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Frequently Asked Questions for &os;
&rel2.relx; and &rel.relx;The &os; Documentation Project199519961997199819992000200120022003200420052006200720082009201020112012201320142015The &os; Documentation Project
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$FreeBSD$This is the Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQ) for &os; versions
&rel2.relx; and &rel.relx;. Every effort has been made to
make this FAQ as informative as possible;
if you have any suggestions as to how it may be improved, send
them to the &a.doc;.The latest version of this document is always available
from the &os;
website. It may also be downloaded as one large
HTML file with HTTP or as
a variety of other formats from the &os; FTP
server.IntroductionWhat is &os;?&os; is a modern operating system for desktops,
laptops, servers, and embedded systems with support for a
large number of platforms.It is based on U.C. Berkeley's
4.4BSD-Lite release, with some
4.4BSD-Lite2 enhancements. It is also
based indirectly on William Jolitz's port of U.C.
Berkeley's Net/2 to the &i386;, known as
386BSD, though very little of the 386BSD
code remains.&os; is used by companies, Internet Service Providers,
researchers, computer professionals, students and home
users all over the world in their work, education and
recreation.For more detailed information on &os;, refer to the
&os;
Handbook.What is the goal of the &os; Project?The goal of the &os; Project is to provide a stable
and fast general purpose operating system that may be used
for any purpose without strings attached.Does the &os; license have any restrictions?Yes. Those restrictions do not control how the code
is used, but how to treat the &os; Project itself.
The license itself is available at
license
and can be summarized like this:Do not claim that you wrote this.Do not sue us if it breaks.Do not remove or modify the license.Many of us have a significant investment in the
project and would certainly not mind a little financial
compensation now and then, but we definitely do not insist
on it. We believe that our first and foremost
mission is to provide code to any and all
comers, and for whatever purpose, so that the code gets
the widest possible use and provides the widest possible
benefit. This, we believe, is one of the most fundamental
goals of Free Software and one that we enthusiastically
support.Code in our source tree which falls under the GNU
General Public License (GPL) or GNU
Library General Public License (LGPL) comes with
slightly more strings attached, though at least on the
side of enforced access rather than the usual opposite.
Due to the additional complexities that can evolve in the
commercial use of GPL software, we do, however, endeavor
to replace such software with submissions under the more
relaxed &os;
license whenever possible.Can &os; replace my current operating system?For most people, yes. But this question is not quite
that cut-and-dried.Most people do not actually use an operating system.
They use applications. The applications are what really
use the operating system. &os; is designed to provide a
robust and full-featured environment for applications. It
supports a wide variety of web browsers, office suites,
email readers, graphics programs, programming
environments, network servers, and much more.
Most of these applications can be
managed through the Ports
Collection.If an application is only available on one operating
system, that operating system cannot just be replaced.
Chances are, there is a very similar application on &os;,
however. As a solid office or Internet server or a
reliable workstation, &os; will almost certainly do
everything you need. Many computer users across the
world, including both novices and experienced &unix;
administrators, use &os; as their only desktop operating
system.Users migrating to &os; from another &unix;-like
environment will find &os; to be similar.
&windows; and &macos; users may be interested in instead
using PC-BSD, a
+ xlink:href="https://www.trueos.org">TrueOS, a
&os;-based desktop distribution. Non-&unix; users should
expect to invest some additional time learning the
&unix; way of doing things. This FAQ
and the &os;
Handbook are excellent places to start.Why is it called &os;?It may be used free of charge, even by commercial
users.Full source for the operating system is freely
available, and the minimum possible restrictions have
been placed upon its use, distribution and
incorporation into other work (commercial or
non-commercial).Anyone who has an improvement or bug fix is free
to submit their code and have it added to the source
tree (subject to one or two obvious
provisions).It is worth pointing out that the word
free is being used in two ways here: one
meaning at no cost and the other meaning
do whatever you like. Apart from
one or two things you cannot do with
the &os; code, for example pretending you wrote it, you
can really do whatever you like with it.What are the differences between &os; and NetBSD,
OpenBSD, and other open source BSD operating
systems?James Howard wrote a good explanation of the history
and differences between the various projects, called The
BSD Family Tree which goes a fair way to
answering this question. Some of the information is out
of date, but the history portion in particular remains
accurate.Most of the BSDs share patches and code, even today.
All of the BSDs have common ancestry.The design goals of &os; are described in , above. The design goals of
the other most popular BSDs may be summarized as
follows:OpenBSD aims for operating system security above
all else. The OpenBSD team wrote &man.ssh.1; and
&man.pf.4;, which have both been ported to
&os;.NetBSD aims to be easily ported to other hardware
platforms.DragonFly BSD is a fork of &os; 4.8 that
has since developed many interesting features of its
own, including the HAMMER file system and support for
user-mode vkernels.What is the latest version of &os;?At any point in the development of &os;, there can be
multiple parallel branches. &rel.relx; releases are made
from the &rel.stable; branch, and &rel2.relx; releases are
made from the &rel2.stable; branch.Up until the release of 9.0, the &rel2.relx; series
was the one known as -STABLE.
However, as of &rel.head.relx;, the &rel2.relx; branch
will be designated for an extended support
status and receive only fixes for major problems, such as
security-related fixes.
Version &rel.current;
is the latest release from the &rel.stable; branch; it was
released in &rel.current.date;. Version &rel2.current;
is the latest release from the &rel2.stable; branch; it
was released in &rel2.current.date;.Releases are made every
few months. While many people stay more
up-to-date with the &os; sources (see the questions on
&os.current; and &os.stable;) than that, doing so
is more of a commitment, as the sources are a moving
target.More information on &os; releases can be found on the
Release
Engineering page and in &man.release.7;.What is &os;-CURRENT?&os.current;
is the development version of the operating system, which
will in due course become the new &os.stable; branch. As
such, it is really only of interest to developers working
on the system and die-hard hobbyists. See the relevant
section in the Handbook
for details on running
-CURRENT.Users not familiar with &os; should not use
&os.current;. This branch sometimes evolves quite quickly
and due to mistake can be un-buildable at times. People
that use &os.current; are expected to be able to analyze,
debug, and report problems.&os; snapshot
releases are made based on the current state of the
-CURRENT and
-STABLE branches. The goals behind
each snapshot release are:To test the latest version of the installation
software.To give people who would like to run
-CURRENT or
-STABLE but who do not have the
time or bandwidth to follow it on a day-to-day basis
an easy way of bootstrapping it onto their
systems.To preserve a fixed reference point for the code
in question, just in case we break something really
badly later. (Although Subversion normally prevents
anything horrible like this happening.)To ensure that all new features and fixes in need
of testing have the greatest possible number of
potential testers.No claims are made that any
-CURRENT snapshot can be considered
production quality for any purpose.
If a stable and fully tested system is needed,
stick to full releases.Snapshot releases are directly available from snapshot.Official snapshots are generated on a regular
basis for all actively developed branches.What is the &os;-STABLE
concept?Back when &os; 2.0.5 was released, &os;
development branched in two. One branch was named -STABLE,
one -CURRENT.
&os;-STABLE is the development branch
from which major releases are made. Changes go into this
branch at a slower pace and with the general assumption
that they have first been tested in &os;-CURRENT.
However, at any given time, the sources for &os;-STABLE
may or may not be suitable for general use, as it may
uncover bugs and corner cases that were not yet found in
&os;-CURRENT. Users who do not have the resources to
perform testing should instead run the most recent release
of &os;.
&os;-CURRENT, on the other hand, has
been one unbroken line since 2.0 was released, leading
towards &rel.current;-RELEASE and beyond. For more
detailed information on branches see &os;
Release Engineering: Creating the Release
Branch, the status of the branches and
the upcoming release schedule can be found on the Release
Engineering Information page.&rel.current;-STABLE is the actively developed
-STABLE branch. The latest release
on the &rel.current;-STABLE branch is
&rel.current;-RELEASE, which was released in
&rel.current.date;.The &rel.head; branch is the actively developed
-CURRENT branch toward the next
generation of &os;. See What is
&os;-CURRENT? for more information on this
branch.When are &os; releases made?The &a.re; releases a new major version of &os; about
every 18 months and a new minor version about every 8
months, on average. Release dates are announced well in
advance, so that the people working on the system know
when their projects need to be finished and tested. A
testing period precedes each release, to ensure that the
addition of new features does not compromise the stability
of the release. Many users regard this caution as one of
the best things about &os;, even though waiting for all
the latest goodies to reach -STABLE
can be a little frustrating.More information on the release engineering process
(including a schedule of upcoming releases) can be found
on the release
engineering pages on the &os; Web site.For people who need or want a little more excitement,
binary snapshots are made weekly as discussed
above.Who is responsible for &os;?The key decisions concerning the &os; project, such as
the overall direction of the project and who is allowed to
add code to the source tree, are made by a core
team of 9 people. There is a much larger team of
more than 350 committers
who are authorized to make changes directly to the &os;
source tree.However, most non-trivial changes are discussed in
advance in the mailing
lists, and there are no restrictions on who may
take part in the discussion.Where can I get &os;?Every significant release of &os; is available via
anonymous FTP from the &os;
FTP site:The latest &rel.stable; release,
&rel.current;-RELEASE can be found in the &rel.current;-RELEASE
directory.Snapshot
releases are made monthly for the -CURRENT and -STABLE branch, these being
of service purely to bleeding-edge testers and
developers.The latest &rel2.stable; release,
&rel2.current;-RELEASE can be found in the &rel2.current;-RELEASE
directory.Information about obtaining &os; on CD, DVD, and other
media can be found in the
Handbook.How do I access the Problem Report database?The Problem Report database of all user change
requests may be queried by using our web-based PR query
interface.The web-based
problem report submission interface can be used
to submit problem reports through a web browser.Before submitting a problem report, read Writing
&os; Problem Reports, an article on how to write
good problem reports.Documentation and SupportWhat good books are there about &os;?The project produces a wide range of documentation,
available online from this link: http://www.FreeBSD.org/docs.html.
In addition, the Bibliography at the
end of this FAQ, and the
one in the Handbook reference other recommended
books.Is the documentation available in other formats, such
as plain text (ASCII), or &postscript;?Yes. The documentation is available in a number of
different formats and compression schemes on the &os; FTP
site, in the /pub/FreeBSD/doc/
directory.The documentation is categorized in a number of
different ways. These include:The document's name, such as
faq, or
handbook.The document's language and encoding. These are
based on the locale names found under
/usr/share/locale on a &os;
system. The current languages and encodings
are as follows:NameMeaningen_US.ISO8859-1English (United States)bn_BD.ISO10646-1Bengali or Bangla (Bangladesh)da_DK.ISO8859-1Danish (Denmark)de_DE.ISO8859-1German (Germany)el_GR.ISO8859-7Greek (Greece)es_ES.ISO8859-1Spanish (Spain)fr_FR.ISO8859-1French (France)hu_HU.ISO8859-2Hungarian (Hungary)it_IT.ISO8859-15Italian (Italy)ja_JP.eucJPJapanese (Japan, EUC encoding)mn_MN.UTF-8Mongolian (Mongolia, UTF-8
encoding)nl_NL.ISO8859-1Dutch (Netherlands)no_NO.ISO8859-1Norwegian (Norway)pl_PL.ISO8859-2Polish (Poland)pt_BR.ISO8859-1Portuguese (Brazil)ru_RU.KOI8-RRussian (Russia, KOI8-R encoding)sr_YU.ISO8859-2Serbian (Serbia)tr_TR.ISO8859-9Turkish (Turkey)zh_CN.UTF-8Simplified Chinese (China, UTF-8
encoding)zh_TW.UTF-8Traditional Chinese (Taiwan, UTF-8
encoding)Some documents may not be available in all
languages.The document's format. We produce the
documentation in a number of different output formats.
Each format has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Some formats are better suited for online reading,
while others are meant to be aesthetically pleasing
when printed on paper. Having the documentation
available in any of these formats ensures that our
readers will be able to read the parts they are
interested in, either on their monitor, or on paper
after printing the documents. The currently available
formats are:FormatMeaninghtml-splitA collection of small, linked, HTML
files.htmlOne large HTML file containing the entire
documentpdfAdobe's Portable Document Formatps&postscript;rtfµsoft;'s Rich Text FormattxtPlain textPage numbers are not automatically updated when
loading Rich Text Format into Word. Press CtrlA,
CtrlEnd,
F9 after loading the document, to
update the page numbers.The compression and packaging scheme.Where the format is
html-split, the files are
bundled up using &man.tar.1;. The resulting
.tar file is then compressed
using the compression schemes detailed in the next
point.All the other formats generate one file. For
example,
article.pdf,
book.html, and so on.These files are then compressed using either
the zip or
bz2 compression schemes.
&man.tar.1; can be used to uncompress these
files.So the &postscript; version of the Handbook,
compressed using bzip2 will be
stored in a file called
book.ps.bz2 in the
handbook/ directory.After choosing the format and compression mechanism,
download the
compressed files, uncompress them, and then copy
the appropriate documents into place.For example, the split HTML version of the
FAQ, compressed using &man.bzip2.1;,
can be found in
doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.html-split.tar.bz2
To download and uncompress that file, type:&prompt.root; fetch ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.html-split.tar.bz2
&prompt.root; tar xvf book.html-split.tar.bz2If the file is compressed,
tar will automatically
detect the appropriate format and decompress it correctly,
resulting in a collection of
.html files. The main one is called
index.html, which will contain the
table of contents, introductory material, and links to the
other parts of the document.Where do I find info on the &os; mailing lists? What
&os; news groups are available?Refer to the Handbook
entry on mailing-lists and the Handbook
entry on newsgroups.Are there &os; IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
channels?Yes, most major IRC networks host a &os; chat
channel:Channel #FreeBSDhelp on EFNet
is a channel dedicated to helping &os; users.Channel #FreeBSD on Freenode is
a general help channel with many users at any time.
The conversations have been known to run off-topic for
a while, but priority is given to users with &os;
questions. Other users can help with
the basics, referring to the Handbook whenever
possible and providing links for learning more about
a particular topic. This is primarily an English
speaking channel, though it does have users from all
over the world. Non-native English speakers should
try to ask the question in English first and then
relocate to ##freebsd-lang as
appropriate.Channel #FreeBSD on DALNET is
available at irc.dal.net in
the US and irc.eu.dal.net in
Europe.Channel #FreeBSD on UNDERNET
is available at
us.undernet.org in the US and
eu.undernet.org in Europe.
