication algorithm for AH is hmac-md5. Configuration at Gateway-A: &prompt.root; setkey -c <<EOF spdadd fec0:0:0:1::/64 fec0:0:0:2::/64 any -P out ipsec esp/tunnel/fec0:0:0:1::1-fec0:0:0:2::1/require ah/transport/fec0:0:0:1::1-fec0:0:0:2::1/require ; spdadd fec0:0:0:2::/64 fec0:0:0:1::/64 any -P in ipsec esp/tunnel/fec0:0:0:2::1-fec0:0:0:1::1/require ah/transport/fec0:0:0:2::1-fec0:0:0:1::1/require ; add fec0:0:0:1::1 fec0:0:0:2::1 esp 0x10001 -m tunnel -E 3des-cbc "kamekame12341234kame1234" -A hmac-sha1 "this is the test key" ; add fec0:0:0:1::1 fec0:0:0:2::1 ah 0x10001 -m transport -A hmac-md5 "this is the test" ; add fec0:0:0:2::1 fec0:0:0:1::1 esp 0x10001 -m tunnel -E 3des-cbc "kamekame12341234kame1234" -A hmac-sha1 "this is the test key" ; add fec0:0:0:2::1 fec0:0:0:1::1 ah 0x10001 -m transport -A hmac-md5 "this is the test" ; EOF Making SAs with the different end ESP tunnel mode is required between Host-A and Gateway-A. Encryption algorithm is cast128-cbc, and authentication algorithm for ESP is hmac-sha1. ESP transport mode is recommended between Host-A and Host-B. Encryption algorithm is rc5-cbc, and authentication algorithm for ESP is hmac-md5. ================== ESP ================= | ======= ESP ======= | | | | | Host-A Gateway-A Host-B fec0:0:0:1::1 ---- fec0:0:0:2::1 ---- fec0:0:0:2::2 Configuration at Host-A: &prompt.root; setkey -c <<EOF spdadd fec0:0:0:1::1[any] fec0:0:0:2::2[80] tcp -P out ipsec esp/transport/fec0:0:0:1::1-fec0:0:0:2::2/use esp/tunnel/fec0:0:0:1::1-fec0:0:0:2::1/require ; spdadd fec0:0:0:2::1[80] fec0:0:0:1::1[any] tcp -P in ipsec esp/transport/fec0:0:0:2::2-fec0:0:0:l::1/use esp/tunnel/fec0:0:0:2::1-fec0:0:0:1::1/require ; add fec0:0:0:1::1 fec0:0:0:2::2 esp 0x10001 -m transport -E cast128-cbc "12341234" -A hmac-sha1 "this is the test key" ; add fec0:0:0:1::1 fec0:0:0:2::1 esp 0x10002 -E rc5-cbc "kamekame" -A hmac-md5 "this is the test" ; add fec0:0:0:2::2 fec0:0:0:1::1 esp 0x10003 -m transport -E cast128-cbc "12341234" -A hmac-sha1 "this is the test key" ; add fec0:0:0:2::1 fec0:0:0:1::1 esp 0x10004 -E rc5-cbc "kamekame" -A hmac-md5 "this is the test" ; EOF OpenSSH OpenSSH security OpenSSH Contributed by &a.chern;, April 21, 2001. Secure shell is a set of network connectivity tools used to access remote machines securely. It can be used as a direct replacement for rlogin, rsh, rcp, and telnet. Additionally, any other TCP/IP connections can be tunneled/forwarded securely through ssh. ssh encrypts all traffic to effectively eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other network-level attacks. OpenSSH is maintained by the OpenBSD project, and is based upon SSH v1.2.12 with all the recent bug fixes and updates. It is compatible with both SSH protocols 1 and 2. OpenSSH has been in the base system since FreeBSD 4.0. Advantages of using OpenSSH Normally, when using &man.telnet.1; or &man.rlogin.1;, data is sent over the network in an clear, un-encrypted form. Network sniffers anywhere in between the client and server can steal your user/password information or data transferred in your session. OpenSSH offers a variety of authentication and encryption methods to prevent this from happening. Enabling sshd OpenSSH enabling Be sure to make the following additions to your rc.conf file: sshd_enable="YES" This will load the ssh daemon the next time your system initializes. Alternatively, you can simply run the sshd daemon. SSH client OpenSSH client The &man.ssh.1; utility works similarly to &man.rlogin.1;. &prompt.root ssh user@foobardomain.com Host key not found from the list of known hosts. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes Host 'foobardomain.com' added to the list of known hosts. user@foobardomain.com's password: ******* The login will continue just as it would have if a session was created using rlogin or telnet. SSH utilizes a key fingerprint system for verifying the authenticity of the server when the client connects. The user is prompted to enter 'yes' only during the first time connecting. Future attempts to login are all verified against the saved fingerprint key. The SSH client will alert you if the saved fingerprint differs from the received fingerprint on future login attempts. The fingerprints are saved in ~/.ssh/known_hosts Secure copy OpenSSH secure copy scp The scp command works similarly to rcp; it copies a file to or from a remote machine, except in a secure fashion. &prompt.root scp user@foobardomain.com:/COPYRIGHT COPYRIGHT user@foobardomain.com's password: COPYRIGHT 100% |*****************************| 4735 00:00 &prompt.root Since the fingerprint was already saved for this host in the previous example, it is verified when using scp here. Configuration OpenSSH configuration The system-wide configuration files for both the OpenSSH daemon and client reside within the /etc/ssh directory. ssh_config configures the client settings, while sshd_config configures the daemon. ssh-keygen Instead of using passwords, &man.ssh-keygen.1; can be used to generate RSA keys to authenticate a user. &prompt.user ssh-keygen Initializing random number generator... Generating p: .++ (distance 66) Generating q: ..............................++ (distance 498) Computing the keys... Key generation complete. Enter file in which to save the key (/home/user/.ssh/identity): Enter passphrase: Enter the same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/identity. ... &man.ssh-keygen.1; will create a public and private key pair for use in authentication. The private key is stored in ~/.ssh/identity, whereas the public key is stored in ~/.ssh/identity.pub. The public key must be placed in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys of the remote machine in order for the setup to work. This will allow connection to the remote machine based upon RSA authentication instead of passwords. If a passphrase is used in &man.ssh-keygen.1;, the user will be prompted for a password each time in order to use the private key. &man.ssh-agent.1; and &man.ssh-add.1; are utilities used in managing multiple passworded private keys. SSH Tunneling OpenSSH tunneling OpenSSH has the ability to create a tunnel to encapsulate another protocol in an encrypted session. The following command tells &man.ssh.1; to create a tunnel for telnet. &prompt.user; ssh -2 -N -f -L 5023:localhost:23 user@foo.bar.com &prompt.user; -2 this forces &man.ssh.1 to use version 2 of the protocol. (Do not use if you are working with older ssh servers) -N indicates no command, or tunnel only. If omitted, &man.ssh.1; would initiate a normal session. -f forces &man.ssh.1; to run in the background. -L indicates a local tunnel in localport:localhost:remoteport fashion. foo.bar.com is the remote/target SSH server. An SSH tunnel works by creating a listen socket on the specified local host and port. It then forwards any connection to the local host/port via the SSH connection to the remote machine on the specified remote port. In the example, port 5023 on localhost is being forwarded to port 23 on the remote machine. Since 23 is telnet, this would create a secure telnet session through an SSH tunnel. This can be used to wrap any number of insecure TCP protocols such as smtp, pop3, ftp, etc. A typical SSH Tunnel &prompt.user; ssh -2 -N -f -L 5025:localhost:25 user@mailserver.foobar.com user@mailserver.foobar.com's password: ***** &prompt.user; telnet localhost 5025 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. 220 mailserver.foobar.com ESMTP This can be used in conjunction with an &man.ssh-keygen.1; and additional user accounts to create a more seamless/hassle-free SSH tunneling environment. Keys can be used in place of typing a password, and the tunnels can be run as a separate user. Further Reading OpenSSH &man.ssh.1; &man.scp.1; &man.ssh-keygen.1; &man.ssh-agent.1; &man.ssh-add.1; &man.sshd.8; &man.sftp-server.8; diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/serialcomms/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/serialcomms/chapter.sgml index c03355b486..992d7b7d66 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/serialcomms/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/serialcomms/chapter.sgml @@ -1,2721 +1,2721 @@ Serial Communications Synopsis UNIX has always had support for serial communications. In fact, the very first UNIX machines relied on serial lines for user input and output. Things have changed a lot from the days when the average terminal consisted of a 10-character-per-second serial printer and a keyboard. This chapter will cover some of the ways in which FreeBSD uses serial communications. Serial Basics Assembled from FAQ. This section should give you some general information about serial ports. If you do not find what you want here, check into the Terminal and Dial-up sections of the handbook. The ttydX (or cuaaX) device is the regular device you will want to open for your applications. When a process opens the device, it will 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 is 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. Terminals Contributed by &a.kelly; 28 July 1996 Terminals provide a convenient and low-cost way to access the power of your FreeBSD system when you are not at the computer's console