Since it is a help channel, be prepared to read the
documents you are referred to.Channel #FreeBSD on RUSNET
is a Russian language channel dedicated to
helping &os; users. This is also good place for
non-technical discussions.Channel #bsdchat on Freenode is
a Traditional Chinese (UTF-8 encoding) language
channel dedicated to helping &os; users.
This is also good place for non-technical
discussions.The &os; wiki has a good
list of IRC channels.Each of these channels are distinct and are not
connected to each other. Since their chat styles differ,
try each to find one suited to your
chat style.Are there any web based forums to discuss &os;?The official &os; forums are located at https://forums.FreeBSD.org/.Where can I get commercial &os; training and
support?iXsystems,
Inc., parent company of the &os;
- Mall, provides commercial &os; and PC-BSD
+ Mall, provides commercial &os; and TrueOS
software support,
in addition to &os; development and tuning
solutions.BSD Certification Group, Inc. provides system
administration certifications for DragonFly BSD,
&os;, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Refer to their
site for more information.Any other organizations providing training and support
should contact the Project to be listed here.InstallationNikClaytonnik@FreeBSD.orgWhich platform should I download? I have a 64
bit capable &intel; CPU,
but I only see amd64.&arch.amd64; is the term &os; uses for 64-bit
compatible x86 architectures (also known as "x86-64" or
"x64"). Most modern computers should use &arch.amd64;.
Older hardware should use &arch.i386;. When installing
on a non-x86-compatible architecture, select the
platform which best matches the hardware.Which file do I download to get &os;?On the Getting
&os; page, select [iso] next
to the architecture that matches the hardware.Any of the following can be used:filedescriptiondisc1.isoContains enough to install &os; and
a minimal set of packages.dvd1.isoSimilar to disc1.iso
but with additional packages.memstick.imgA bootable image sufficient for writing to a
USB stick.bootonly.isoA minimal image that requires network access
during installation to completely install
&os;.&arch.pc98; users require these floppy images:
floppies/boot.flp,
floppies/kern1.flp,
floppies/kern2.flp, and
floppies/mfsroot1.flp. These images
need to be written onto floppies by tools like
&man.dd.1;.Full instructions on this procedure and a little bit
more about installation issues in general can be found in
the Handbook
entry on installing &os;.What do I do if the install image does not
boot?This can be caused by not downloading the image in
binary mode when using
FTP.Some FTP clients default their transfer mode to
ascii and attempt to change any
end-of-line characters received to match the
conventions used by the client's system. This will
almost invariably corrupt the boot image. Check the
SHA-256 checksum of the downloaded boot image: if it
is not exactly that on the
server, then the download process is suspect.When using a command line FTP client, type
binary at the FTP command prompt
after getting connected to the server and before
starting the download of the image.Where are the instructions for installing &os;?Installation instructions
can be found at Handbook
entry on installing &os;.What are the minimum requirements to run &os;?&os; requires a 486 or better PC,
64 MB or more of RAM, and at least 1.1 GB of hard
disk space.How can I make my own custom release or install
disk?Customized &os; installation media can be created by
building a custom release. Follow the instructions in the
Release
Engineering article.Can &windows; co-exist with &os;?If &windows; is installed first, then yes. &os;'s
boot manager will then manage to boot &windows; and &os;.
If &windows; is installed afterwards, it will
overwrite the boot manager. If that
happens, see the next section.Another operating system destroyed my Boot Manager.
How do I get it back?This depends upon the boot manager.
The &os; boot selection menu can be reinstalled using
&man.boot0cfg.8;. For example, to restore the boot menu
onto the disk ada0:&prompt.root; boot0cfg -B ada0The non-interactive MBR bootloader can be installed
using &man.gpart.8;:&prompt.root; gpart bootcode -b /boot/mbr ada0For more complex situations, including GPT disks, see
&man.gpart.8;.I booted from a CD, but the install program
says no CD-ROM is found. Where did it go?The usual cause of this problem is a mis-configured
CD-ROM drive. Many PCs now ship with the CD-ROM as the
slave device on the secondary IDE controller, with no
master device on that controller. This is illegal
according to the ATAPI specification, but &windows; plays
fast and loose with the specification, and the BIOS
ignores it when booting. This is why the BIOS was able to
see the CD-ROM to boot from it, but why &os; cannot see it
to complete the install.Reconfigure the system so that the CD-ROM is either
the master device on the IDE controller it is attached to,
or make sure that it is the slave on an IDE controller
that also has a master device.Do I need to install the source?In general, no. There is nothing in the base system
which requires the presence of the source to operate.
Some ports, like sysutils/lsof, will
not build unless the source is installed. In particular,
if the port builds a kernel module or directly operates on
kernel structures, the source must be installed.Do I need to build a kernel?Usually not. The supplied GENERIC
kernel contains the drivers an ordinary computer will
need. &man.freebsd-update.8;, the &os; binary upgrade
tool, cannot upgrade custom kernels, another reason to
stick with the GENERIC kernel when
possible. For computers with very limited RAM, such as
embedded systems, it may be worthwhile to build a smaller
custom kernel containing just the required drivers.Should I use DES, Blowfish, or MD5 passwords and how
do I specify which form my users receive?&os; 9 and later use
SHA512 by
default. DES
passwords are still available for backwards compatibility
with legacy operating systems which still
use the less secure password format. &os; also supports
the Blowfish and MD5 password formats. Which
password format to use for new passwords is controlled by
the passwd_format login capability in
/etc/login.conf, which takes values
of des, blf (if
these are available) or md5. See the
&man.login.conf.5; manual page for more information about
login capabilities.What are the limits for FFS file systems?For FFS file systems, the largest file system is
practically limited by the amount of memory required to
&man.fsck.8; the file system. &man.fsck.8; requires one
bit per fragment, which with the default fragment size of
4 KB equates to 32 MB of memory per TB of disk.
This does mean that on architectures which limit userland
processes to 2 GB (e.g., &i386;), the maximum
&man.fsck.8;'able filesystem is ~60 TB.If there was not a &man.fsck.8; memory limit the
maximum filesystem size would be 2 ^ 64 (blocks)
* 32 KB => 16 Exa * 32 KB => 512
ZettaBytes.The maximum size of a single FFS file is approximately
2 PB with the default block size of 32 KB. Each
32 KB block can point to 4096 blocks. With triple
indirect blocks, the calculation is 32 KB * 12 +
32 KB * 4096 + 32 KB * 4096^2 + 32 KB *
4096^3. Increasing the block size to 64 KB will
increase the max file size by a factor of 16.Why do I get an error message, readin
failed after compiling and booting a new
kernel?The world and kernel are out of sync. This
is not supported. Be sure to use make
buildworld and make
buildkernel to update the kernel.Boot the system by specifying the kernel directly at
the second stage, pressing any key when the
| shows up before loader is
started.Is there a tool to perform post-installation
configuration tasks?Yes. bsdconfig provides a
nice interface to configure &os; post-installation.Hardware CompatibilityGeneralI want to get a piece of hardware for my &os;
system. Which model/brand/type is best?This is discussed continually on the &os; mailing
lists but is to be expected since hardware changes so
quickly. Read through the Hardware Notes
for &os; &rel.current;
or &rel2.current;
and search the mailing list archives
before asking about the latest and greatest hardware.
Chances are a discussion about that type of hardware
took place just last week.Before purchasing a laptop, check the archives for
&a.mobile; and &a.questions;, or possibly a specific
mailing list for a particular hardware type.What are the limits for memory? Does &os; support
more than 4 GB of memory
(RAM)? More than 16 GB? More than
48 GB?&os; as an operating system generally supports
as much physical memory (RAM) as the platform it is
running on does. Keep in mind that different platforms
have different limits for memory; for example &i386;
without PAE supports at most
4 GB of memory (and usually less than that because
of PCI address space) and &i386; with PAE supports at
most 64 GB memory. As of &os; 10, AMD64
platforms support up to 4 TB of physical
memory.Why does &os; report less than 4 GB memory when
installed on an &i386; machine?The total address space on &i386; machines is
32-bit, meaning that at most 4 GB of memory is
addressable (can be accessed). Furthermore, some
addresses in this range are reserved by hardware for
different purposes, for example for using and
controlling PCI devices, for accessing video memory, and
so on. Therefore, the total amount of memory usable by
the operating system for its kernel and applications is
limited to significantly less than 4 GB. Usually,
3.2 GB to 3.7 GB is the maximum usable
physical memory in this configuration.To access more than 3.2 GB to 3.7 GB of
installed memory (meaning up to 4 GB but also more
than 4 GB), a special tweak called
PAE must be used. PAE stands for
Physical Address Extension and is a way for 32-bit x86
CPUs to address more than 4 GB of memory. It
remaps the memory that would otherwise be overlaid by
address reservations for hardware devices above the
4 GB range and uses it as additional physical
memory (see &man.pae.4;). Using PAE has some drawbacks;
this mode of memory access is a little bit slower than
the normal (without PAE) mode and loadable modules (see
&man.kld.4;) are not supported. This means all drivers
must be compiled into the kernel.The most common way to enable PAE is to build a new
kernel with the special ready-provided kernel
configuration file called PAE,
which is already configured to build a safe kernel.
Note that some entries in this kernel configuration file
are too conservative and some drivers marked as unready
to be used with PAE are actually usable. A rule of
thumb is that if the driver is usable on 64-bit
architectures (like AMD64), it is also usable with PAE.
When creating a custom kernel configuration
file, PAE can be enabled by adding the following
line:options PAEPAE is not much used nowadays because most new x86
hardware also supports running in 64-bit mode, known as
AMD64 or &intel; 64. It has a much larger address
space and does not need such tweaks. &os; supports
AMD64 and it is recommended that this version of &os; be
used instead of the &i386; version if 4 GB or more
memory is required.Architectures and ProcessorsDoes &os; support architectures other than the
x86?Yes. &os; divides support into multiple tiers.
Tier 1 architectures, such as i386 or amd64; are fully
supported. Tiers 2 and 3 are supported on a
best-effort basis. A full explanation of the tier
system is available in the Committer's
Guide.A complete list of supported architectures can be
found on the platforms
page.Does &os; support Symmetric Multiprocessing
(SMP)?&os; supports symmetric multi-processor (SMP) on all
non-embedded platforms (e.g, &arch.i386;, &arch.amd64;,
etc.). SMP is also supported in arm and MIPS kernels,
although some CPUs may not support this. &os;'s SMP
implementation uses fine-grained locking, and
performance scales nearly linearly with number of
CPUs.&man.smp.4; has more details.What is microcode?
How do I install &intel; CPU microcode updates?Microcode is a method of programmatically
implementing hardware level instructions. This allows
for CPU bugs to be fixed without replacing the on board
chip.Install sysutils/devcpu-data,
then add:microcode_update_enable="YES"to /etc/rc.confHard Drives, Tape Drives, and CD and DVD DrivesWhat kind of hard drives does &os; support?&os; supports EIDE, SATA, SCSI, and SAS drives (with
a compatible controller; see the next section), and all
drives using the original Western Digital
interface (MFM, RLL, ESDI, and of course IDE). A few
ESDI controllers that use proprietary interfaces may not
work: stick to WD1002/3/6/7 interfaces and
clones.Which SCSI or SAS controllers are supported?See the complete list in the Hardware Notes for &os;
&rel.current;
or &rel2.current;.What types of tape drives are supported?&os; supports all standard SCSI tape
interfaces.Does &os; support tape changers?&os; supports SCSI changers using the &man.ch.4;
device and the &man.chio.1; command. The details of how
to control the changer can be found in
&man.chio.1;.While
AMANDA and some other
products already understands changers, other
applications only know how to move a tape from one point
to another. In this case, keep track of which slot a
tape is in and which slot the tape currently in the
drive needs to go back to.Which CD-ROM and CD-RW drives are supported by
&os;?Any SCSI drive connected to a supported controller
is supported. Most ATAPI compatible IDE CD-ROMs are
supported.&os; supports any ATAPI-compatible IDE CD-R or CD-RW
drive. See &man.burncd.8; for details.&os; also supports any SCSI CD-R or CD-RW drives.
Install the sysutils/cdrtools port or
package, then use cdrecord.Keyboards and MiceIs it possible to use a mouse outside the
X Window system?The default console driver,
&man.syscons.4;, provides the ability to use a mouse
pointer in text consoles to cut & paste text. Run
the mouse daemon, &man.moused.8;, and turn on the mouse
pointer in the virtual console:&prompt.root; moused -p /dev/xxxx -t yyyy
&prompt.root; vidcontrol -m onWhere xxxx is the mouse
device name and yyyy is a
protocol type for the mouse. The mouse daemon can
automatically determine the protocol type of most mice,
except old serial mice. Specify the
auto protocol to invoke automatic
detection. If automatic detection does not work, see
the &man.moused.8; manual page for a list of supported
protocol types.For a PS/2 mouse, add
moused_enable="YES" to
/etc/rc.conf to start the mouse
daemon at boot time. Additionally, to
use the mouse daemon on all virtual terminals instead of
just the console, add allscreens_flags="-m
on" to
/etc/rc.conf.When the mouse daemon is running, access to the
mouse must be coordinated between the mouse daemon and
other programs such as X Windows. Refer to the
FAQ
Why does my mouse not work
with X? for more details on this issue.How do I cut and paste text with a mouse in the text
console?It is not possible to remove data using the mouse.
However, it is possible to copy and paste. Once the
mouse daemon is running as described in the previous question, hold down
button 1 (left button) and move the mouse to select a
region of text. Then, press button 2 (middle button) to
paste it at the text cursor. Pressing button 3 (right
button) will extend the selected region
of text.If the mouse does not have a middle button, it is
possible to emulate one or remap buttons using mouse
daemon options. See the &man.moused.8; manual page for
details.My mouse has a fancy wheel and buttons. Can I use
them in &os;?The answer is, unfortunately, It
depends. These mice with additional features
require specialized driver in most cases. Unless the
mouse device driver or the user program has specific
support for the mouse, it will act just like a standard
two, or three button mouse.For the possible usage of wheels in the X Window
environment, refer to that section.How do I use my delete key in sh
and csh?For the Bourne Shell, add
the following lines to ~/.shrc.
See &man.sh.1; and &man.editrc.5;.bind ^? ed-delete-next-char # for console
bind ^[[3~ ed-delete-next-char # for xtermFor the C Shell, add the
following lines to ~/.cshrc.
See &man.csh.1;.bindkey ^? delete-char # for console
bindkey ^[[3~ delete-char # for xtermFor more information, see this
page.Other HardwareWorkarounds for no sound from my &man.pcm.4; sound
card?Some sound cards set their output volume to 0 at
every boot. Run the following command every time the
machine boots:&prompt.root; mixer pcm 100 vol 100 cd 100Does &os; support power management on my
laptop?&os; supports the ACPI features
found in modern hardware. Further information can be
found in &man.acpi.4;.TroubleshootingWhy is &os; finding the wrong amount of memory on
&i386; hardware?The most likely reason is the difference between
physical memory addresses and virtual addresses.The convention for most PC hardware is to use the
memory area between 3.5 GB and 4 GB for a
special purpose (usually for PCI). This address space is
used to access PCI hardware. As a result real, physical
memory cannot be accessed by that address space.What happens to the memory that should appear in that
location is hardware dependent. Unfortunately,
some hardware does nothing and the ability to use that
last 500 MB of RAM is entirely lost.Luckily, most hardware remaps the memory to a higher
location so that it can still be used. However, this can
cause some confusion when watching the boot
messages.On a 32-bit version of &os;, the memory appears lost,
since it will be remapped above 4 GB, which a 32-bit
kernel is unable to access. In this case, the solution is
to build a PAE enabled kernel. See the entry on memory
limits for more information.On a 64-bit version of &os;, or when running a
PAE-enabled kernel, &os; will correctly detect and remap
the memory so it is usable. During boot, however, it may
seem as if &os; is detecting more memory than the system
really has, due to the described remapping. This is
normal and the available memory will be corrected as the
boot process completes.Why do my programs occasionally die with
Signal 11 errors?Signal 11 errors are caused when a process has
attempted to access memory which the operating system has
not granted it access to. If something like this is
happening at seemingly random intervals,
start investigating the cause.These problems can usually be attributed to
either:If the problem is occurring only in a specific
custom application, it is
probably a bug in the code.If it is a problem with part of the base &os;
system, it may also be buggy code, but more often than
not these problems are found and fixed long before us
general FAQ readers get to use
these bits of code (that is what -CURRENT is
for).It is probably
not a &os; bug if the
problem occurs compiling a program, but the activity
that the compiler is carrying out changes each
time.For example, if make
buildworld fails while trying
to compile ls.c into
ls.o and, when run again, it fails
in the same place, this is a broken build. Try
updating source and try again. If the compile fails
elsewhere, it is almost certainly due to hardware.In the first case, use a debugger such as
&man.gdb.1; to find the point in the program which is
attempting to access a bogus address and fix
it.In the second case, verify which piece of
hardware is at fault.Common causes of this include:The hard disks might be overheating: Check that
the fans are still working, as the disk and
other hardware might be overheating.The processor running is overheating: This might
be because the processor has been overclocked, or the
fan on the processor might have died. In either case,
ensure that the hardware is running at
what it is specified to run at, at least while trying
to solve this problem. If it is not, clock it back
to the default settings.)Regarding overclocking, it is far
cheaper to have a slow system than a fried system that
needs replacing! Also the community is not
sympathetic to problems on overclocked systems.Dodgy memory: if multiple memory
SIMMS/DIMMS are installed, pull them all out and try
running the machine with each SIMM or DIMM
individually to narrow the problem down to either the
problematic DIMM/SIMM or perhaps even a
combination.Over-optimistic motherboard settings: the BIOS
settings, and some motherboard jumpers, provide
options to set various timings. The defaults
are often sufficient, but sometimes setting the wait
states on RAM too low, or setting the RAM
Speed: Turbo option
will cause strange behavior. A possible idea is to
set to BIOS defaults, after noting
the current settings first.Unclean or insufficient power to the motherboard.
Remove any unused I/O boards, hard disks, or
CD-ROMs,
or disconnect the power cable from them, to see if
the power supply can manage a smaller load. Or try
another power supply, preferably one with a little
more power. For instance, if the current power supply
is rated at 250 Watts, try one rated at
300 Watts.Read the section on
Signal 11 for a further
explanation and a discussion on how memory testing
software or hardware can still pass faulty memory. There
is an extensive FAQ on this at the SIG11
problem FAQ.Finally, if none of this has helped, it is possibly
a bug in &os;.
Follow these instructions
to send a problem report.My system crashes with either Fatal trap
12: page fault in kernel mode, or
panic:, and spits out a bunch of
information. What should I do?The &os; developers are interested in these
errors, but need more information than just the error
message. Copy the full crash message. Then consult the
FAQ section on kernel
panics, build a debugging kernel, and get a
backtrace. This might sound difficult, but does not
require any programming skills. Just follow the
instructions.What is the meaning of the error maxproc
limit exceeded by uid %i, please see tuning(7) and
login.conf(5)?The &os; kernel will only allow a certain number of
processes to exist at one time. The number is based on
the kern.maxusers &man.sysctl.8;
variable. kern.maxusers also affects
various other in-kernel limits, such as network buffers.
If the machine is heavily loaded,
increase kern.maxusers. This will
increase these other system limits in addition to the
maximum number of processes.To adjust the kern.maxusers value,
see the File/Process
Limits section of the Handbook. While that
section refers to open files, the same limits apply to
processes.If the machine is lightly loaded but running a very
large number of processes, adjust the
kern.maxproc tunable by defining it in
/boot/loader.conf. The tunable will
not get adjusted until the system is rebooted. For more
information about tuning tunables, see
&man.loader.conf.5;. If these processes are being run by
a single user, adjust
kern.maxprocperuid to be one less than
the new kern.maxproc value. It must
be at least one less because one system program,
&man.init.8;, must always be running.Why do full screen applications on remote machines
misbehave?The remote machine may be setting the terminal type to
something other than xterm which is
required by the &os; console. Alternatively the kernel
may have the wrong values for the width and height of the
terminal.Check the value of the TERM
environment variable is xterm. If the
remote machine does not support that try
vt100.Run stty -a to check what the
kernel thinks the terminal dimensions are. If they are
incorrect, they can be changed by running
stty rows RR cols
CC.Alternatively, if the client machine has
x11/xterm installed, then running
resize will query the terminal for the
correct dimensions and set them.Why does it take so long to connect to my computer via
ssh or
telnet?The symptom: there is a long delay between the time
the TCP connection is established and the time when the
client software asks for a password (or, in
&man.telnet.1;'s case, when a login prompt
appears).The problem: more likely than not, the delay is caused
by the server software trying to resolve the client's IP
address into a hostname. Many servers, including the
Telnet and
SSH servers that come with
&os;, do this to store the hostname in a log file for
future reference by the administrator.The remedy: if the problem occurs whenever connecting
the client computer to any server, the problem
is with the client. If the problem only occurs
when someone connects to the server computer, the
problem is with the server.If the problem is with the client, the only remedy is
to fix the DNS so the server can resolve it. If this is
on a local network, consider it a server problem and keep
reading. If this is on the Internet,
contact your ISP.If the problem is with the server on a
local network, configure the server
to resolve address-to-hostname queries for the local
address range. See &man.hosts.5; and &man.named.8;
for more information. If this is on the
Internet, the problem may be that the local server's
resolver is not functioning correctly. To check, try to
look up another host such as
www.yahoo.com. If it does not
work, that is the problem.Following a fresh install of &os;, it is also possible
that domain and name server information is missing from
/etc/resolv.conf. This will often
cause a delay in SSH, as the
option UseDNS is set to
yes by default in
/etc/ssh/sshd_config. If this is
causing the problem, either fill in the
missing information in
/etc/resolv.conf or set
UseDNS to no in
sshd_config as a temporary
workaround.Why does file: table is full
show up repeatedly in &man.dmesg.8;?This error message indicates that the number of
available file descriptors have been exhausted on the
system. Refer to the kern.maxfiles
section of the Tuning
Kernel Limits section of the Handbook for a
discussion and solution.Why does the clock on my computer keep incorrect
time?The computer has two or more clocks, and &os; has
chosen to use the wrong one.Run &man.dmesg.8;, and check for lines that contain
Timecounter. The one with the highest
quality value that &os; chose.&prompt.root; dmesg | grep Timecounter
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
Timecounter "ACPI-fast" frequency 3579545 Hz quality 1000
Timecounter "TSC" frequency 2998570050 Hz quality 800
Timecounters tick every 1.000 msecConfirm this by checking the
kern.timecounter.hardware
&man.sysctl.3;.&prompt.root; sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware
kern.timecounter.hardware: ACPI-fastIt may be a broken ACPI timer. The simplest solution
is to disable the ACPI timer in
/boot/loader.conf:debug.acpi.disabled="timer"Or the BIOS may modify the TSC clock—perhaps to
change the speed of the processor when running from
batteries, or going into a power saving mode, but &os; is
unaware of these adjustments, and appears to gain or lose
time.In this example, the i8254 clock is
also available, and can be selected by writing its name to
the kern.timecounter.hardware
&man.sysctl.3;.&prompt.root; sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254
kern.timecounter.hardware: TSC -> i8254The computer should now start keeping more accurate
time.To have this change automatically run at boot time,
add the following line to
/etc/sysctl.conf:kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254What does the error swap_pager: indefinite
wait buffer: mean?This means that a process is trying to page memory to
disk, and the page attempt has hung trying to access the
disk for more than 20 seconds. It might be caused by bad
blocks on the disk drive, disk wiring, cables, or any
other disk I/O-related hardware. If the drive itself is
bad, disk errors will appear in
/var/log/messages and in the output
of dmesg. Otherwise, check the cables
and connections.What is a lock order
reversal?The &os; kernel uses a number of resource locks to
arbitrate contention for certain resources. When multiple
kernel threads try to obtain multiple resource locks,
there's always the potential for a deadlock, where two
threads have each obtained one of the locks and blocks
forever waiting for the other thread to release one of the
other locks. This sort of locking problem can be avoided
if all threads obtain the locks in the same order.A run-time lock diagnostic system called
&man.witness.4;, enabled in &os.current; and disabled by
default for stable branches and releases, detects the
potential for deadlocks due to locking errors, including
errors caused by obtaining multiple resource locks with a
different order from different parts of the kernel. The
&man.witness.4; framework tries to detect this problem as
it happens, and reports it by printing a message to the
system console about a lock order
reversal (often referred to also as
LOR).It is possible to get false positives, as
&man.witness.4; is conservative. A true positive report
does not mean that a system is
dead-locked; instead it should be understood as a warning
that a deadlock could have happened here.Problematic LORs tend to get
fixed quickly, so check the &a.current; before posting
to it.What does Called ... with the following
non-sleepable locks held mean?This means that a function that may sleep was called
while a mutex (or other unsleepable) lock was held.The reason this is an error is because mutexes are not
intended to be held for long periods of time; they are
supposed to only be held to maintain short periods of
synchronization. This programming contract allows device
drivers to use mutexes to synchronize with the rest of the
kernel during interrupts. Interrupts (under &os;) may not
sleep. Hence it is imperative that no subsystem in the
kernel block for an extended period while holding a
mutex.To catch such errors, assertions may be added to the
kernel that interact with the &man.witness.4; subsystem to
emit a warning or fatal error (depending on the system
configuration) when a potentially blocking call is made
while holding a mutex.In summary, such warnings are non-fatal, however with
unfortunate timing they could cause undesirable effects
ranging from a minor blip in the system's responsiveness
to a complete system lockup.For additional information about locking in &os; see
&man.locking.9;.Why does
buildworld/installworld
die with the message touch: not
found?This error does not mean that the &man.touch.1;
utility is missing. The error is instead probably due to
the dates of the files being set sometime in the future.
If the CMOS clock is set to local time, run
adjkerntz -i to adjust
the kernel clock when booting into single-user
mode.User ApplicationsWhere are all the user applications?Refer to the ports
page for info on software packages ported to
&os;. The list currently tops &os.numports; and is
growing daily, so come back to check often or subscribe to
the &a.announce; for periodic updates on new
entries.Most ports should work on all supported versions of
&os;. Those that do not are specifically marked as such.
Each time a &os; release is made, a snapshot of the ports
tree at the time of release in also included in the
ports/ directory.&os; supports compressed binary packages to easily
install and uninstall ports. Use &man.pkg.7; to control
the installation of packages.How do I download the Ports tree? Should I be using
SVN?Any of the methods listed here work:Use portsnap for most use cases. Refer to Using
the Ports Collection for instructions on how to
use this tool.Use SVN if custom patches to the
ports tree are needed. Refer to Using
Subversion for details.Does &os; support &java;?Yes. Refer to http://www.FreeBSD.org/java/
for more information.Why can I not build this port on my
&rel2.relx; -, or
&rel.relx; -STABLE machine?If the installed &os; version lags
significantly behind -CURRENT or
-STABLE, update the
Ports Collection using the instructions in Using
the Ports Collection. If the system is
up-to-date, someone might have committed a change to the
port which works for -CURRENT but
which broke the port for -STABLE.
Submit
a bug report, since the Ports Collection is supposed to
work
for both the -CURRENT and
-STABLE branches.I just tried to build INDEX using
make index, and it failed. Why?First, make sure that the Ports Collection is
up-to-date. Errors that affect building
INDEX from an up-to-date copy of the
Ports Collection are high-visibility and are thus almost
always fixed immediately.There are rare cases where INDEX
will not build due to odd cases involving
WITH_* or
WITHOUT_*
variables being set in make.conf. If
you suspect that this is the case, try to make
INDEX with those make variables
turned off before reporting it to &a.ports;.I updated the sources, now how do I update my
installed ports?&os; does not include a port upgrading tool, but it
does have some tools to make the upgrade process somewhat
easier. Additional tools are available to simplify
port handling and are described the Upgrading
Ports section in the &os; Handbook.Do I need to recompile every port each time I perform
a major version update?Yes! While a recent system will run with
software compiled under an older release,
things will randomly crash and fail to work once
other ports are installed or updated.When the system is upgraded, various shared libraries,
loadable modules, and other parts of the system will be
replaced with newer versions. Applications linked against
the older versions may fail to start or, in other cases,
fail to function properly.For more information, see the
section on upgrades in the &os; Handbook.Do I need to recompile every port each time I perform
a minor version update?In general, no. &os; developers do their utmost to
guarantee binary compatibility across all releases with
the same major version number. Any exceptions will be
documented in the Release Notes, and advice given there
should be followed.Why is /bin/sh so minimal? Why
does &os; not use bash or another
shell?Many people need to write shell scripts which will be
portable across many systems. That is why &posix;
specifies the shell and utility commands in great detail.
Most scripts are written in Bourne shell (&man.sh.1;), and
because several important programming interfaces
(&man.make.1;, &man.system.3;, &man.popen.3;, and
analogues in higher-level scripting languages like Perl
and Tcl) are specified to use the Bourne shell to
interpret commands. Because the Bourne shell is so often
and widely used, it is important for it to be quick to
start, be deterministic in its behavior, and have a small
memory footprint.The existing implementation is our best effort at
meeting as many of these requirements simultaneously as we
can. To keep /bin/sh small, we have
not provided many of the convenience features that other
shells have. That is why other more featureful shells
like bash, scsh,
&man.tcsh.1;, and zsh are available.