or on a connected network. This section describes how to use terminals with FreeBSD. Uses and Types of Terminals The original Unix systems did not have consoles. Instead, people logged in and ran programs through terminals that were connected to the computer's serial ports. It is quite similar to using a modem and some terminal software to dial into a remote system to do text-only work. Today's PCs have consoles capable of high quality graphics, but the ability to establish a login session on a serial port still exists in nearly every Unix-style operating system today; FreeBSD is no exception. By using a terminal attached to a unused serial port, you can log in and run any text program that you would normally run on the console or in an xterm window in the X Window System. For the business user, you can attach many terminals to a FreeBSD system and place them on your employees' desktops. For a home user, a spare computer such as an older IBM PC or a Macintosh can be a terminal wired into a more powerful computer running FreeBSD. You can turn what might otherwise be a single-user computer into a powerful multiple user system. For FreeBSD, there are three kinds of terminals: Dumb terminals PCs acting as terminals X terminals The remaining subsections describe each kind. Dumb Terminals Dumb terminals are specialized pieces of hardware that let you connect to computers over serial lines. They are called dumb because they have only enough computational power to display, send, and receive text. You cannot run any programs on them. It is the computer to which you connect them that has all the power to run text editors, compilers, email, games, and so forth. There are hundreds of kinds of dumb terminals made by many manufacturers, including Digital Equipment Corporation's VT-100 and Wyse's WY-75. Just about any kind will work with FreeBSD. Some high-end terminals can even display graphics, but only certain software packages can take advantage of these advanced features. Dumb terminals are popular in work environments where workers do not need access to graphic applications such as those provided by the X Window System. PCs Acting As Terminals If a dumb terminal has just enough ability to display, send, and receive text, then certainly any spare personal computer can be a dumb terminal. All you need is the proper cable and some terminal emulation software to run on the computer. Such a configuration is popular in homes. For example, if your spouse is busy working on your FreeBSD system's console, you can do some text-only work at the same time from a less powerful personal computer hooked up as a terminal to the FreeBSD system. X Terminals X terminals are the most sophisticated kind of terminal available. Instead of connecting to a serial port, they usually connect to a network like Ethernet. Instead of being relegated to text-only applications, they can display any X application. We introduce X terminals just for the sake of completeness. However, this chapter does not cover setup, configuration, or use of X terminals. Cables and Ports To connect a terminal to your FreeBSD system, you need the right kind of cable and a serial port to which to connect it. This section tells you what to do. If you are already familiar with your terminal and the cable it requires, skip to Configuration. Cables Because terminals use serial ports, you need to use serial—also known as RS-232C—cables to connect the terminal to the FreeBSD system. There are a couple of kinds of serial cables. Which one you'll use depends on the terminal you want to connect: If you are connecting a personal computer to act as a terminal, use a null-modem cable. A null-modem cable connects two computers or terminals together. If you have an actual terminal, your best source of information on what cable to use is the documentation that accompanied the terminal. If you do not have the documentation, then try a null-modem cable. If that does not work, then try a standard cable. Also, the serial port on both the terminal and your FreeBSD system must have connectors that will fit the cable you are using. Null-modem cables A null-modem cable passes some signals straight through, like signal ground, but switches other signals. For example, the send data pin on one end goes to the receive data pin on the other end. If you like making your own cables, here is a table showing a recommended way to construct a null-modem cable for use with terminals. This table shows the RS-232C signal names and the pin numbers on a DB-25 connector. Signal Pin # Pin # Signal TxD 2 connects to 3 RxD RxD 3 connects to 2 TxD DTR 20 connects to 6 DSR DSR 6 connects to 20 DTR SG 7 connects to 7 SG DCD 8 connects to 4 RTS RTS 4 5 CTS CTS 5 connects to 8 DCD For DCD to RTS, connect pins 4 to 5 internally in the connector hood, and then to pin 8 in the remote hood. Standard RS-232C Cables A standard serial cable passes all the RS-232C signals straight-through. That is, the send data pin on one end of the cable goes to the send data pin on the other end. This is the type of cable to connect a modem to your FreeBSD system, and the type of cable needed for some terminals. Ports Serial ports are the devices through which data is transferred between the FreeBSD host computer and the terminal. This section describes the kinds of ports that exist and how they are addressed in FreeBSD. Kinds of Ports Several kinds of serial ports exist. Before you purchase or construct a cable, you need to make sure it will fit the ports on your terminal and on the FreeBSD system. Most terminals will have DB25 ports. Personal computers, including PCs running FreeBSD, will have DB25 or DB9 ports. If you have a multiport serial card for your PC, you may have RJ-12 or RJ-45 ports. See the documentation that accompanied the hardware for specifications on the kind of port in use. A visual inspection of the port often works, too. Port Names In FreeBSD, you access each serial port through an entry in the /dev directory. There are two different kinds of entries: Call-in ports are named /dev/ttydX where X is the port number, starting from zero. Generally, you use the call-in port for terminals. Call-in ports require that the serial line assert the data carrier detect (DCD) signal to work. Call-out ports are named /dev/cuaaX. You usually do not use the call-out port for terminals, just for modems. You may use the call-out port if the serial cable or the terminal does not support the carrier detect signal. See the &man.sio.4; manual page for more information. If you have connected a terminal to the first serial port (COM1 in DOS parlance), then you want to use /dev/ttyd0 to refer to the terminal. If it is on the second serial port (also known as COM2), it is /dev/ttyd1, and so forth. Note that you may have to configure your kernel to support each serial port, especially if you have a multiport serial card. See Configuring the FreeBSD Kernel for more information. Configuration This section describes what you need to configure on your FreeBSD system to enable a login session on a terminal. It assumes you have already configured your kernel to support the serial port to which the terminal is connected—and that you have connected it. In a nutshell, you need to tell the init process, which is responsible for process control and initialization, to start a getty process, which is responsible for reading a login name and starting the login program. To do so, you have to edit the /etc/ttys file. First, use the su command to become root. Then, make the following changes to /etc/ttys: Add an line to /etc/ttys for the entry in the /dev directory for the serial port if it is not already there. Specify that /usr/libexec/getty be run on the port, and specify the appropriate getty type from the /etc/gettytab file. Specify the default terminal type. Set the port to on. Specify whether the port should be secure. Force init to reread the /etc/ttys file. As an optional step, you may wish to create a custom getty type for use in step 2 by making an entry in /etc/gettytab. This document does not explain how to do so; you are encouraged to see the &man.gettytab.5; and the &man.getty.8; manual pages for more information. The remaining sections detail how to do these steps. We will use a running example throughout these sections to illustrate what we need to do. In our example, we will connect two terminals to the system: a Wyse-50 and a old 286 IBM PC running Procomm terminal software emulating a VT-100 terminal. We connect the Wyse to the second serial port and the 286 to the sixth serial port (a port on a multiport serial card). For more information on the /etc/ttys file, see the &man.ttys.5; manual page. Adding an Entry to <filename>/etc/ttys</filename> First, you need to add an entry to the /etc/ttys file, unless one is already there. The /etc/ttys file lists all of the ports on your FreeBSD system where you want to allow logins. For example, the first virtual console ttyv0 has an entry in this file. You can log in on the console using this entry. This file contains entries for the other virtual consoles, serial ports, and pseudo-ttys. For a hardwired terminal, just list the serial port's /dev entry without the /dev part. When you installed your FreeBSD system, the /etc/ttys file included entries for the first four serial ports: ttyd0 through ttyd3. If you are attaching a terminal on one of those ports, you do not need to add an entry. In our example, we attached a Wyse-50 to the second serial port, ttyd1, which is already in the file. We need to add an entry for the 286 PC connected to the sixth serial port. Here is an excerpt of the /etc/ttys file after we add the new entry: ttyd1 "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" unknown off secure ttyd5 Specifying the <replaceable>getty</replaceable> Type Next, we need to specify what program will be run to handle the logins on a terminal. For FreeBSD, the standard program to do that is /usr/libexec/getty. It is what provides the login: prompt. The program getty takes one (optional) parameter on its command line, the getty type. A getty type tells about characteristics on the terminal line, like bps rate and parity. The getty program reads these characteristics from the file /etc/gettytab. The file /etc/gettytab contains lots of entries for terminal lines both old and new. In almost all cases, the entries that start with the text std will work for hardwired terminals. These entries ignore parity. There is a std entry for each bps rate from 110 to 115200. Of course, you can add your own entries to this file. The manual page &man.gettytab.5; provides more information. When setting the getty type in the /etc/ttys file, make sure that the communications settings on the terminal match. For our example, the Wyse-50 uses no parity and connects at 38400 bps. The 286 PC uses no parity and connects at 19200 bps. Here is the /etc/ttys file so far (showing just the two terminals in which we are interested): ttyd1 "/usr/libexec/getty std.38400" unknown off secure ttyd5 "/usr/libexec/getty std.19200" Note that the second field—where we specify what program to run—appears in quotes. This is important, otherwise the type argument to getty might be interpreted as the next field. Specifying the Default Terminal Type The third field in the /etc/ttys file lists the default terminal type for the port. For dial-up ports, you typically put unknown or dialup in this field because users may dial up with practically any kind of terminal or software. For hardwired terminals, the terminal type does not change, so you can put a real terminal type in this field. Users will usually use the tset program in their .login or .profile files to check the terminal type and prompt for one if necessary. By setting a terminal type in the /etc/ttys file, users can forego such prompting. To find out what terminal types FreeBSD supports, see the file /usr/share/misc/termcap. It lists about 600 terminal types. You can add more if you wish. See the &man.termcap.5; manual page for information. In our example, the Wyse-50 is a Wyse-50 type of terminal (although it can emulate others, we will leave it in Wyse-50 mode). The 286 PC is running Procomm which will be set to emulate a VT-100. Here are the pertinent yet unfinished entries from the /etc/ttys file: ttyd1 "/usr/libexec/getty std.38400" wy50 off secure ttyd5 "/usr/libexec/getty std.19200" vt100 Enabling the Port The next field in /etc/ttys, the fourth field, tells whether to enable the port. Putting on here will have the init process start the program in the second field, getty, which will prompt for a login. If you put off in the fourth field, there will be no getty, and hence no logins on the port. So, naturally, you want an on in this field. Here again is the /etc/ttys file. We have turned each port on. ttyd1 "/usr/libexec/getty std.38400" wy50 on secure ttyd5 "/usr/libexec/getty std.19200" vt100 on Specifying Secure Ports We have arrived at the last field (well, almost: there is an optional window specifier, but we will ignore that). The last field tells whether the port is secure. What does secure mean? It means that the root account (or any account with a user ID of 0) may login on the port. Insecure ports do not allow root to login. How do you use secure and insecure ports? By marking a port as insecure, the terminal to which it is connected will not allow root to login. People who know the root password to your FreeBSD system will first have to login using a regular user account. To gain superuser privileges, they will then have to use the su command. Because of this, you will have two records to help track down possible compromises of root privileges: both the login and the su command make records in the system log (and logins are also recorded in the wtmp file). By marking a port as secure, the terminal will allow root in. People who know the root password will just login as root. You will not have the potentially useful login and su command records. Which should you use? Just use insecure. Use insecure even for terminals not in public user areas or behind locked doors. It is quite easy to login and use su if you need superuser privileges. Here finally are the completed entries in the /etc/ttys file, with comments added to describe where the terminals are: ttyd1 "/usr/libexec/getty std.38400" wy50 on insecure # Kitchen ttyd5 "/usr/libexec/getty std.19200" vt100 on insecure # Guest bathroom Force <command>init</command> to Reread <filename>/etc/ttys</filename> When you boot FreeBSD, the first process, init, will read the /etc/ttys file and start the programs listed for each enabled port to prompt for logins. After you edit /etc/ttys, you do not want to have to reboot your system to get init to see the changes. So, init will reread /etc/ttys if it receives a SIGHUP (hangup) signal. So, after you have saved your changes to /etc/ttys, send SIGHUP to init by typing: &prompt.root; kill -HUP 1 (The init process always has process ID 1.) If everything is set up correctly, all cables are in place, and the terminals are powered up, you should see login prompts. Your terminals are ready for their first logins! Debugging your connection Even with the most meticulous attention to detail, something could still go wrong while setting up a terminal. Here is a list of symptoms and some suggested fixes. No login prompt appears Make sure the terminal is plugged in and powered up. If it is a personal computer acting as a terminal, make sure it is running terminal emulation software on the correct serial port. Make sure the cable is connected firmly to both the terminal and the FreeBSD computer. Make sure it is the right kind of cable. Make sure the terminal and FreeBSD agree on the bps rate and parity settings. If you have a video display terminal, make sure the contrast and brightness controls are turned up. If it is a printing terminal, make sure paper and ink are in good supply. Make sure that a getty process is running and serving the terminal. Type &prompt.root; ps -axww|grep getty to get a list of running getty processes. You should see an entry for the terminal. For example, the display 22189 d1 Is+ 0:00.03 /usr/libexec/getty std.38400 ttyd1 shows that a getty is running on the second serial port ttyd1 and is using the std.38400 entry in /etc/gettytab. If no getty process is running, make sure you have enabled the port in /etc/ttys. Make sure you have run kill -HUP 1. Garbage appears instead of a login prompt Make sure the terminal and FreeBSD agree on the bps rate and parity settings. Check the getty processes to make sure the correct getty type is in use. If not, edit /etc/ttys and run kill -HUP 1. Characters appear doubled; the password appears when typed Switch the terminal (or the terminal emulation software) from half duplex or local echo to full duplex. Dial-in Service Contributed by &a.ghelmer;. This document provides suggestions for configuring a FreeBSD system to handle dial-up modems. This document is written based on the author's experience with FreeBSD versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.1.5.1 (and experience with dial-up modems on other UNIX-like operating systems); however, this document may not answer all of your questions or provide examples specific enough to your environment. The author cannot be responsible if you damage your system or lose data due to attempting to follow the suggestions here. Prerequisites To begin with, the author assumes you have some basic knowledge of FreeBSD. You need to have FreeBSD installed, know how to edit files in a UNIX-like environment, and how to look up manual pages on the system. As discussed below, you will need certain versions of FreeBSD, and knowledge of some terminology & modem and cabling. FreeBSD Version First, it is assumed that you are using FreeBSD version 1.1 or higher (including versions 2.x). FreeBSD version 1.0 included two different serial drivers, which complicates the situation. Also, the serial device driver (sio) has improved in every release of FreeBSD, so more recent versions of FreeBSD are assumed to have better and more efficient drivers than earlier versions. Terminology A quick rundown of terminology: bps Bits per Second — the rate at which data is transmitted DTE Data Terminal Equipment — for example, your computer DCE Data Communications Equipment — your modem RS-232 EIA standard for serial communications via hardware