Compare the memory utilization of
these shells by looking at the VSZ and
RSS columns in a ps -u
listing.How do I create audio CDs from my MIDI files?To create audio CDs from MIDI files, first install
audio/timidity++ from ports then
install manually the GUS patches set by Eric A. Welsh,
available at http://alleg.sourceforge.net/digmid.html.
After TiMidity++ has been
installed properly, MIDI files may be converted to WAV
files with the following command line:&prompt.user; timidity -Ow -s 44100 -o /tmp/juke/01.wav 01.midThe WAV files can then be converted to other formats
or burned onto audio CDs, as described in the &os;
Handbook.Kernel ConfigurationI would like to customize my kernel. Is it
difficult?Not at all! Check out the kernel
config section of the Handbook.The new kernel will be
installed to the /boot/kernel
directory along with its modules, while the old kernel
and its modules will be moved to the
/boot/kernel.old directory. If
a mistake is made in the
configuration, simply boot the previous version of the
kernel.Why is my kernel so big?GENERIC kernels shipped with &os;
are compiled in debug mode.
Kernels built in debug mode contain debug data in
separate files that are used for debugging.
&os; releases prior to 11.0 store these debug files in
the same directory as the kernel itself,
/boot/kernel/.
In &os; 11.0 and later the debug files are stored in
/usr/lib/debug/boot/kernel/.
Note that there will be little or no performance loss from
running a debug kernel, and it is useful to keep one
around in case of a system panic.When running low on disk space, there
are different options to reduce the size of
/boot/kernel/ and
/usr/lib/debug/.To not install the symbol files,
make sure the following line exists in
/etc/src.conf:WITHOUT_KERNEL_SYMBOLS=yesFor more information see &man.src.conf.5;.If you want to avoid building debug files altogether,
make sure that both of the following are true:This line does not exist in the kernel
configuration file:makeoptions DEBUG=-gDo not run &man.config.8; with
.Either of the above settings will cause the kernel to
be built in debug mode.To build and install only the specified modules, list
them in
/etc/make.conf:MODULES_OVERRIDE= accf_http ipfwReplace accf_httpd ipfw with a
list of needed modules. Only the listed modules will be
built. This reduces the size of the kernel
directory and decreases the amount of time needed to
build the kernel. For more information, read
/usr/share/examples/etc/make.conf.Unneeded devices can be removed from the kernel
to further reduce the size. See for more information.To put any of these options into effect, follow the
instructions to build
and install the new kernel.For reference, the &os; 11 &arch.amd64; kernel
(/boot/kernel/kernel) is
approximately 25 MB.Why does every kernel I try to build fail to compile,
even GENERIC?There are a number of possible causes for this
problem:The source
tree is different from the one used to build the
currently running system. When attempting an upgrade,
read /usr/src/UPDATING, paying
particular attention to the COMMON
ITEMS section at the end.The make
buildkernel command did not complete
successfully. The make
buildkernel target relies on files
generated by the make buildworld
target to complete its job correctly.Even when building &os;-STABLE, it is possible
that the source tree was fetched at a time when it was
either being modified or it was broken.
Only releases are guaranteed to be
buildable, although &os;-STABLE builds fine the
majority of the time. Try re-fetching the source tree
and see if the problem goes away. Try using a
different mirror in case the previous one is having
problems.Which scheduler is in use on a
running system?The name of the scheduler currently being used is
directly available as the value of the
kern.sched.name sysctl:&prompt.user; sysctl kern.sched.name
kern.sched.name: ULEWhat is kern.sched.quantum?kern.sched.quantum is the maximum
number of ticks a process can run without being preempted
in the 4BSD scheduler.Disks, File Systems, and Boot LoadersHow can I add my new hard disk to my &os;
system?See the Adding
Disks section in the &os; Handbook.How do I move my system over to my huge new
disk?The best way is to reinstall the operating system on
the new disk, then move the user data over. This is
highly recommended when tracking
-STABLE for more than one release or
when updating a release instead of installing a new one.
Install booteasy on both disks with &man.boot0cfg.8; and
dual boot until you are happy with the new configuration.
Skip the next paragraph to find out how to move the data
after doing this.Alternatively, partition and label the new disk with
either &man.sade.8; or &man.gpart.8;. If the disks are
MBR-formatted, booteasy can be installed on both disks
with &man.boot0cfg.8; so that the computer can dual boot
to the old or new system after the copying is done.Once the new disk set up,
the data cannot just be copied. Instead, use tools that
understand device files and system flags, such as
&man.dump.8;. Although it is recommended
to move the data while in single-user mode, it
is not required.When the disks are formatted with
UFS, never use anything but
&man.dump.8; and &man.restore.8; to move the root file
system. These commands should also be used when moving a
single partition to another empty partition. The sequence
of steps to use dump to move the data
from one UFS partitions to a new
partition is:newfs the new partition.mount it on a temporary mount
point.cd to that directory.dump the old partition, piping
output to the new one.For example, to move
/dev/ada1s1a with
/mnt as the temporary mount point,
type:&prompt.root; newfs /dev/ada1s1a
&prompt.root; mount /dev/ada1s1a /mnt
&prompt.root; cd /mnt
&prompt.root; dump 0af - / | restore rf -Rearranging partitions with
dump takes a bit more work. To merge a
partition like /var into its parent,
create the new partition large enough for both, move the
parent partition as described above, then move the child
partition into the empty directory that the first move
created:&prompt.root; newfs /dev/ada1s1a
&prompt.root; mount /dev/ada1s1a /mnt
&prompt.root; cd /mnt
&prompt.root; dump 0af - / | restore rf -
&prompt.root; cd var
&prompt.root; dump 0af - /var | restore rf -To split a directory from its parent, say putting
/var on its own partition when it was
not before, create both partitions, then mount the child
partition on the appropriate directory in the temporary
mount point, then move the old single partition:&prompt.root; newfs /dev/ada1s1a
&prompt.root; newfs /dev/ada1s1d
&prompt.root; mount /dev/ada1s1a /mnt
&prompt.root; mkdir /mnt/var
&prompt.root; mount /dev/ada1s1d /mnt/var
&prompt.root; cd /mnt
&prompt.root; dump 0af - / | restore rf -The &man.cpio.1; and &man.pax.1; utilities are also
available for moving user data. These are known to lose
file flag information, so use them with caution.Which partitions can safely use Soft Updates? I have
heard that Soft Updates on / can
cause problems. What about Journaled Soft Updates?Short answer: Soft Updates can usually be safely used
on all partitions.Long answer: Soft Updates has two characteristics
that may be undesirable on certain partitions. First, a
Soft Updates partition has a small chance of losing data
during a system crash. The partition will not be
corrupted as the data will simply be lost. Second, Soft
Updates can cause temporary space shortages.When using Soft Updates, the kernel can take up to
thirty seconds to write changes to the physical disk.
When a large file is deleted the file still resides on
disk until the kernel actually performs the deletion.
This can cause a very simple race condition. Suppose
one large file is deleted and another large file is
immediately created. The first large file is not yet
actually removed from the physical disk, so the disk might
not have enough room for the second large file. This will
produce an error that the partition does not have enough
space, even though a large chunk of space has just been
released. A few seconds later, the file creation works as
expected.If a system should crash after the kernel accepts a
chunk of data for writing to disk, but before that data is
actually written out, data could be lost. This risk is
extremely small, but generally manageable.These issues affect all partitions using Soft Updates.
So, what does this mean for the root partition?Vital information on the root partition changes very
rarely. If the system crashed during the thirty-second
window after such a change is made, it is possible that
data could be lost. This risk is negligible for most
applications, but be aware that it exists. If
the system cannot tolerate this much risk, do not use
Soft Updates on the root file system!/ is traditionally one of the
smallest partitions. If
/tmp is on
/, there may be intermittent
space problems. Symlinking /tmp to
/var/tmp will solve this
problem.Finally, &man.dump.8; does not work in live mode (-L)
on a filesystem, with Journaled Soft Updates
(SU+J).Can I mount other foreign file systems under
&os;?&os; supports a variety of other file systems.UFSUFS CD-ROMs can be mounted directly on &os;.
Mounting disk partitions from Digital UNIX and other
systems that support UFS may be more complex,
depending on the details of the disk partitioning
for the operating system in question.ext2/ext3&os; supports ext2fs and
ext3fs partitions. See
&man.ext2fs.5; for more information.NTFSFUSE based NTFS support is available as a port
(sysutils/fusefs-ntfs). For more
information see ntfs-3g.FAT&os; includes a read-write FAT driver. For more
information, see &man.mount.msdosfs.8;.ZFS&os; includes a port of &sun;'s ZFS driver. The
current recommendation is to use it only on
&arch.amd64; platforms with sufficient memory. For
more information, see &man.zfs.8;.&os; includes the Network File System
NFS and the &os; Ports Collection
provides several FUSE applications to support many other
file systems.How do I mount a secondary DOS partition?The secondary DOS partitions are found after
all the primary partitions. For
example, if E is the
second DOS partition on the second SCSI drive, there will
be a device file for slice 5 in
/dev. To mount it:&prompt.root; mount -t msdosfs /dev/da1s5 /dos/eIs there a cryptographic file system for &os;?Yes, &man.gbde.8; and &man.geli.8;.
See the Encrypting
Disk Partitions section of the &os;
Handbook.How do I boot &os; and &linux; using
GRUB?To boot &os; using GRUB,
add the following to either
/boot/grub/menu.lst or
/boot/grub/grub.conf, depending upon
which is used by the &linux; distribution.title &os; 9.1
root (hd0,a)
kernel /boot/loaderWhere hd0,a points to the
root partition on the first disk. To specify
the slice number, use something like this
(hd0,2,a). By default, if the
slice number is omitted, GRUB
searches the first slice
which has the a partition.How do I boot &os; and &linux; using
BootEasy?Install LILO at the start of the &linux; boot
partition instead of in the Master Boot Record. You can
then boot LILO from
BootEasy.This is recommended when running &windows; and &linux;
as it makes it simpler to get &linux; booting again if
&windows; is reinstalled.How do I change the boot prompt from
??? to something more
meaningful?This cannot be accomplished with the standard boot
manager without rewriting it. There are a number of other
boot managers in the sysutils
category of the Ports Collection.How do I use a new removable drive?If the drive already has a file system on it,
use a command like this:&prompt.root; mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mntIf the drive will only be used with &os; systems,
partition it with UFS or
ZFS. This will provide long filename
support, improvement in performance, and stability. If
the drive will be used by other operating systems, a more
portable choice, such as msdosfs, is better.&prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 count=2
&prompt.root; gpart create -s GPT /dev/da0
&prompt.root; gpart add -t freebsd-ufs /dev/da0Finally, create a new file system:&prompt.root; newfs /dev/da0p1and mount it:&prompt.root; mount /dev/da0s1 /mntIt is a good idea to add a line to
/etc/fstab (see &man.fstab.5;) so you
can just type mount /mnt in the
future:/dev/da0p1 /mnt ufs rw,noauto 0 0Why do I get Incorrect super
block when mounting a CD?The type of device to mount must be specified. This
is described in the Handbook section on Using
Data CDs.Why do I get Device not
configured when mounting a CD?This generally means that there is no CD in the
drive, or the drive is not visible on the bus.
Refer to the Using
Data CDs section of the Handbook for a detailed
discussion of this issue.Why do all non-English characters in filenames show up
as ? on my CDs when mounted in &os;?The CD probably uses the Joliet
extension for storing information about files and
directories. This is discussed in the Handbook section on
Using
Data CD-ROMs.A CD burned under &os; cannot be read
under any other operating system. Why?This means a raw file was burned to the CD, rather
than creating an ISO 9660 file system. Take a look
at the Handbook section on Using
Data CDs.How can I create an image of a data CD?This is discussed in the Handbook section on Writing
Data to an ISO File System.
For more on working with CD-ROMs, see the Creating
CDs Section in the Storage chapter in the
Handbook.Why can I not mount an audio
CD?Trying to mount an audio CD will produce an error
like cd9660: /dev/acd0c: Invalid
argument. This is because
mount only works on file systems.
Audio CDs do not have file systems; they just have data.
Instead, use a program that reads audio CDs, such as the
audio/xmcd package or port.How do I mount a multi-session
CD?By default, &man.mount.8; will attempt to mount the
last data track (session) of a CD. To
load an earlier session, use the
command line argument. Refer to
&man.mount.cd9660.8; for specific examples.How do I let ordinary users mount CD-ROMs, DVDs,
USB drives, and other removable media?As root set
the sysctl variable vfs.usermount to
1.&prompt.root; sysctl vfs.usermount=1To make this persist across reboots, add the line
vfs.usermount=1 to
/etc/sysctl.conf so that it is reset
at system boot time.Users can only mount devices they have read
permissions to. To allow users to mount a device
permissions must be set in
/etc/devfs.conf.For example, to allow users to mount the first USB
drive add:# Allow all users to mount a USB drive.
own /dev/da0 root:operator
perm /dev/da0 0666All users can now mount devices they could read onto a
directory that they own:&prompt.user; mkdir ~/my-mount-point
&prompt.user; mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0 ~/my-mount-pointUnmounting the device is simple:&prompt.user; umount ~/my-mount-pointEnabling vfs.usermount, however,
has negative security implications. A better way to
access &ms-dos; formatted media is to use the
emulators/mtools package in the Ports
Collection.The device name used in the previous examples must
be changed according to the configuration.The du and df
commands show different amounts of disk space available.
What is going on?This is due to how these commands actually work.
du goes through the directory tree,
measures how large each file is, and presents the totals.
df just asks the file system how much
space it has left. They seem to be the same thing, but a
file without a directory entry will affect
df but not
du.When a program is using a file, and the file is
deleted, the file is not really removed from the file
system until the program stops using it. The file is
immediately deleted from the directory listing, however.
As an example, consider a file large enough
to affect the output of
du and df. A
file being viewed with more can be
deleted wihout causing an error.
The entry is
removed from the directory so no other program or user can
access it. However, du shows that it
is gone as it has walked the directory tree and the
file is not listed. df shows that it
is still there, as the file system knows that
more is still using that space. Once
the more session ends,
du and df will
agree.This situation is common on web servers. Many people
set up a &os; web server and forget to rotate the log
files. The access log fills up /var.
The new administrator deletes the file, but the system
still complains that the partition is full. Stopping and
restarting the web server program would free the file,
allowing the system to release the disk space. To prevent
this from happening, set up &man.newsyslog.8;.Note that Soft Updates can delay the freeing of disk
space and it can take up to 30 seconds for the
change to be visible.How can I add more swap space?This section of the Handbook
describes how to do this.Why does &os; see my disk as smaller than the
manufacturer says it is?Disk manufacturers calculate gigabytes as a billion
bytes each, whereas &os; calculates them as
1,073,741,824 bytes each. This explains why, for
example, &os;'s boot messages will report a disk that
supposedly has 80 GB as holding
76,319 MB.Also note that &os; will (by default) reserve 8% of the
disk space.How is it possible for a partition to be more than
100% full?A portion of each UFS partition (8%, by default) is
reserved for use by the operating system and the
root user.
&man.df.1; does not count that space when calculating the
Capacity column, so it can exceed 100%.
Notice that the Blocks
column is always greater than the sum of the
Used and Avail
columns, usually by a factor of 8%.For more details, look up in
&man.tunefs.8;.Why does &os; pause for a long time at boot when the
system has large amounts of ram?&os; 10.1 and earlier executes a memory test early
in the boot process.
When the system has a small amount of memory, the test
takes a few seconds. Computers with tens or hundreds of
gigabytes of memory can take several minutes to complete
the test. The memory test can be disabled by adding
hw.memtest.tests=0 to
/boot/loader.conf.For more details, see &man.loader.conf.5;.ZFSWhat is the minimum amount of RAM one should have to
run ZFS?A minimum of 4GB of RAM is required for comfortable
usage, but individual workloads can vary widely.What is the ZIL and when does it get used?The ZIL (ZFS
intent log) is a write log used to implement posix write
commitment semantics across crashes. Normally writes
are bundled up into transaction groups and written to
disk when filled (Transaction Group
Commit). However syscalls like &man.fsync.2;
require a commitment that the data is written to stable
storage before returning. The ZIL is needed for writes
that have been acknowledged as written but which are not
yet on disk as part of a transaction. The transaction
groups are timestamped. In the event of a crash the
last valid timestamp is found and missing data is merged
in from the ZIL.Do I need a SSD for ZIL?By default, ZFS stores the ZIL in the pool with all
the data. If an application has a heavy write load,
storing the ZIL in a separate device that has very fast
synchronous, sequential write performance can improve
overall system. For other workloads, a SSD is unlikely
to make much of an improvement.What is the L2ARC?The L2ARC is a read cache stored
on a fast device such as an SSD.
This cache is not persistent across reboots. Note that
RAM is used as the first layer of cache and the L2ARC is
only needed if there is insufficient RAM.L2ARC needs space in the ARC to index it. So,
perversely, a working set that fits perfectly in the
ARC will not fit perfectly any more if a L2ARC is used
because part of the ARC is holding the L2ARC index,
pushing part of the working set into the L2ARC which is
slower than RAM.Is enabling deduplication advisable?Generally speaking, no.Deduplication takes up a significant amount of RAM
and may slow down read and write disk access times.
Unless one is storing data that is very heavily
duplicated, such as virtual machine images or user
backups, it is possible that deduplication will do more
harm than good. Another consideration is the inability
to revert deduplication status. If data is written when
deduplication is enabled, disabling dedup will not cause
those blocks which were deduplicated to be replicated
until they are next modified.Deduplication can also lead to some unexpected
situations. In particular, deleting files may become
much slower.I cannot delete or create files on my ZFS pool.
How can I fix this?This could happen because the pool is 100% full.
ZFS requires space on the disk to write transaction
metadata. To restore the pool to a usable state,
truncate the file to delete:&prompt.user; truncate -s 0 unimportant-fileFile truncation works because a new transaction is
not started, new spare blocks are created
instead.On systems with additional ZFS dataset tuning,
such as deduplication, the space may not be
immediately availableDoes ZFS support TRIM for Solid State Drives?ZFS TRIM support was added to &os; 10-CURRENT
with revision r240868. ZFS TRIM
support was added to all &os;-STABLE branches in
r252162 and
r251419, respectively.ZFS TRIM is enabled by default, and can be turned
off by adding this line to
/etc/sysctl.conf:vfs.zfs.trim_disable=1ZFS TRIM may not work with all configurations,
such as a ZFS filesystem on a GELI-backed
device.System AdministrationWhere are the system start-up configuration
files?The primary configuration file is
/etc/defaults/rc.conf which is
described in &man.rc.conf.5;. System startup scripts
such as /etc/rc and
/etc/rc.d, which are described in
&man.rc.8;, include this file. Do not edit this
file! Instead, to edit an entry in
/etc/defaults/rc.conf, copy the line
into /etc/rc.conf and change it
there.For example, if to start &man.named.8;, the
included DNS server:&prompt.root; echo 'named_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.confTo start up local services, place shell scripts in the
/usr/local/etc/rc.d directory. These
shell scripts should be set executable, the default file
mode is 555.How do I add a user easily?Use the &man.adduser.8; command, or the &man.pw.8;
command for more complicated situations.To remove the user, use the &man.rmuser.8; command or,
if necessary, &man.pw.8;.Why do I keep getting messages like root:
not found after editing
/etc/crontab?This is normally caused by editing the system crontab.
This is not the correct way to do things as the system
crontab has a different format to the per-user crontabs.
The system
crontab has an extra field, specifying which user to run
the command as. &man.cron.8; assumes this user is the
first word of the command to execute. Since no such
command exists, this error message is displayed.To delete the extra, incorrect crontab:&prompt.root; crontab -rWhy do I get the error, you are not in the
correct group to su root when I try to
su to root?This is a security feature. In order to
su to
root, or any
other account with superuser privileges, the user account
must be a member of the
wheel group.
If this feature were not there, anybody with an
account on a system who also found out root's password would be
able to gain superuser level access to the system.To allow someone to su to
root, put
them in the wheel group using
pw:&prompt.root; pw groupmod wheel -m lisaThe above example will add user lisa to the group
wheel.I made a mistake in rc.conf, or
another startup file, and now I cannot edit it because the
file system is read-only. What should I do?Restart the system using boot
-s at the loader prompt to enter single-user
mode. When prompted for a shell pathname, press
Enter and run mount
-urw / to re-mount the root file system in
read/write mode. You may also need to run mount
-a -t ufs to mount the file system where your
favorite editor is defined. If that editor is on
a network file system, either configure
the network manually before mounting the network file
systems, or use an editor which resides on a local file
system, such as &man.ed.1;.In order to use a full screen editor such as
&man.vi.1; or &man.emacs.1;, run
export TERM=xterm on &os; 9.0+
so that these editors can load the correct data from the
&man.termcap.5; database.After performing these steps, edit
/etc/rc.conf to
fix the syntax error. The error message displayed
immediately after the kernel boot messages should indicate
the number of the line in the file which is at
fault.Why am I having trouble setting up my printer?See the Handbook
entry on printing for troubleshooting
tips.How can I correct the keyboard mappings for my
system?Refer to the Handbook section on using
localization, specifically the section on console
setup.Why can I not get user quotas to work properly?It is possible that the kernel is not configured
to use quotas. In this case,
add the following line to the kernel configuration
file and recompile the kernel:options QUOTARefer to the Handbook
entry on quotas for full details.Do not turn on quotas on
/.Put the quota file on the file system that the
quotas are to be enforced on:File SystemQuota file/usr/usr/admin/quotas/home/home/admin/quotas……Does &os; support System V IPC primitives?Yes, &os; supports System V-style IPC, including
shared memory, messages and semaphores, in the
GENERIC kernel. With a custom
kernel, support may be loaded with the
sysvshm.ko,
sysvsem.ko and
sysvmsg.ko kernel modules, or
enabled in the custom kernel by adding the following lines
to the kernel configuration file:options SYSVSHM # enable shared memory
options SYSVSEM # enable for semaphores
options SYSVMSG # enable for messagingRecompile and install the kernel.What other mail-server software can I use instead of
Sendmail?The Sendmail
server is the default mail-server software for &os;, but
it can be replaced with another
MTA installed from the Ports Collection. Available ports
include mail/exim,
mail/postfix, and
mail/qmail. Search the mailing lists
for discussions regarding the advantages and disadvantages
of the available MTAs.I have forgotten the root password! What do I
do?Do not panic! Restart the system, type
boot -s at the
Boot: prompt to enter single-user mode.
At the question about the shell to use, hit
Enter which will display a
&prompt.root; prompt. Enter mount
-urw / to remount the root file system
read/write, then run mount -a to
remount all the file systems. Run passwd
root to change the root password then run
&man.exit.1; to continue booting.If you are still prompted to give the root password when
entering the single-user mode, it means that the console
has been marked as insecure in
/etc/ttys. In this case, it will
be required to boot from a &os; installation disk,
choose the Live CD or
Shell at the beginning of the
install process and issue the commands mentioned above.
Mount the specific partition in this
case and then chroot to it. For example, replace
mount -urw / with
mount /dev/ada0p1 /mnt; chroot /mnt
for a system on
ada0p1.If the root partition cannot be mounted from
single-user mode, it is possible that the partitions are
encrypted and it is impossible to mount them without the
access keys. For more information see the section
about encrypted disks in the &os; Handbook.How do I keep ControlAltDelete
from rebooting the system?When using &man.syscons.4;, the default console
driver, build and install a new kernel with this line in
the configuration file:options SC_DISABLE_REBOOTThis can also be done by setting the following
&man.sysctl.8; which does not require a reboot or kernel
recompile:&prompt.root; sysctl hw.syscons.kbd_reboot=0The above two methods are exclusive: The
&man.sysctl.8; does not exist if the kernel is compiled
with SC_DISABLE_REBOOT.How do I reformat DOS text files to &unix;
ones?Use this &man.perl.1; command:&prompt.user; perl -i.bak -npe 's/\r\n/\n/g' file(s)where file(s) is one or
more files to process. The modification is done in-place,
with the original file stored with a
.bak extension.Alternatively, use &man.tr.1;:&prompt.user; tr -d '\r' < dos-text-file > unix-filedos-text-file is the file
containing DOS text while
unix-file will contain the
converted output. This can be quite a bit faster than
using perl.Yet another way to reformat DOS text files is to use
the converters/dosunix port from the
Ports Collection. Consult its documentation about the
details.How do I re-read /etc/rc.conf and
re-start /etc/rc without a
reboot?Go into single-user mode and then back to multi-user
mode:&prompt.root; shutdown now
&prompt.root; return
&prompt.root; exitI tried to update my system to the latest
-STABLE, but got
-BETAx,
-RC or
-PRERELEASE! What is going
on?Short answer: it is just a name.
RC stands for Release
Candidate. It signifies that a release is
imminent. In &os;, -PRERELEASE is
typically synonymous with the code freeze before a
release. (For some releases, the
-BETA label was used in the same way
as -PRERELEASE.)Long answer: &os; derives its releases from one of two
places. Major, dot-zero, releases, such as 9.0-RELEASE
are branched from the head of the development stream,
commonly referred to as -CURRENT. Minor releases, such
as 6.3-RELEASE or 5.2-RELEASE, have been snapshots of the
active -STABLE branch.
Starting with 4.3-RELEASE, each release also now has its
own branch which can be tracked by people requiring an
extremely conservative rate of development (typically only
security advisories).When a release is about to be made, the branch from
which it will be derived from has to undergo a certain
process. Part of this process is a code freeze. When a
code freeze is initiated, the name of the branch is
changed to reflect that it is about to become a release.
For example, if the branch used to be called 6.2-STABLE,
its name will be changed to 6.3-PRERELEASE to signify the
code freeze and signify that extra pre-release testing
should be happening. Bug fixes can still be committed to
be part of the release. When the source code is in shape
for the release the name will be changed to 6.3-RC to
signify that a release is about to be made from it. Once
in the RC stage, only the most critical bugs found can be
fixed. Once the release (6.3-RELEASE in this example) and
release branch have been made, the branch will be renamed
to 6.3-STABLE.For more information on version numbers and the
various Subversion branches, refer to the Release
Engineering article.I tried to install a new kernel, and the
&man.chflags.1; failed. How do I get around this?Short answer: the security level is
greater than 0. Reboot directly to single-user mode to
install the kernel.Long answer: &os; disallows changing system flags at
security levels greater than 0. To check the current
security level:&prompt.root; sysctl kern.securelevelThe security level cannot be lowered in multi-user
mode, so boot to single-user mode to install the kernel,
or change the security level in
/etc/rc.conf then reboot. See the
&man.init.8; manual page for details on
securelevel, and see
/etc/defaults/rc.conf and the
&man.rc.conf.5; manual page for more information on
rc.conf.I cannot change the time on my system by more than one
second! How do I get around this?Short answer: the system is at a security level
greater than 1. Reboot directly to single-user mode to
change the date.Long answer: &os; disallows changing the time by more
that one second at security levels greater than 1. To
check the security level:&prompt.root; sysctl kern.securelevelThe security level cannot be lowered in multi-user
mode. Either boot to single-user mode to change the date
or change the security level in
/etc/rc.conf and reboot. See the
&man.init.8; manual page for details on
securelevel, and see
/etc/defaults/rc.conf and the
&man.rc.conf.5; manual page for more information on
rc.conf.Why is rpc.statd using 256 MB
of memory?No, there is no memory leak, and it is not using
256 MB of memory. For convenience,
rpc.statd maps an obscene amount of
memory into its address space. There is nothing terribly
wrong with this from a technical standpoint; it just
throws off things like &man.top.1; and &man.ps.1;.&man.rpc.statd.8; maps its status file (resident on
/var) into its address space; to save
worrying about remapping it later when it needs to grow,
it maps it with a generous size. This is very evident
from the source code, where one can see that the length
argument to &man.mmap.2; is 0x10000000,
or one sixteenth of the address space on an IA32, or
exactly 256 MB.Why can I not unset the schg file
flag?The system is running a securelevel greater than 0.
Lower the securelevel and try again. For
more information, see the FAQ
entry on securelevel and the &man.init.8; manual
page.What is vnlru?vnlru flushes and frees vnodes when
the system hits the kern.maxvnodes
limit. This kernel thread sits mostly idle, and only
activates when there is a huge amount of RAM and users are
accessing tens of thousands of tiny files.What do the various memory states displayed by
top mean?Active: pages recently
statistically used.Inactive: pages recently
statistically unused.Cache: (most often) pages that
have percolated from inactive to a status where they
maintain their data, but can often be immediately
reused (either with their old association, or reused
with a new association). There can be certain
immediate transitions from active
to cache state if the page is known
to be clean (unmodified), but that transition is a
matter of policy, depending upon the algorithm choice
of the VM system maintainer.Free: pages without data
content, and can be immediately used in certain
circumstances where cache pages might be ineligible.