If you need more information about these terms and data communications in general, the author remembers reading that The RS-232 Bible (anybody have an ISBN?) is a good reference. When talking about communications data rates, the author does not use the term baud. Baud refers to the number of electrical state transitions that may be made in a period of time, while bps (bits per second) is the correct term to use (at least it does not seem to bother the curmudgeons quite a much). External v.s. Internal Modems External modems seem to be more convenient for dial-up, because external modems often can be semi-permanently configured via parameters stored in non-volatile RAM and they usually provide lighted indicators that display the state of important RS-232 signals. Blinking lights impress visitors, but lights are also very useful to see whether a modem is operating properly. Internal modems usually lack non-volatile RAM, so their configuration may be limited only to setting DIP switches. If your internal modem has any signal indicator lights, it is probably difficult to view the lights when the system's cover is in place. Modems and Cables A background knowledge of these items is assumed You know how to connect your modem to your computer so that the two can communicate (unless you have an internal modem, which does not need such a cable) You are familiar with your modem's command set, or know where to look up needed commands You know how to configure your modem (probably via a terminal communications program) so you can set the non-volatile RAM parameters The first, connecting your modem, is usually simple — most straight-through serial cables work without any problems. You need to have a cable with appropriate connectors (DB-25 or DB-9, male or female) on each end, and the cable must be a DCE-to-DTE cable with these signals wired: Transmitted Data (SD) Received Data (RD) Request to Send (RTS) Clear to Send (CTS) Data Set Ready (DSR) Data Terminal Ready (DTR) Carrier Detect (CD) Signal Ground (SG) FreeBSD needs the RTS and CTS signals for flow-control at speeds above 2400bps, the CD signal to detect when a call has been answered or the line has been hung up, and the DTR signal to reset the modem after a session is complete. Some cables are wired without all of the needed signals, so if you have problems, such as a login session not going away when the line hangs up, you may have a problem with your cable. The second prerequisite depends on the modem(s) you use. If you do not know your modem's command set by heart, you will need to have the modem's reference book or user's guide handy. Sample commands for USR Sportster 14,400 external modems will be given, which you may be able to use as a reference for your own modem's commands. Lastly, you will need to know how to setup your modem so that it will work well with FreeBSD. Like other UNIX-like operating systems, FreeBSD uses the hardware signals to find out when a call has been answered or a line has been hung up and to hangup and reset the modem after a call. FreeBSD avoids sending commands to the modem or watching for status reports from the modem. If you are familiar with connecting modems to PC-based bulletin board systems, this may seem awkward. Serial Interface Considerations FreeBSD supports NS8250-, NS16450-, NS16550-, and NS16550A-based EIA RS-232C (CCITT V.24) communications interfaces. The 8250 and 16450 devices have single-character buffers. The 16550 device provides a 16-character buffer, which allows for better system performance. (Bugs in plain 16550's prevent the use of the 16-character buffer, so use 16550A's if possible). Because single-character-buffer devices require more work by the operating system than the 16-character-buffer devices, 16550A-based serial interface cards are much preferred. If the system has many active serial ports or will have a heavy load, 16550A-based cards are better for low-error-rate communications. Quick Overview Here is the process that FreeBSD follows to accept dial-up logins. A getty process, spawned by init, patiently waits to open the assigned serial port (/dev/ttyd0, for our example). The command ps ax might show this: 4850 ?? I 0:00.09 /usr/libexec/getty V19200 ttyd0 When a user dials the modem's line and the modems connect, the CD line is asserted by the modem. The kernel notices that carrier has been detected and completes getty's open of the port. getty sends a login: prompt at the specified initial line speed. getty watches to see if legitimate characters are received, and, in a typical configuration, if it finds junk (probably due to the modem's connection speed being different than getty's speed), getty tries adjusting the line speeds until it receives reasonable characters. We hope getty finds the correct speed and the user sees a login: prompt. After the user enters his/her login name, getty executes /usr/bin/login, which completes the login by asking for the user's password and then starting the user's shell. Let's dive into the configuration... Kernel Configuration FreeBSD kernels typically come prepared to search for four serial - ports, known in the PC-DOS world as COM1:, + ports, known in the MS-DOS world as COM1:, COM2:, COM3:, and COM4:. FreeBSD can presently also handle dumb multiport serial interface cards, such as the Boca Board 1008 and 2016 (please see the manual page &man.sio.4; for kernel configuration information if you have a multiport serial card). The default kernel only looks for the standard COM ports, though. To see if your kernel recognizes any of your serial ports, watch for messages while the kernel is booting, or use the /sbin/dmesg command to replay the kernel's boot messages. In particular, look for messages that start with the characters sio. Hint: to view just the messages that have the word sio, use the command: &prompt.root; /sbin/dmesg | grep 'sio' For example, on a system with four serial ports, these are the serial-port specific kernel boot messages: sio0 at 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 on isa sio0: type 16550A sio1 at 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on isa sio1: type 16550A sio2 at 0x3e8-0x3ef irq 5 on isa sio2: type 16550A sio3 at 0x2e8-0x2ef irq 9 on isa sio3: type 16550A If your kernel does not recognize all of your serial ports, you will probably need to configure a custom FreeBSD kernel for your system. Please see the BSD System Manager's Manual chapter on Building Berkeley Kernels with Config [the source for which is in /usr/src/share/doc/smm] and FreeBSD Configuration Options [in /sys/conf/options and in /sys/arch/conf/options.arch, with arch for example being i386] for more information on configuring and building kernels. You may have to unpack the kernel source distribution if have not installed the system sources already (srcdist/srcsys.?? in FreeBSD 1.1, srcdist/sys.?? in FreeBSD 1.1.5.1, or the entire source distribution in FreeBSD 2.0) to be able to configure and build kernels. Create a kernel configuration file for your system (if you have not already) by cding to /sys/i386/conf. Then, if you are creating a new custom configuration file, copy the file GENERICAH (or GENERICBT, if you have a BusTek SCSI controller on FreeBSD 1.x) to YOURSYS, where YOURSYS is the name of your system, but in upper-case letters. Edit the file, and change the device lines: device sio0 at isa? port "IO_COM1" tty irq 4 vector siointr device sio1 at isa? port "IO_COM2" tty irq 3 vector siointr device sio2 at isa? port "IO_COM3" tty irq 5 vector siointr device sio3 at isa? port "IO_COM4" tty irq 9 vector siointr You can comment-out or completely remove lines for devices you do not have. If you have a multiport serial board, such as the Boca Board BB2016, please see the &man.sio.4; man page for complete information on how to write configuration lines for multiport boards. Be careful if you are using a configuration file that was previously used for a different version of FreeBSD because the device flags have changed between versions. port "IO_COM1" is a substitution for port 0x3f8, IO_COM2 is 0x2f8, IO_COM3 is 0x3e8, and IO_COM4 is 0x2e8, which are fairly common port addresses for their respective serial ports; interrupts 4, 3, 5, and 9 are fairly common interrupt request lines. Also note that regular serial ports cannot share interrupts on ISA-bus PCs (multiport boards have on-board electronics that allow all the 16550A's on the board to share one or two interrupt request lines). When you are finished adjusting the kernel configuration file, use the program config as documented in Building Berkeley Kernels with Config and the &man.config.8; manual page to prepare a kernel building directory, then build, install, and test the new kernel. Device Special Files Most devices in the kernel are accessed through device special files, which are located in the /dev directory. The sio devices are accessed through the /dev/ttyd? (dial-in) and /dev/cuaa? (call-out) devices. On FreeBSD version 1.1.5 and higher, there are also initialization devices (/dev/ttyid? and /dev/cuai0?) and locking devices (/dev/ttyld? and /dev/cual0?). The initialization devices are used to initialize communications port parameters each time