Free pages can be reused at interrupt or process
state.Wired: pages that are fixed
into memory, usually for kernel purposes, but also
sometimes for special use in processes.Pages are most often written to disk (sort of a VM
sync) when they are in the inactive state, but active
pages can also be synced. This depends upon the CPU
tracking of the modified bit being available, and in
certain situations there can be an advantage for a block
of VM pages to be synced, whether they are active or
inactive. In most common cases, it is best to think of
the inactive queue to be a queue of relatively unused
pages that might or might not be in the process of being
written to disk. Cached pages are already synced, not
mapped, but available for immediate process use with their
old association or with a new association. Free pages are
available at interrupt level, but cached or free pages can
be used at process state for reuse. Cache pages are not
adequately locked to be available at interrupt
level.There are some other flags (e.g., busy flag or busy
count) that might modify some of the described
rules.How much free memory is available?There are a couple of kinds of free
memory. One kind is the amount of memory
immediately available without paging anything else out.
That is approximately the size of cache queue + size of
free queue (with a derating factor, depending upon system
tuning). Another kind of free memory is
the total amount of VM space. That can
be complex, but is dependent upon the amount of swap space
and memory. Other kinds of free memory
descriptions are also possible, but it is relatively
useless to define these, but rather it is important to
make sure that the paging rate is kept low, and to avoid
running out of swap space.What is /var/empty?/var/empty is a directory that
the &man.sshd.8; program uses when performing privilege
separation. The /var/empty
directory is empty, owned by root and has the
schg flag set. This directory should
not be deleted.I just changed
/etc/newsyslog.conf. How can I check
if it does what I expect?To see what &man.newsyslog.8; will do, use the
following:&prompt.user; newsyslog -nrvvMy time is wrong, how can I change the
timezone?Use &man.tzsetup.8;.The X Window System and Virtual ConsolesWhat is the X Window System?The X Window System (commonly X11)
is the most widely available windowing system capable of
running on &unix; or &unix; like systems, including
&os;. The X.Org
Foundation administers the X
protocol standards, with the current reference
implementation, version 11 release &xorg.version;, so
references are often shortened to
X11.Many implementations are available for different
architectures and operating systems. An implementation of
the server-side code is properly known as an X
server.I want to run &xorg;, how do I go about it?To install &xorg; do one of the following:Use the x11/xorg
meta-port, which builds and installs every &xorg;
component.Use x11/xorg-minimal, which builds
and installs only the necessary &xorg; components.Install &xorg; from &os; packages:&prompt.root; pkg install xorgAfter the installation of &xorg;, follow the
instructions from the X11
Configuration section of the &os;
Handbook.I tried to run X, but I get a
No devices detected. error when I
type startx. What do I do now?The system is probably running at a raised
securelevel. It is not possible to
start X at a raised securelevel because
X requires write access to &man.io.4;. For more
information, see at the &man.init.8; manual page.There are two solutions to the problem: set the
securelevel back down to zero or run
&man.xdm.1; (or an alternative display manager) at boot
time before the securelevel is
raised.See for more information
about running &man.xdm.1; at boot time.Why does my mouse not work with X?When using &man.syscons.4;, the default console
driver, &os; can be configured to support a mouse pointer
on each virtual screen. To avoid conflicting with X,
&man.syscons.4; supports a virtual device called
/dev/sysmouse. All mouse events
received from the real mouse device are written to the
&man.sysmouse.4; device via &man.moused.8;. To use the
mouse on one or more virtual consoles,
and use X, see and set up
&man.moused.8;.Then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and
make sure the following lines exist:Section "InputDevice"
Option "Protocol" "SysMouse"
Option "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
.....Starting with &xorg; version 7.4, the
InputDevice sections in
xorg.conf are ignored in favor of
autodetected devices. To restore the old behavior, add
the following line to the ServerLayout
or ServerFlags section:Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"Some people prefer to use
/dev/mouse under X. To make this
work, /dev/mouse should be linked
to /dev/sysmouse (see
&man.sysmouse.4;) by adding the following line to
/etc/devfs.conf (see
&man.devfs.conf.5;):link sysmouse mouseThis link can be created by restarting &man.devfs.5;
with the following command (as root):&prompt.root; service devfs restartMy mouse has a fancy wheel. Can I use it in X?Yes, if X is configured for a 5 button mouse. To
do this, add the lines Buttons 5
and ZAxisMapping 4 5 to the
InputDevice section of
/etc/X11/xorg.conf, as seen in this
example:Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSectionTo use the mouse in
Emacs, also add the following
lines to~/.emacs:;; wheel mouse
(global-set-key [mouse-4] 'scroll-down)
(global-set-key [mouse-5] 'scroll-up)My laptop has a Synaptics touchpad. Can I use it in
X?Yes, after configuring a few things to make
it work.In order to use the Xorg synaptics driver,
first remove moused_enable from
rc.conf.To enable synaptics, add the following line to
/boot/loader.conf:hw.psm.synaptics_support="1"Add the following to
/etc/X11/xorg.conf:Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Touchpad0"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Protocol" "psm"
Option "Device" "/dev/psm0"
EndSectionAnd be sure to add the following into the
ServerLayout section:InputDevice "Touchpad0" "SendCoreEvents"How do I use remote X displays?For security reasons, the default setting is to not
allow a machine to remotely open a window.To enable this feature, start
X with the optional
argument:&prompt.user; startx -listen_tcpWhat is a virtual console and how do I make
more?Virtual consoles provide
several simultaneous sessions on the same machine without
doing anything complicated like setting up a network or
running X.When the system starts, it will display a login prompt
on the monitor after displaying all the boot messages.
Type in your login name and password to
start working on the first virtual
console.To start another
session, perhaps to look at documentation for a program
or to read mail while waiting for an
FTP transfer to finish,
hold down Alt and press
F2. This will display the login prompt
for the second virtual
console. To go back to the
original session, press AltF1.The default &os; installation has eight virtual
consoles enabled. AltF1,
AltF2,
AltF3,
and so on will switch between these virtual
consoles.To enable more of virtual consoles, edit
/etc/ttys (see &man.ttys.5;) and add
entries for ttyv8 to
ttyvc, after the comment on
Virtual terminals:# Edit the existing entry for ttyv8 in /etc/ttys and change
# "off" to "on".
ttyv8 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm on secure
ttyv9 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm on secure
ttyva "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm on secure
ttyvb "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm on secureThe more virtual
terminals, the more resources that are used. This can be
problematic on systems with 8 MB RAM or less.
Consider changing secure to
insecure.Versions of &os; prior to 9.0 used the
cons25 terminal type, and not
xterm. Use the format of existing entries in
when adding entries to
/etc/ttys.In order to run an X server, at least one virtual
terminal must be left to off for it
to use. This means that only eleven of the Alt-function
keys can be used as virtual consoles so that one is left
for the X server.For example, to run X and eleven virtual consoles, the
setting for virtual terminal 12 should be:ttyvb "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm off secureThe easiest way to activate the
virtual consoles is to reboot.How do I access the virtual consoles from X?Use CtrlAltFn
to switch back to a virtual console. Press CtrlAltF1
to return to the first virtual console.Once at a text console, use
AltFn
to move between them.To return to the X session, switch to the
virtual console running X. If X was started from the
command line using startx,
the X session will attach to the next unused virtual
console, not the text console from which it was invoked.
For eight active virtual terminals, X will
run on the ninth, so use AltF9.How do I start XDM on
boot?There are two schools of thought on how to start
&man.xdm.1;. One school starts xdm
from /etc/ttys (see &man.ttys.5;)
using the supplied example, while the other runs
xdm from
rc.local (see &man.rc.8;) or from an
X script in
/usr/local/etc/rc.d. Both are
equally valid, and one may work in situations where the
other does not. In both cases the result is the same: X
will pop up a graphical login prompt.The &man.ttys.5; method has the advantage of
documenting which vty X will start on and passing the
responsibility of restarting the X server on logout to
&man.init.8;. The &man.rc.8; method makes it easy to
killxdm if there is
a problem starting the X server.If loaded from &man.rc.8;, xdm
should be started without any arguments.
xdm must start
after &man.getty.8; runs, or else
getty and xdm will
conflict, locking out the console. The best way around
this is to have the script sleep 10 seconds or so then
launch xdm.When starting xdm from
/etc/ttys, there still is a chance of
conflict between xdm and &man.getty.8;.
One way to avoid this is to add the vt
number in
/usr/local/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers::0 local /usr/local/bin/X vt4The above example will direct the X server to run in
/dev/ttyv3. Note the number is
offset by one. The X server counts the vty from one,
whereas the &os; kernel numbers the vty from zero.Why do I get Couldn't open
console when I run
xconsole?When X is started with
startx, the permissions on
/dev/console will
not get changed, resulting in things
like xterm -C and
xconsole not working.This is because of the way console permissions are set
by default. On a multi-user system, one does not
necessarily want just any user to be able to write on the
system console. For users who are logging directly onto a
machine with a VTY, the &man.fbtab.5; file exists to solve
such problems.In a nutshell, make sure an uncommented line of the
form is in /etc/fbtab (see
&man.fbtab.5;):/dev/ttyv0 0600 /dev/consoleIt will ensure that whomever logs in on
/dev/ttyv0 will own the
console.Why does my PS/2 mouse misbehave under X?The mouse and the mouse driver may have become out of
synchronization. In rare cases, the driver may also
erroneously report synchronization errors:psmintr: out of sync (xxxx != yyyy)If this happens, disable the synchronization check
code by setting the driver flags for the PS/2 mouse driver
to 0x100. This can be easiest achieved
by adding hint.psm.0.flags="0x100" to
/boot/loader.conf and
rebooting.How do I reverse the mouse buttons?Type
xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1". Add this
command to ~/.xinitrc or
~/.xsession to make it happen
automatically.How do I install a splash screen and where do I find
them?The detailed answer for this question can be found in
the Boot
Time Splash Screens section of the &os;
Handbook.Can I use the Windows keys on my
keyboard in X?Yes. Use &man.xmodmap.1; to
define which functions the keys should perform.Assuming all Windows keyboards are
standard, the keycodes for these three keys are the
following:115 —
Windows key, between the left-hand
Ctrl and Alt
keys116 —
Windows key, to the right of
AltGr117 —
Menu, to the left of the right-hand
CtrlTo have the left Windows key print a
comma, try this.&prompt.root; xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = comma"To have the Windows key-mappings
enabled automatically every time X is started, either put
the xmodmap commands in
~/.xinitrc or, preferably, create
a ~/.xmodmaprc and include the
xmodmap options, one per line, then add
the following line to
~/.xinitrc:xmodmap $HOME/.xmodmaprcFor example, to map the 3 keys to be
F13, F14, and
F15, respectively. This would make it
easy to map them to useful functions within applications
or the window manager.To do this, put the following in
~/.xmodmaprc.keycode 115 = F13
keycode 116 = F14
keycode 117 = F15For the x11-wm/fvwm2 desktop
manager, one could map the keys so that
F13 iconifies or de-iconifies the
window the cursor is in, F14 brings the
window the cursor is in to the front or, if it is already
at the front, pushes it to the back, and
F15 pops up the main Workplace
menu even if the cursor is not on the
desktop, which is useful when no part of
the desktop is visible.The following entries in
~/.fvwmrc implement the
aforementioned setup:Key F13 FTIWS A Iconify
Key F14 FTIWS A RaiseLower
Key F15 A A Menu Workplace NopHow can I get 3D hardware acceleration for
&opengl;?The availability of 3D acceleration depends on the
version of &xorg; and the type of video
chip. For an nVidia chip, use
the binary drivers provided for &os; by installing one of
the following ports:The latest versions of nVidia cards are supported
by the x11/nvidia-driver
port.Older drivers are available as
x11/nvidia-driver-###nVidia provides detailed information on which
card is supported by which driver on their web site: http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32667.html.For Matrox G200/G400, check the
x11-servers/mga_hal
port.For ATI Rage 128 and Radeon see
&man.ati.4x;, &man.r128.4x; and &man.radeon.4x;.NetworkingWhere can I get information on diskless
booting?Diskless booting means that the &os;
box is booted over a network, and reads the necessary
files from a server instead of its hard disk. For full
details, see the
Handbook entry on diskless booting.Can a &os; box be used as a dedicated network
router?Yes. Refer to the Handbook entry on advanced
networking, specifically the section on routing
and gateways.Can I connect my &windows; box to the Internet via
&os;?Typically, people who ask this question have two PCs
at home, one with &os; and one with some version of
&windows; the idea is to use the &os; box to connect to
the Internet and then be able to access the Internet from
the &windows; box through the &os; box. This is really
just a special case of the previous question and works
perfectly well.Dialup users must use
and set gateway_enable to
YES in
/etc/rc.conf. For more information,
refer to &man.ppp.8; or the Handbook
entry on user PPP.If the connection to the Internet is over Ethernet,
use &man.natd.8;. A tutorial can be found in the natd
section of the Handbook.Does &os; support PPP?Yes. &man.ppp.8; provides support for both incoming
and outgoing connections.For more information on how to use this, refer to
the Handbook
chapter on PPP.Does &os; support NAT or Masquerading?Yes. For instructions on how to use NAT over a PPP
connection, see the Handbook
entry on PPP. To use NAT over
some other sort of network connection, look at the
natd
section of the Handbook.How can I set up Ethernet aliases?If the alias is on the same subnet as an address
already configured on the interface, add
netmask 0xffffffff to this
command:&prompt.root; ifconfig ed0 alias 192.0.2.2 netmask 0xffffffffOtherwise, specify the network address and
netmask as usual:&prompt.root; ifconfig ed0 alias 172.16.141.5 netmask 0xffffff00More information can be found in the &os; Handbook.Why can I not NFS-mount from a &linux; box?Some versions of the &linux; NFS code only accept
mount requests from a privileged port; try to issue the
following command:&prompt.root; mount -o -P linuxbox:/blah /mntWhy does mountd keep telling me it
can't change attributes and that I
have a bad exports list on my &os;
NFS server?The most frequent problem is not understanding the
correct format of /etc/exports.