a port is opened, such as crtscts for modems which use CTS/RTS signaling for flow control. The locking devices are used to lock flags on ports to prevent users or programs changing certain parameters; see the manual pages &man.termios.4;, &man.sio.4;, and &man.stty.1; for information on the terminal settings, locking & initializing devices, and setting terminal options, respectively. Making Device Special Files A shell script called MAKEDEV in the /dev directory manages the device special files. (The manual page for &man.MAKEDEV.8; on FreeBSD 1.1.5 is fairly bogus in its discussion of COM ports, so ignore it.) To use MAKEDEV to make dial-up device special files for COM1: (port 0), cd to /dev and issue the command MAKEDEV ttyd0. Likewise, to make dial-up device special files for COM2: (port 1), use MAKEDEV ttyd1. MAKEDEV not only creates the /dev/ttyd? device special files, but also creates the /dev/cuaa? (and all of the initializing and locking special files under FreeBSD 1.1.5 and up) and removes the hardwired terminal special file /dev/tty0?, if it exists. After making new device special files, be sure to check the permissions on the files (especially the /dev/cua* files) to make sure that only users who should have access to those device special files can read & write on them — you probably do not want to allow your average user to use your modems to dial-out. The default permissions on the /dev/cua* files should be sufficient: crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 28, 129 Feb 15 14:38 /dev/cuaa1 crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 28, 161 Feb 15 14:38 /dev/cuaia1 crw-rw---- 1 uucp dialer 28, 193 Feb 15 14:38 /dev/cuala1 These permissions allow the user uucp and users in the group dialer to use the call-out devices. Configuration Files There are three system configuration files in the /etc directory that you will probably need to edit to allow dial-up access to your FreeBSD system. The first, /etc/gettytab, contains configuration information for the /usr/libexec/getty daemon. Second, /etc/ttys holds information that tells /sbin/init what tty devices should have getty processes running on them. Lastly, you can place port initialization commands in the /etc/rc.serial script if you have FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 or higher; otherwise, you can initialize ports in the /etc/rc.local script. There are two schools of thought regarding dial-up modems on UNIX. One group likes to configure their modems and system so that no matter at what speed a remote user dials in, the local computer-to-modem RS-232 interface runs at a locked speed. The benefit of this configuration is that the remote user always sees a system login prompt immediately. The downside is that the system does not know what a user's true data rate is, so full-screen programs like Emacs will not adjust their screen-painting methods to make their response better for slower connections. The other school configures their modems' RS-232 interface to vary its speed based on the remote user's connection speed. For example, V.32bis (14.4 Kbps) connections to the modem might make the modem run its RS-232 interface at 19.2 Kbps, while 2400 bps connections make the modem's RS-232 interface run at 2400 bps. Because getty does not understand any particular modem's connection speed reporting, getty gives a login: message at an initial speed and watches the characters that come back in response. If the user sees junk, it is assumed that they know they should press the <Enter> key until they see a recognizable prompt. If the data rates do not match, getty sees anything the user types as junk, tries going to the next speed and gives the login: prompt again. This procedure can continue ad nauseam, but normally only takes a keystroke or two before the user sees a good prompt. Obviously, this login sequence does not look as clean as the former locked-speed method, but a user on a low-speed connection should receive better interactive response from full-screen programs. The author will try to give balanced configuration information, but is biased towards having the modem's data rate follow the connection rate. <filename>/etc/gettytab</filename> /etc/gettytab is a &man.termcap.5;-style file of configuration information for &man.getty.8;. Please see the &man.gettytab.5; manual page for complete information on the format of the file and the list of capabilities. Locked-Speed Config If you are locking your modem's data communications rate at a particular speed, you probably will not need to make any changes to /etc/gettytab. Matching-Speed Config You will need to setup an entry in /etc/gettytab to give getty information about the speeds you wish to use for your modem. If you have a 2400 bps modem, you can probably use the existing D2400 entry. This entry already exists in the FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 gettytab file, so you do not need to add it unless it is missing under your version of FreeBSD: # # Fast dialup terminals, 2400/1200/300 rotary (can start either way) # D2400|d2400|Fast-Dial-2400:\ :nx=D1200:tc=2400-baud: 3|D1200|Fast-Dial-1200:\ :nx=D300:tc=1200-baud: 5|D300|Fast-Dial-300:\ :nx=D2400:tc=300-baud: If you have a higher speed modem, you will probably need to add an entry in /etc/gettytab; here is an entry you could use for a 14.4 Kbps modem with a top interface speed of 19.2 Kbps: # # Additions for a V.32bis Modem # um|V300|High Speed Modem at 300,8-bit:\ :nx=V19200:tc=std.300: un|V1200|High Speed Modem at 1200,8-bit:\ :nx=V300:tc=std.1200: uo|V2400|High Speed Modem at 2400,8-bit:\ :nx=V1200:tc=std.2400: up|V9600|High Speed Modem at 9600,8-bit:\ :nx=V2400:tc=std.9600: uq|V19200|High Speed Modem at 19200,8-bit:\ :nx=V9600:tc=std.19200: On FreeBSD 1.1.5 and later, this will result in 8-bit, no parity connections. Under FreeBSD 1.1, add :np: parameters to the std.xxx entries at the top of the file for 8 bits, no parity; otherwise, the default is 7 bits, even parity. The example above starts the communications rate at 19.2 Kbps (for a V.32bis connection), then cycles through 9600 bps (for V.32), 2400 bps, 1200 bps, 300 bps, and back to 19.2 Kbps. Communications rate cycling is implemented with the nx= (next table) capability. Each of the lines uses a tc= (table continuation) entry to pick up the rest of the standard settings for a particular data rate. If you have a 28.8 Kbps modem and/or you want to take advantage of compression on a 14.4 Kbps modem, you need to use a higher communications rate than 19.2 Kbps. Here is an example of a gettytab entry starting a 57.6 Kbps: # # Additions for a V.32bis or V.34 Modem # Starting at 57.6 Kbps # vm|VH300|Very High Speed Modem at 300,8-bit:\ :nx=VH57600:tc=std.300: vn|VH1200|Very High Speed Modem at 1200,8-bit:\ :nx=VH300:tc=std.1200: vo|VH2400|Very High Speed Modem at 2400,8-bit:\ :nx=VH1200:tc=std.2400: vp|VH9600|Very High Speed Modem at 9600,8-bit:\ :nx=VH2400:tc=std.9600: vq|VH57600|Very High Speed Modem at 57600,8-bit:\ :nx=VH9600:tc=std.57600: If you have a slow CPU or a heavily loaded system and you do not have 16550A-based serial ports, you may receive sio silo errors at 57.6 Kbps. <filename>/etc/ttys</filename> /etc/ttys is the list of ttys for init to monitor. /etc/ttys also provides security information to login (user root may only login on ttys marked secure). See the manual page for &man.ttys.5; for more information. You will need to either modify existing lines in /etc/ttys or add new lines to make init run getty processes automatically on your new dial-up ports. The general format of the line will be the same, whether you are using a locked-speed or matching-speed configuration: ttyd0 "/usr/libexec/getty xxx" dialup on The first item in the above line is the device special file for this entry — ttyd0 means /dev/ttyd0 is the file that this getty will be watching. The second item, "/usr/libexec/getty xxx" (xxx will be replaced by the initial gettytab capability) is the process init will run on the device. The third item, dialup, is the default terminal type. The fourth parameter, on, indicates to init that the line is operational. There can be a fifth parameter, secure, but it should only be used for terminals which are physically secure (such as the system console). The default terminal type (dialup in the example above) may depend on local preferences. dialup is the traditional default terminal type on dial-up lines so that users may customize their login scripts to notice when the terminal is dialup and automatically adjust their terminal type. However, the author finds it easier at his site to specify vt102 as the default terminal type, since the users just use VT102 emulation on their remote systems. After you have made changes to /etc/ttys, you may send the init process a HUP signal to re-read the file. You can use the command &prompt.root; kill -HUP 1 to send the signal. If this is your first time setting up the system, though, you may want to wait until your modem(s) are properly configured and connected before signaling init. Locked-Speed Config For a locked-speed configuration, your ttys entry needs to have a fixed-speed entry provided to getty. For a modem whose port speed is locked at 19.2 Kbps, the ttys entry might look like this: ttyd0 "/usr/libexec/getty std.19200" dialup on If your modem is locked at a different data rate, substitute the appropriate name for the std.speed entry for std.19200 from /etc/gettytab for your modem's data rate. Matching-Speed Config In a matching-speed configuration, your ttys entry needs to reference the appropriate beginning auto-baud (sic) entry in /etc/gettytab. For example, if you added the above suggested entry for a matching-speed modem that starts at 19.2 Kbps (the gettytab entry containing the V19200 starting point), your ttys entry might look like this: ttyd0 "/usr/libexec/getty V19200" dialup on <filename>/etc/rc.serial</filename> or <filename>/etc/rc.local</filename> High-speed modems, like V.32, V.32bis, and V.34 modems, need to use hardware (RTS/CTS) flow control. You can add stty commands to /etc/rc.serial on FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 and up, or /etc/rc.local on FreeBSD 1.1, to set the hardware flow control flag in the FreeBSD kernel for the modem ports. For example, on a sample FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 system, /etc/rc.serial reads: #!/bin/sh # # Serial port initial configuration stty -f /dev/ttyid1 crtscts stty -f /dev/cuai01 crtscts This sets the termios flag crtscts on serial port #1's (COM2:) dial-in and dial-out initialization devices. On an old FreeBSD 1.1 system, these entries were added to /etc/rc.local to set the crtscts flag on the devices: # Set serial ports to use RTS/CTS flow control stty -f /dev/ttyd0 crtscts stty -f /dev/ttyd1 crtscts stty -f /dev/ttyd2 crtscts stty -f /dev/ttyd3 crtscts Since there is no initialization device special file on FreeBSD 1.1, one has to just set the flags on the sole device special file and hope the flags are not cleared by a miscreant. Modem Settings If you have a modem whose parameters may be permanently set in non-volatile RAM, you will need to use a terminal program (such as - Telix under PC-DOS or tip under FreeBSD) to set the + Telix under MS-DOS or tip under FreeBSD) to set the parameters. Connect to the modem using the same communications speed as the initial speed getty will use and configure the modem's non-volatile RAM to match these requirements: CD asserted when connected DTR asserted for operation; dropping DTR hangs up line & resets modem CTS transmitted data flow control Disable XON/XOFF flow control RTS received data flow control Quiet mode (no result codes) No command echo Please read the documentation for your modem to find out what commands and/or DIP switch settings you need to give it. For example, to set the above parameters on a USRobotics Sportster 14,400 external modem, one could give these commands to the modem: ATZ AT&C1&D2&H1&I0&R2&W You might also want to take this opportunity to adjust other settings in the modem, such as whether it will use V.42bis and/or MNP5 compression. The USR Sportster 14,400 external modem also has some DIP switches that need to be set; for other modems, perhaps you can use these settings as an example: Switch 1: UP — DTR Normal Switch 2: Do not care (Verbal Result Codes/Numeric Result Codes) Switch 3: UP — Suppress Result Codes Switch 4: DOWN — No echo, offline commands Switch 5: UP — Auto Answer Switch 6: UP — Carrier Detect Normal Switch 7: UP — Load NVRAM Defaults Switch 8: Do not care (Smart Mode/Dumb Mode) Result codes should be disabled/suppressed for dial-up modems to avoid problems that can occur if getty mistakenly gives a login: prompt to a modem that is in command mode and the modem echoes the command or returns a result code. I have heard this sequence can result in a extended, silly conversation between getty and the modem. Locked-speed Config For a locked-speed configuration, you will need to configure the modem to maintain a constant modem-to-computer data rate independent of the communications rate. On a USR Sportster 14,400 external modem, these commands will lock the modem-to-computer data rate at the speed used to issue the commands: ATZ AT&B1&W Matching-speed Config For a variable-speed configuration, you will need to configure your modem to adjust its serial port data rate to match the incoming call rate. On a USR Sportster 14,400 external modem, these commands will lock the modem's error-corrected data rate to the speed used to issue the commands, but allow the serial port rate to vary for non-error-corrected connections: ATZ AT&B2&W Checking the Modem's Configuration Most high-speed modems provide commands to view the modem's current operating parameters in a somewhat human-readable fashion. On the USR Sportster 14,400 external modems, the command ATI5 displays the settings that are stored in the non-volatile RAM. To see the true operating parameters of the modem (as influenced by the USR's DIP switch settings), use the commands ATZ and then ATI4. If you have a different brand of modem, check your modem's manual to see how to double-check your modem's configuration parameters. Troubleshooting Here are a few steps you can follow to check out the dial-up modem on your system. Checking out the FreeBSD system Hook up your modem to your FreeBSD system, boot the system, and, if your modem has status indication lights, watch to see whether the modem's DTR indicator lights when the login: prompt appears on the system's console — if it lights up, that should mean that FreeBSD has started a getty process on the appropriate communications port and is waiting for the modem to accept a call. If the DTR indicator doesn't light, login to the FreeBSD system through the console and issue a ps ax to see if FreeBSD is trying to run a getty process on the correct port. You should see a lines like this among the processes displayed: 114 ?? I 0:00.10 /usr/libexec/getty V19200 ttyd0 115 ?? I 0:00.10 /usr/libexec/getty V19200 ttyd1 If you see something different, like this: 114 d0 I 0:00.10 /usr/libexec/getty V19200 ttyd0 and the modem has not accepted a call yet, this means that getty has completed its open on the communications port. This could indicate a problem with the cabling or a mis-configured modem, because getty should not be able to open the communications port until CD (carrier detect) has been asserted by the modem. If you do not see any getty processes waiting to open the desired ttyd? port, double-check your entries in /etc/ttys to see if there are any mistakes there. Also, check the log file /var/log/messages to see if there are any log messages from init or getty regarding any problems. If there are any messages, triple-check the configuration files /etc/ttys and /etc/gettytab, as well as the appropriate device special files /dev/ttyd?, for any mistakes, missing entries, or missing device special files. Try Dialing In Try dialing into the system; be sure to use 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop bit on the remote system. If you do not get a prompt right away, or get garbage, try pressing <Enter> about once per second. If you still do not see a login: prompt after a while, try sending a BREAK. If you are using a high-speed modem to do the dialing, try dialing again after locking the dialing modem's interface speed (via AT&B1 on a USR Sportster, for example). If you still cannot get a login: prompt, check /etc/gettytab again and double-check that The initial capability name specified in /etc/ttys for the line matches a name of a capability in /etc/gettytab Each nx= entry matches another gettytab capability name Each tc= entry matches another gettytab capability name If you dial but the modem on the FreeBSD system will not answer, make sure that the modem is configured to answer the phone when DTR is asserted. If the modem seems to be configured correctly, verify that the DTR line is asserted by checking the modem's indicator lights (if it has any). If you have gone over everything several times and it still does not work, take a break and come back to it later. If it still does not work, perhaps you can send an electronic mail message to the &a.questions;describing your modem and your problem, and the good folks on the list will try to help. Acknowledgments Thanks to these people for comments and advice: &a.kelly; for a number of good suggestions Dial-out Service Information integrated from FAQ. The following are tips to getting your host to be able to connect over the modem to another computer. This is appropriate for establishing a terminal session with a remote host. This is useful to log onto a BBS. This kind of connection can be extremely helpful to get a file on the Internet if you have problems with PPP. If you need to FTP something and PPP is broken, use the terminal session to FTP it. Then use zmodem to transfer it to your machine. Why cannot I run <command>tip</command> or <command>cu</command>? 