Review &man.exports.5; and the NFS
entry in the Handbook, especially the section on configuring
NFS.How do I enable IP multicast support?Install the net/mrouted package
or port and add
mrouted_enable="YES" to
/etc/rc.conf start this service at
boot time.Why do I have to use the FQDN for hosts on my
site?See the answer in the &os; Handbook.Why do I get an error, Permission
denied, for all networking
operations?If the kernel is compiled with the
IPFIREWALL option, be aware
that the default policy is to deny all packets that are
not explicitly allowed.If the firewall is unintentionally misconfigured,
restore network operability by
typing the following as root:&prompt.root; ipfw add 65534 allow all from any to anyConsider setting
firewall_type="open" in
/etc/rc.conf.For further information on configuring this
firewall, see the Handbook
chapter.Why is my ipfwfwd
rule to redirect a service to another machine not
working?Possibly because network address translation (NAT) is
needed instead of just forwarding packets. A
fwd rule only forwards packets, it does not
actually change the data inside the packet. Consider this
rule:01000 fwd 10.0.0.1 from any to foo 21When a packet with a destination address of
foo arrives at the machine with
this rule, the packet is forwarded to
10.0.0.1, but it still has the
destination address of foo.
The destination address of the packet is
not changed to
10.0.0.1. Most machines would
probably drop a packet that they receive with a
destination address that is not their own. Therefore,
using a fwd rule does not often work the
way the user expects. This behavior is a feature and not
a bug.See the FAQ about
redirecting services, the &man.natd.8; manual, or
one of the several port redirecting utilities in the Ports
Collection for a correct way to do this.How can I redirect service requests from one machine
to another?FTP and other service requests can be redirected with
the sysutils/socket package or port.
Replace the entry for the service in
/etc/inetd.conf to call
socket, as seen in this example for
ftpd:ftp stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/local/bin/socket socket ftp.example.comftpwhere ftp.example.com and
ftp are the host and port to
redirect to, respectively.Where can I get a bandwidth management tool?There are three bandwidth management tools available
for &os;. &man.dummynet.4; is integrated into &os; as
part of &man.ipfw.4;. ALTQ
has been integrated into &os; as part of &man.pf.4;.
Bandwidth Manager from Emerging
Technologies is a commercial product.Why do I get /dev/bpf0: device not
configured?The running application requires the Berkeley
Packet Filter (&man.bpf.4;), but it was removed from a
custom kernel. Add this to the kernel config file and
build a new kernel:device bpf # Berkeley Packet FilterHow do I mount a disk from a &windows; machine that is
on my network, like smbmount in &linux;?Use the SMBFS toolset. It
includes a set of kernel modifications and a set of
userland programs. The programs and information are
available as &man.mount.smbfs.8; in the base
system.What are these messages about: Limiting
icmp/open port/closed port response in my
log files?This kernel message indicates that some activity is
provoking it to send a large amount of ICMP or TCP reset
(RST) responses. ICMP responses are
often generated as a result of attempted connections to
unused UDP ports. TCP resets are generated as a result of
attempted connections to unopened TCP ports. Among
others, these are the kinds of activities which may cause
these messages:Brute-force denial of service (DoS) attacks (as
opposed to single-packet attacks which exploit a
specific vulnerability).Port scans which attempt to connect to a large
number of ports (as opposed to only trying a few
well-known ports).The first number in the message indicates how many
packets the kernel would have sent if the limit was not in
place, and the second indicates the limit. This limit
is controlled using
net.inet.icmp.icmplim. This example
sets the limit to 300
packets per second:&prompt.root; sysctl net.inet.icmp.icmplim=300To disable these messages
without disabling response
limiting, use
net.inet.icmp.icmplim_output
to disable the output:&prompt.root; sysctl net.inet.icmp.icmplim_output=0Finally, to disable response limiting completely,
set net.inet.icmp.icmplim to
0. Disabling response limiting is
discouraged for the reasons listed above.What are these arp: unknown hardware
address format error messages?This means that some device on the local Ethernet is
using a MAC address in a format that &os; does not
recognize. This is probably caused by someone
experimenting with an Ethernet card somewhere else on the
network. This is most commonly seen on cable modem
networks. It is harmless, and should not affect the
performance of the &os; system.Why do I keep seeing messages like:
192.168.0.10 is on
fxp1 but got reply from 00:15:17:67:cf:82 on
rl0, and how do I disable it?Because a packet is coming from outside the network
unexpectedly. To disable them, set
net.link.ether.inet.log_arp_wrong_iface
to 0.SecurityWhat is a sandbox?Sandbox is a security term. It can
mean two things:A process which is placed inside a set of virtual
walls that are designed to prevent someone who breaks
into the process from being able to break into the
wider system.The process is be able to run inside the walls.
Since nothing the process does in regards to executing
code is supposed to be able to breech the walls, a
detailed audit of its code is not needed in order to
be able to say certain things about its
security.The walls might be a user ID, for example.
This is the definition used in the &man.security.7;
and &man.named.8; man pages.Take the ntalk service, for
example (see &man.inetd.8;). This service used to run
as user ID root. Now it runs as
user ID tty. The tty user is a sandbox
designed to make it more difficult for someone who has
successfully hacked into the system via
ntalk from being able to hack
beyond that user ID.A process which is placed inside a simulation of
the machine. It means that someone who is able to
break into the process may believe that he can break
into the wider machine but is, in fact, only breaking
into a simulation of that machine and not modifying
any real data.The most common way to accomplish this is to build
a simulated environment in a subdirectory and then run
the processes in that directory chrooted so that
/ for that process is this
directory, not the real / of the
system).Another common use is to mount an underlying file
system read-only and then create a file system layer
on top of it that gives a process a seemingly
writeable view into that file system. The process may
believe it is able to write to those files, but only
the process sees the effects — other processes
in the system do not, necessarily.An attempt is made to make this sort of sandbox so
transparent that the user (or hacker) does not realize
that he is sitting in it.&unix; implements two core sandboxes. One is at the
process level, and one is at the userid level.Every &unix; process is completely firewalled off from
every other &unix; process. One process cannot modify the
address space of another.A &unix; process is owned by a particular userid. If
the user ID is not the root user, it serves to
firewall the process off from processes owned by other
users. The user ID is also used to firewall off
on-disk data.What is securelevel?securelevel is a security
mechanism implemented in the kernel. When the securelevel
is positive, the kernel restricts certain tasks; not even
the superuser (root) is allowed to do
them. The securelevel mechanism limits the ability
to:Unset certain file flags, such as
schg (the system immutable
flag).Write to kernel memory via
/dev/mem and
/dev/kmem.Load kernel modules.Alter firewall rules.To check the status of the securelevel on a running
system:&prompt.root; sysctl -n kern.securelevelThe output contains the current value of the
securelevel. If it is greater than 0, at
least some of the securelevel's protections are
enabled.The securelevel of a running system cannot be lowered
as this would defeat its purpose. If a task requires that
the securelevel be non-positive, change the
kern_securelevel and
kern_securelevel_enable variables in
/etc/rc.conf and reboot.For more information on securelevel and the specific
things all the levels do, consult &man.init.8;.Securelevel is not a silver bullet; it has many
known deficiencies. More often than not, it provides a
false sense of security.One of its biggest problems is that in order for it
to be at all effective, all files used in the boot
process up until the securelevel is set must be
protected. If an attacker can get the system to execute
their code prior to the securelevel being set (which
happens quite late in the boot process since some things
the system must do at start-up cannot be done at an
elevated securelevel), its protections are invalidated.
While this task of protecting all files used in the boot
process is not technically impossible, if it is
achieved, system maintenance will become a nightmare
since one would have to take the system down, at least
to single-user mode, to modify a configuration
file.This point and others are often discussed on the
mailing lists, particularly the &a.security;.
Search the archives here
for an extensive discussion. A more fine-grained
mechanism is preferred.BIND (named) is listening on some
high-numbered ports. What is going on?BIND uses a random high-numbered port for outgoing
queries. Recent versions of it choose a new, random UDP
port for each query. This may cause problems for some
network configurations, especially if a firewall blocks
incoming UDP packets on particular ports. To
get past that firewall, try the
avoid-v4-udp-ports and
avoid-v6-udp-ports options to avoid
selecting random port numbers within a blocked
range.If a port number (like 53) is specified via the
query-source or
query-source-v6 options in
/etc/namedb/named.conf, randomized
port selection will not be used. It is strongly
recommended that these options not be used to specify
fixed port numbers.Congratulations, by the way. It is good practice to
read &man.sockstat.1; output and notice odd
things!The Sendmail daemon is
listening on port 587 as well as the standard port 25!
What is going on?Recent versions of Sendmail
support a mail submission feature that runs over port 587.
This is not yet widely supported, but is growing in
popularity.What is this UID 0 toor account? Have I been
compromised?Do not worry. toor is an
alternative superuser account, where toor
is root spelled backwards. It is intended to be used with
a non-standard shell so the default shell for root does not need to
change. This is important as shells which are not part of
the base distribution, but are instead installed from
ports or packages, are installed in
/usr/local/bin which, by default,
resides on a different file system. If root's shell is located in
/usr/local/bin and the
file system
containing /usr/local/bin) is not
mounted, root will not be able to
log in to fix a problem and will have to reboot into
single-user mode in order to enter the path to a
shell.Some people use toor for day-to-day
root tasks with
a non-standard shell, leaving root, with a standard
shell, for single-user mode or emergencies. By default, a
user cannot log in using toor as it does not have a
password, so log in as root and set a password
for toor before
using it to login.PPPI cannot make &man.ppp.8; work. What am I doing
wrong?First, read &man.ppp.8; and
the PPP
section of the Handbook. To assist in
troubleshooting, enable logging with the
following command:set log Phase Chat Connect Carrier lcp ipcp ccp commandThis command may be typed at the &man.ppp.8; command
prompt or it may be entered at the start of the
default section
in /etc/ppp/ppp.conf. Make sure that
/etc/syslog.conf contains the lines
below and the file /var/log/ppp.log
exists:!ppp
*.* /var/log/ppp.logA lot about what is going can be learned from the log
file. Do not worry if it does not all make sense as
it may make sense to someone else.Why does &man.ppp.8; hang when I run it?This is usually because the hostname will not
resolve. The best way to fix this is to make sure that
/etc/hosts is read first by the
by ensuring that the hosts line is
listed first in /etc/host.conf.
Then, put an entry in /etc/hosts for
the local machine. If there is no local network, change
the localhost line:127.0.0.1 foo.example.com foo localhostOtherwise, add another entry for the host.
Consult the relevant manual pages for more details.When finished, verify that this command is successful:
ping -c1 `hostname`.Why will &man.ppp.8; not dial in
-auto mode?First, check that a default route exists. This
command should display two entries:Destination Gateway Flags Refs Use Netif Expire
default 10.0.0.2 UGSc 0 0 tun0
10.0.0.2 10.0.0.1 UH 0 0 tun0If
a default route is not listed, make sure that the
HISADDR line has been added to
/etc/ppp/ppp.conf.Another reason for the default route line being
missing is that a default
route has been added to /etc/rc.conf
and this line is missing
from /etc/ppp/ppp.conf:delete ALLIf this is the case, go back to the Final
System Configuration section of the
Handbook.What does No route to host
mean?This error is usually because the following section
is missing in
/etc/ppp/ppp.linkup:MYADDR:
delete ALL
add 0 0 HISADDRThis is only necessary for a dynamic IP address or
when the address of the default gateway is unknown. When
using interactive mode, the following can be typed in
after entering packet mode. Packet mode
is indicated by the capitalized PPP in
the prompt:delete ALL
add 0 0 HISADDRRefer to the PPP
and Dynamic IP addresses section of the Handbook
for further details.Why does my connection drop after about 3
minutes?The default PPP timeout is 3 minutes. This can be
adjusted with the following line:set timeout NNNwhere NNN is the number of
seconds of inactivity before the connection is closed. If
NNN is zero, the connection is
never closed due to a timeout. It is possible to put this
command in ppp.conf, or to type it at
the prompt in interactive mode. It is also possible to
adjust it on the fly while the line is active by
connecting to ppp's server
socket using &man.telnet.1; or &man.pppctl.8;. Refer to
the &man.ppp.8; man page for further details.Why does my connection drop under heavy load?If Link Quality Reporting (LQR) is
configured, it is possible that too many
LQR packets are lost between the &os;
system and the peer. &man.ppp.8; deduces that the line
must therefore be bad, and disconnects.
LQR is disabled by default and can be
enabled with the following line:enable lqrWhy does my connection drop after a random amount of
time?Sometimes, on a noisy phone line or even on a line
with call waiting enabled, the modem may hang up because
it incorrectly thinks that it lost carrier.There is a setting on most modems for determining how
tolerant it should be to temporary losses of carrier.
Refer to the modem manual for details.Why does my connection hang after a random amount of
time?Many people experience hung connections with no
apparent explanation. The first thing to establish is
which side of the link is hung.When using an external modem, try
using &man.ping.8; to see if the TD
light is flashing when data is transmitted. If it flashes
but the RD light does not, the
problem is with the remote end. If TD
does not flash, the problem is local. With an internal
modem, use the set
server command in
ppp.conf. When the hang occurs,
connect to &man.ppp.8; using &man.pppctl.8;. If the
network connection suddenly revives due to the activity on
the diagnostic socket, or if it will not
connect but the set socket
command succeeded at startup time, the problem is local.
If it can connect but things are still hung, enable local
logging with set log local async
and use &man.ping.8; from another window or terminal to
make use of the link. The async logging will show the
data being transmitted and received on the link. If data
is going out and not coming back, the problem is
remote.Having established whether the problem is local or
remote, there are now two possibilities:If the problem is remote, read on entry .If the problem is local, read on entry .The remote end is not responding. What can I
do?There is very little that can be done about this.
Many ISPs will refuse to help users not running a
µsoft; OS. Add enable lqr to
/etc/ppp/ppp.conf, allowing
&man.ppp.8; to detect the remote failure and hang up.