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/tip You do not have to run this command for cu, since cu is just a hard link to tip. My stock Hayes modem is not 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 is not 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 is a communication problem. Try ATS7=45&W. Actually, as shipped tip does not 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 is called a direct entry in your /etc/remote file. For example, if your modem is 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 will be connected to your modem. If there is no /dev/cuaa0 on your system, do this: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; MAKEDEV cuaa0 Or use cu as root with the following command: &prompt.root; cu -lline -sspeed line is the serial port (e.g./dev/cuaa0) and speed is the speed (e.g.57600). When you are done entering the AT commands hit ~. to exit. The <literal>@</literal> sign for the pn capability does not 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 is 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 things like: &prompt.root; 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: &prompt.root; 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 do not have to use 1200 bps, though. I access a number of hosts through a terminal server. Rather than waiting until you are 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 is 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 have pressed CTRL+A, tip's 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 is 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 <command>tip</command>? If you are 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 is no error checking, so you probably should use another protocol, like zmodem. How can I run zmodem with <command>tip</command>? To receive files, start the sending program on the remote end. Then, type ~C rz to begin receiving them locally. To send files, start the receiving program on the remote end. Then, type ~C sz files to send them to the remote system. Setting Up the Serial Console &a.yokota; and &a.wpaul;: The text is heavily based on /sys/i386/boot/biosboot/README.serial written by &a.wpaul;. Introduction The FreeBSD/i386 operating system can boot on a system with only a dumb terminal on a serial port as a console. Such a configuration should be useful for two classes of people: system administrators who wish to install FreeBSD on machines that have no keyboard or monitor attached, and developers who want to debug the kernel or device drivers. Starting from version 3.1, FreeBSD/i386 employs a three stage bootstrap. The first two stages are in the boot block code which is stored at the beginning of the FreeBSD slice on the boot disk. The boot block will then load and run the boot loader (/boot/loader) as the third stage code. (See &man.boot.8; and &man.loader.8; for more details on the boot process.) In order to set up the serial console you must configure the boot block code, the boot loader code and the kernel. In FreeBSD version 3.0, the boot loader does not exist and there are only two stages in the bootstrap; the boot blocks directly load the kernel into memory. If you are using FreeBSD 3.0, then you should disregard any reference to the boot loader in this section. You can still use the serial port as a console. FreeBSD versions 2.X are quite different from 3.X, in that the serial port driver, &man.sio.4;, must be configured in a different way. This chapter will not describe the settings for version 2.X systems. If you are using these older versions of FreeBSD, please consult /sys/i386/boot/biosboot/README.serial instead. 6 Steps to Set up the Serial Console Prepare a serial cable. You will need either a null-modem cable or a standard serial cable and a null-modem adapter. See for a discussion on serial cables. Unplug your keyboard. Most PC systems probe for the keyboard during the Power-On Self-Test (POST) and will generate an error if the keyboard is not detected. Some machines complain loudly about the lack of a keyboard and will not continue to boot until it is plugged in. If your computer complains about the error, but boots anyway, then you do not have to do anything special. (Some machines with Phoenix BIOS installed merely say Keyboard failed and continue to boot normally.) If your computer refuses to boot without a keyboard attached then you will have to configure the BIOS so that it ignores this error (if it can). Consult your motherboard's manual for details on how to do this. Setting the keyboard to Not installed in the BIOS setup does not mean that you will not be able to use your keyboard. All this does is tell the BIOS not to probe for a keyboard at power-on so that it will not complain if the keyboard is not plugged in. You can leave the keyboard plugged in even with this flag set to Not installed and the keyboard will still work. If your system has a PS/2 mouse, chances are very good that you may have to unplug your mouse as well as your keyboard. This is because PS/2 mice share some hardware with the keyboard, and leaving the mouse plugged in can fool the keyboard probe into thinking the keyboard is still there. It is said that a Gateway 2000 Pentium 90Mhz system with an AMI BIOS that behaves this way. In general this is not a problem since the mouse is not much good without the keyboard anyway. Plug a dumb terminal into COM1: (sio0). If you do not have a dumb terminal, you can use an old PC/XT with a modem program, or the serial port on another UNIX box. If you do not have a COM1: (sio0), get one. At this time, there is no way to select a port other than COM1: for the boot blocks without recompiling the boot blocks. If you are already using COM1: for another device, you will have to temporarily remove that device and install a new boot block and kernel once you get FreeBSD up and running. (It is assumed that COM1: will be available on a file/compute/terminal server anyway; if you really need COM1: for something else (and you can not switch that something else to COM2: (sio1)), then you probably should not even be bothering with all this in the first place.) Make sure the configuration file of your kernel has appropriate flags set for COM1: (sio0). Relevant flags are: 0x10 Enables console support for this unit. The other console flags are ignored unless this is set. Currently, at most one unit can have console support; the first one (in config file order) with this flag set is preferred. This option alone will not make the serial port the console. Set the following flag or use the option described below, together with this flag. 0x20 Forces this unit to be the console (unless there is another higher priority console), regardless of the option discussed below. This flag replaces the COMCONSOLE option in FreeBSD versions 2.X. The flag 0x20 must be used together with the flag. 0x40 Reserves this unit (in conjunction with 0x10) and makes the unit unavailable for normal access. You should not set this flag to the serial port unit which you want to use as the serial console. The only use of this flag is to designate the unit for kernel remote debugging. See for more information on remote debugging. In FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT or later the semantics of the flag 0x40 are slightly different and there is another flag to specify a serial port for remote debugging. Example: device sio0 at isa? port "IO_COM1" tty flags 0x10 irq 4 See &man.sio.4; for more details. If the flags were not set, you need to run UserConfig (on a different console) or recompile the kernel. Create boot.config in the root directory of the a partition on the boot drive. This file will instruct the boot block code how you would like to boot the system. In order to activate the serial console, you need one or more of the following options—if you want multiple options, include them all on the same line: Toggles internal and serial consoles. You can use this to switch console devices. For instance, if you boot from the internal (video) console, you can use to direct the boot loader and the kernel to use the serial port as its console device. Alternatively, if you boot from the serial port, you can use the to tell the boot loader and the kernel to use the video display as the console instead. Toggles single and dual console configurations. In the single configuration the console will be either the internal console (video display) or the serial port, depending on the state of the option above. In the dual console configuration, both the video display and the serial port will become the console at the same time, regardless of the state of the option. However, that the dual console configuration takes effect only during the boot block is running. Once the boot loader gets control, the console specified by the option becomes the only console. Makes the boot block probe the keyboard. If no keyboard is found, the and options are automatically set. Due to space constraints in the current version of the boot blocks, the option is capable of detecting extended keyboards only. Keyboards with less than 101 keys (and without F11 and F12 keys) may not be detected. Keyboards on some laptop computers may not be properly found because of this limitation. If this is to be the case with your system, you have to abandon using the option. Unfortunately there is no workaround for this problem. Use either the option to select the console automatically, or the option to activate the serial console. You may include other options described in &man.boot.8; as well. The options, except for , will be passed to the boot loader (/boot/loader). The boot loader will determine which of the internal video or the serial port should become the console by examining the state of the option alone. This means that if you specify the option but not the option in /boot.config, you can use the serial port as the console only during the boot block; the boot loader will use the internal video display as the console. Boot the machine. When you start your FreeBSD box, the boot blocks will echo the contents of /boot.config to the console. For example; /boot.config: -P Keyboard: no The second line appears only if you put in /boot.config and indicates presence/absence of the keyboard. These messages go to either serial or internal console, or both, depending on the option in /boot.config. Options Message goes to none internal console serial console serial and internal consoles serial and internal consoles , keyboard present internal console , keyboard absent serial console After the above messages, there will be a small pause before the boot blocks continue loading the boot loader and before any further messages printed to the console. Under normal circumstances, you do not need to interrupt the boot blocks, but you may want to do so in order to make sure things are set up correctly. Hit any key, other than Enter/Return, at the console to interrupt the boot process. The boot blocks will then prompt you for further action. You should now see something like: >> FreeBSD/i386 BOOT Default: 0:wd(0,a)/boot/loader boot: Verify the above message appears on either the serial or internal console or both, according to the options you put in /boot.config. If the message appears in the correct console, hit Enter/Return to continue the boot process. If you want the serial console but you do not see the prompt on the serial terminal, something is wrong with your settings. In the meantime, you enter and hit Enter/Return (if possible) to tell the boot block (and then the boot loader and the kernel) to choose the serial port for the console. Once the system is up, go back and check what went wrong. After the boot loader is loaded and you are in the third stage of the boot process you can still switch between the internal console and the serial console by setting appropriate environment variables in the boot loader. See . Summary Here is the summary of various settings discussed in this section and the console eventually selected. Case 1: You set the flags to 0x10 for sio0 device sio0 at isa? port "IO_COM1" tty flags 0x10 irq 4 Options in /boot.config Console during boot blocks Console during boot loader Console in kernel nothing internal internal internal serial serial serial serial and internal internal internal serial and internal serial serial , keyboard present internal internal internal , keyboard absent serial and internal serial serial Case 2: You set the flags to 0x30 for sio0 device sio0 at isa? port "IO_COM1" tty flags 0x30 irq 4 Options in /boot.config Console during boot blocks Console during boot loader Console in kernel nothing internal internal serial serial serial serial serial and internal internal serial serial and internal serial serial , keyboard present internal internal serial , keyboard absent serial and internal serial serial Tips for the Serial Console Setting A Faster Serial Port Speed By default the serial port settings are set to 9600 baud, 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop bit. If you wish to change the speed, you need to recompile at least the boot blocks. Add the following line to /etc/make.conf and compile new boot blocks: BOOT_COMCONSOLE_SPEED=19200 If the serial console is configured in some other way than by booting with , or if the serial console used by the kernel is different from the one used by the boot blocks, then you must also add the following option to the kernel configuration file and compile a new kernel: options CONSPEED=19200 Using Serial Port Other Than <devicename>sio0</devicename> For The Console Using a port other than sio0 as the console requires some recompiling. If you want to use another serial port for whatever reasons, recompile the boot blocks, the boot loader and the kernel as follows. Get the kernel source. Edit /etc/make.conf and set BOOT_COMCONSOLE_PORT to the address of the port you want to use (0x3F8, 0x2F8, 0x3E8 or 0x2E8). Only sio0 through sio3 (COM1: through COM4:) can be used; multiport serial cards will not work. No interrupt setting is needed. Create a custom kernel configuration file and add appropriate flags for the serial port you want to use. For example, if you want to make sio1 (COM2:) the console: device sio1 at isa? port "IO_COM2" tty flags 0x10 irq 3 or device sio1 at isa? port "IO_COM2" tty flags 0x30 irq 3 The console flags for the other serial ports should not be set. Recompile and install the boot blocks: &prompt.root; cd /sys/boot/i386/boot2 &prompt.root; make &prompt.root; make install Recompile and install the boot loader: &prompt.root; cd /sys/boot/i386/loader &prompt.root; make &prompt.root; make install Rebuild and install the kernel. Write the boot blocks to the boot disk with &man.disklabel.8; and boot from the new kernel. Entering the DDB Debugger from the Serial Line If you wish to drop into the kernel debugger from the serial console (useful for remote diagnostics, but also dangerous if you generate a spurious BREAK on the serial port!) then you should compile your kernel with the following options: options BREAK_TO_DEBUGGER options DDB Getting a Login Prompt on the Serial Console While this is not required, you may wish to get a login prompt over the serial line, now that you can see boot messages and can enter the kernel debugging session through the serial console. Here is how to do it. Open the file /etc/ttys with an editor and locate the lines: ttyd0 "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" unknown off secure ttyd1 "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" unknown off secure ttyd2 "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" unknown off secure ttyd3 "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" unknown off secure ttyd0 through ttyd3 corresponds to COM1 through COM4. Change off to on for the desired port. If you have changed the speed of the serial port, you need to change std.9600 to match the current setting, e.g. std.19200. You may also want to change the terminal type from unknown to the actual type of your serial terminal. After editing the file, you must kill -HUP 1 to make this change take effect. Changing Console from the Boot Loader Previous sections described how to set up the serial console by tweaking the boot block. This section shows that you can specify the console by entering some commands and environment variables in the boot loader. As the boot loader is invoked as the third stage of the boot process, after the boot block, the settings in the boot loader will override the settings in the boot block. Setting Up the Serial Console You can easily specify the boot loader and the kernel to use the serial console by writing just one line in /boot/loader.rc: set console=comconsole This will take effect regardless of the settings in the boot block discussed in the previous section. You had better put the above line as the first line of /boot/loader.rc so as to see boot messages on the serial console as early as possible. Likewise, you can specify the internal console as: set console=vidconsole If you do not set the boot loader environment variable console, the boot loader, and subsequently the kernel, will use whichever console indicated by the option in the boot block. In versions 3.2 or later, you may specify the console in /boot/loader.conf.local or /boot/loader.conf, rather than in /boot/loader.rc. In this method your /boot/loader.rc should look like: include /boot/loader.4th start Then, create /boot/loader.conf.local and put the following line there. console=comconsole or console=vidconsole See &man.loader.conf.5; for more information. At the moment, the boot loader has no option equivalent to the option in the boot block, and there is no provision to automatically select the internal console and the serial console based on the presence of the keyboard. Using Serial Port Other than <devicename>sio0</devicename> for the Console You need to recompile the boot loader to use a serial port other than sio0 for the serial console. Follow the procedure described in . Caveats The idea here is to allow people to set up dedicated servers that require no graphics hardware or attached keyboards. Unfortunately, while (most?) every system will let you boot without a keyboard, there are quite a few that will not let you boot without a graphics adapter. Machines with AMI BIOSes can be configured to boot with no graphics adapter installed simply by changing the `graphics adapter' setting in the CMOS configuration to `Not installed.' However, many machines do not support this option and will refuse to boot if you have no display hardware in the system. With these machines, you'll have to leave some kind of graphics card plugged in, (even if it's just a junky mono board) although you will not have to attach a monitor into it. You might also try installing an AMI BIOS.