This detection is relatively slow and therefore not that
useful.First, try disabling all local compression by adding
the following to the configuration:disable pred1 deflate deflate24 protocomp acfcomp shortseq vj
deny pred1 deflate deflate24 protocomp acfcomp shortseq vjThen reconnect to ensure that this makes no
difference. If things improve or if the problem is solved
completely, determine which setting makes the difference
through trial and error. This is good information for
the ISP, although it may make
it apparent that it is not a µsoft; system.Before contacting the ISP, enable async logging
locally and wait until the connection hangs again. This
may use up quite a bit of disk space. The last data read
from the port may be of interest. It is usually ASCII
data, and may even describe the problem (Memory
fault, Core
dumped).If the ISP is helpful, they should be able to enable
logging on their end, then when the next link drop occurs,
they may be able to tell why their side is having a
problem.&man.ppp.8; has hung. What can I do?In this case, rebuild &man.ppp.8; with
debugging information, and then use &man.gdb.1; to grab a
stack trace from the ppp
process that is stuck. To rebuild the
ppp utility with debugging
information, type:&prompt.root; cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/ppp
&prompt.root; env DEBUG_FLAGS='-g' make clean
&prompt.root; env DEBUG_FLAGS='-g' make installThen, restart ppp
and wait until it hangs again. When the debug build of
ppp hangs, start
gdb on the stuck process by
typing:&prompt.root; gdb ppp `pgrep ppp`At the gdb prompt,
use the bt or where
commands to get a stack trace. Save the output of the
gdb session, and
detach from the running process by typing
quit.I keep seeing errors about magic being the same. What
does it mean?Occasionally, just after connecting, there may be
messages in the log that say Magic is
same. Sometimes, these messages are
harmless, and sometimes one side or the other exits. Most
PPP implementations cannot survive this problem, and even
if the link seems to come up, there will be repeated
configure requests and configure acknowledgments in the
log file until &man.ppp.8; eventually gives up and closes
the connection.This normally happens on server machines with slow
disks that are spawning a &man.getty.8; on the port, and
executing &man.ppp.8; from a login script or program after
login. There were reports of it happening consistently
when using slirp. The reason is that in the time taken
between &man.getty.8; exiting and &man.ppp.8; starting,
the client-side &man.ppp.8; starts sending Line Control
Protocol (LCP) packets. Because ECHO is still switched on
for the port on the server, the client &man.ppp.8; sees
these packets reflect back.One part of the LCP negotiation is to establish a
magic number for each side of the link so that
reflections can be detected. The protocol
says that when the peer tries to negotiate the same magic
number, a NAK should be sent and a new magic number should
be chosen. During the period that the server port has
ECHO turned on, the client &man.ppp.8; sends LCP packets,
sees the same magic in the reflected packet and NAKs it.
It also sees the NAK reflect (which also means &man.ppp.8;
must change its magic). This produces a potentially
enormous number of magic number changes, all of which are
happily piling into the server's tty buffer. As soon as
&man.ppp.8; starts on the server, it is flooded with magic
number changes and almost immediately decides it has tried
enough to negotiate LCP and gives up. Meanwhile, the
client, who no longer sees the reflections, becomes happy
just in time to see a hangup from the server.This can be avoided by allowing the peer to start
negotiating with the following line in
ppp.conf:set openmode passiveThis tells &man.ppp.8; to wait for the server to
initiate LCP negotiations. Some servers however may never
initiate negotiations. In this case, try
something like:set openmode active 3This tells &man.ppp.8; to be passive for 3 seconds,
and then to start sending LCP requests. If the peer
starts sending requests during this period, &man.ppp.8;
will immediately respond rather than waiting for the full
3 second period.LCP negotiations continue until the connection is
closed. What is wrong?There is currently an implementation mis-feature in
&man.ppp.8; where it does not associate LCP, CCP &
IPCP responses with their original requests. As a result,
if one PPP implementation is more than 6 seconds slower
than the other side, the other side will send two
additional LCP configuration requests. This is
fatal.Consider two implementations,
A and B.
A starts sending LCP requests
immediately after connecting and
B takes 7 seconds to start. When
B starts,
A has sent 3 LCP REQs. We are
assuming the line has ECHO switched off, otherwise we
would see magic number problems as described in the
previous section. B sends a REQ,
then an ACK to the first of A's
REQs. This results in A entering
the OPENED state and sending and ACK
(the first) back to B. In the
meantime, B sends back two more
ACKs in response to the two additional REQs sent by
A before
B started up.
B then receives the first ACK
from A and enters the
OPENED state.
A receives the second ACK from
B and goes back to the
REQ-SENT state, sending another (forth)
REQ as per the RFC. It then receives the third ACK and
enters the OPENED state. In the
meantime, B receives the forth
REQ from A, resulting in it
reverting to the ACK-SENT state and
sending another (second) REQ and (forth) ACK as per the
RFC. A gets the REQ, goes into
REQ-SENT and sends another REQ. It
immediately receives the following ACK and enters
OPENED.This goes on until one side figures out that they are
getting nowhere and gives up.The best way to avoid this is to configure one side to
be passive — that is, make one
side wait for the other to start negotiating. This can be
done with the following command:set openmode passiveCare should be taken with this option. This command
can also be used to limit the amount of time that
&man.ppp.8; waits for the peer to begin
negotiations:set stopped NAlternatively, the following command (where
N is the number of seconds to
wait before starting negotiations) can be used:set openmode active NCheck the manual page for details.Why does &man.ppp.8; lock up when I shell out to test
it?When using shell or
!, &man.ppp.8; executes a shell
or the passed arguments. The
ppp program will wait for the
command to complete before continuing. Any attempt to
use the PPP link while running the command will appear as
a frozen link. This is because &man.ppp.8; is
waiting for the command to complete.To execute commands like this, use
!bg instead. This will execute the
given command in the background, and &man.ppp.8; can
continue to service the link.Why does &man.ppp.8; over a null-modem cable never
exit?There is no way for &man.ppp.8; to automatically
determine that a direct connection has been dropped. This
is due to the lines that are used in a null-modem serial
cable. When using this sort of connection, LQR should
always be enabled with the following line:enable lqrLQR is accepted by default if negotiated by the
peer.Why does &man.ppp.8; dial for no reason in
mode?If &man.ppp.8; is dialing unexpectedly,
determine the cause, and set up dial filters to
prevent such dialing.To determine the cause, use the following line:set log +tcp/ipThis will log all traffic through the connection. The
next time the line comes up unexpectedly, the
reason will be logged with a convenient timestamp next to
it.Next, disable dialing under these circumstances.
Usually, this sort of problem arises due to DNS lookups.
To prevent DNS lookups from establishing a connection
(this will not prevent &man.ppp.8;
from passing the packets through an established
connection), use the following:set dfilter 1 deny udp src eq 53
set dfilter 2 deny udp dst eq 53
set dfilter 3 permit 0/0 0/0This is not always suitable, as it will effectively
break demand-dial capabilities. Most programs
will need a DNS lookup before doing any other network
related things.In the DNS case, try to determine what is actually
trying to resolve a host name. A lot of the time,
Sendmail is the culprit. Make
sure to configure Sendmail not
to do any DNS lookups in its configuration file. See the
section on using
email with a dialup connection in the &os;
Handbook for details. You may
also want to add the following line to
.mc:define(`confDELIVERY_MODE', `d')dnlThis will make Sendmail
queue everything until the queue is run, usually,
every 30 minutes, or until a sendmail
-q is done, perhaps from
/etc/ppp/ppp.linkup.What do these CCP errors mean?I keep seeing the following errors in my log
file:CCP: CcpSendConfigReq
CCP: Received Terminate Ack (1) state = Req-Sent (6)This is because &man.ppp.8; is trying to negotiate
Predictor1 compression, but the peer does not want to
negotiate any compression at all. The messages are
harmless, but can be silenced by disabling the
compression:disable pred1Why does &man.ppp.8; not log my connection
speed?To log all lines of the modem
conversation, enable the
following:set log +connectThis will make &man.ppp.8; log everything up until the
last requested expect string.To see the connect speed when using
PAP or CHAP,
make sure to configure &man.ppp.8; to
expect the whole CONNECT line, using something
like this:set dial "ABORT BUSY ABORT NO\\sCARRIER TIMEOUT 4 \
\"\" ATZ OK-ATZ-OK ATDT\\T TIMEOUT 60 CONNECT \\c \\n"This gets the CONNECT, sends nothing, then expects a
line-feed, forcing &man.ppp.8; to read the whole CONNECT
response.Why does &man.ppp.8; ignore the \
character in my chat script?The ppp utility parses each
line in its configuration files so that it can interpret
strings such as set phone "123 456 789"
correctly and realize that the number is actually only
one argument. To specify a
" character, escape it
using a backslash (\).When the chat interpreter parses each argument, it
re-interprets the argument to find any special escape
sequences such as \P or
\T. As a result
of this double-parsing, remember to use the
correct number of escapes.To actually send a \
character, do something
like:set dial "\"\" ATZ OK-ATZ-OK AT\\\\X OK"It will result in the following sequence:ATZ
OK
AT\X
OKOr:set phone 1234567
set dial "\"\" ATZ OK ATDT\\T"It will result in the following sequence:ATZ
OK
ATDT1234567What are FCS errors?FCS stands for Frame Check Sequence. Each PPP packet
has a checksum attached to ensure that the data being
received is the data being sent. If the FCS of an
incoming packet is incorrect, the packet is dropped and
the HDLC FCS count is increased. The HDLC error values
can be displayed using the show hdlc
command.If the link is bad or if the serial driver is dropping
packets, it will produce the occasional FCS error.
This is not usually worth worrying about although it does
slow down the compression protocols substantially.If the link freezes as soon as it connects and
produces a large number of FCS errors, make sure the modem
is not using software flow control (XON/XOFF). If the
link must use software flow control, use
set accmap 0x000a0000 to
tell &man.ppp.8; to escape the ^Q and
^S characters.Another reason for too many FCS errors may be
that the remote end has stopped talking
PPP. In this case, enable
async logging to
determine if the incoming data is actually a login or
shell prompt. If it is a shell prompt at the remote
end, it is possible to terminate &man.ppp.8; without
dropping the line by using close lcp
followed by term) to reconnect to
the shell on the remote machine.If nothing in the log file indicates why the link
was terminated, ask the remote
administrator or ISP why the session was
terminated.None of this helps — I am desperate! What can I
do?If all else fails, send the details of the error, the
configuration files, how &man.ppp.8; is being started, the
relevant parts of the log file, and the
output of netstat -rn, before and after
connecting, to the &a.questions;.Serial CommunicationsThis section answers common questions about serial
communications with &os;. PPP is covered in the Networking section.Which multi-port serial cards are supported by
&os;?There is a list of these in the Serial
Communications chapter of the Handbook.Most multi-port PCI cards that are based on 16550 or
clones are supported with no extra effort.Some unnamed clone cards have also been known to work,
especially those that claim to be AST compatible.Check &man.uart.4; and &man.sio.4; to get more
information on configuring such cards.How do I get the boot: prompt to show on the serial
console?See this
section of the Handbook.How do I tell if &os; found my serial ports or modem
cards?As the &os; kernel boots, it will probe for the serial
ports for which the kernel is configured.
Either watch the boot messages closely
or run this command after the system is up and
running:&prompt.user; dmesg | grep -E "^sio[0-9]"
sio0: <16550A-compatible COM port> port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on acpi0
sio0: type 16550A
sio1: <16550A-compatible COM port> port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on acpi0
sio1: type 16550AThis example shows two serial ports. The first is on
IRQ4, port address
0x3f8, and has a 16550A-type UART chip.
The second uses the same kind of chip but is on
IRQ3 and is at port address
0x2f8. Internal modem cards are
treated just like serial ports, except that they
always have a modem attached to the
port.The GENERIC kernel includes
support for two serial ports using the same IRQ and port
address settings in the above example. If these settings
are not right for the system, or if there are more modem
cards or serial ports than the kernel is
configured for, reconfigure using the instructions in
building a kernel
for more details.How do I access the serial ports on &os;?The third serial port, sio2,
or COM3,
is on /dev/cuad2 for dial-out
devices, and on /dev/ttyd2 for
dial-in devices. What is the difference between these two
classes of devices?When
opening /dev/ttydX in blocking mode,
a process will wait for the corresponding
cuadX device to become inactive, and
then wait for the carrier detect line to go active. When
the cuadX device is opened, it makes
sure the serial port is not already in use by the
ttydX device. If the port is
available, it steals it from the
ttydX device. Also, the
cuadX device does not care about
carrier detect. With this scheme and an auto-answer
modem, remote users can log in and local users can still
dial out with the same modem and the system will take care
of all the conflicts.How do I enable support for a multi-port serial
card?The section on kernel configuration provides
information about configuring the kernel. For a
multi-port serial card, place an &man.sio.4; line for each
serial port on the card in the &man.device.hints.5; file.
But place the IRQ specifiers on only one of the entries.
All of the ports on the card should share one IRQ. For
consistency, use the last serial port to specify the IRQ.
Also, specify the following option in the kernel
configuration file:options COM_MULTIPORTThe following /boot/device.hints
example is for an AST 4-port serial card on
IRQ 12:hint.sio.4.at="isa"
hint.sio.4.port="0x2a0"
hint.sio.4.flags="0x701"
hint.sio.5.at="isa"
hint.sio.5.port="0x2a8"
hint.sio.5.flags="0x701"
hint.sio.6.at="isa"
hint.sio.6.port="0x2b0"
hint.sio.6.flags="0x701"
hint.sio.7.at="isa"
hint.sio.7.port="0x2b8"
hint.sio.7.flags="0x701"
hint.sio.7.irq="12"The flags indicate that the master port has minor
number 7 (0x700),
and all the ports share an IRQ
(0x001).Can I set the default serial parameters for a
port?See the Serial
Communications section in the &os;
Handbook.How can I enable dialup logins on my modem?Refer to the section about Dial-in
Services in the &os; Handbook.How can I connect a dumb terminal to my &os;
box?This information is in the Terminals
section of the &os; Handbook.Why can I not run tip or
cu?The built-in &man.tip.1; and
&man.cu.1; utilities can only access the
/var/spool/lock directory via user
uucp and group
dialer.
Use the dialer group to control
who has access to the modem or remote systems by adding
user accounts to dialer.Alternatively, everyone can be configured to run
&man.tip.1; and &man.cu.1; by typing:&prompt.root; chmod 4511 /usr/bin/cu
&prompt.root; chmod 4511 /usr/bin/tipMiscellaneous Questions&os; uses a lot of swap space even when the computer
has free memory left. Why?&os; will proactively move entirely idle, unused pages
of main memory into swap in order to make more main memory
available for active use. This heavy use of swap is
balanced by using the extra free memory for
caching.Note that while &os; is proactive in this regard, it
does not arbitrarily decide to swap pages when the system
is truly idle. Thus, the system will not be all
paged out after leaving it
idle overnight.Why does top show very little free
memory even when I have very few programs running?The simple answer is that free memory is wasted
memory. Any memory that programs do not actively
allocate is used within the &os; kernel as disk cache.
The values shown by &man.top.1; labeled as
Inact, Cache, and
Buf are all cached data at different
aging levels. This cached data means the system does not
have to access a slow disk again for data it has accessed
recently, thus increasing overall performance. In
general, a low value shown for Free
memory in &man.top.1; is good, provided it is not
very low.Why will chmod not change the
permissions on symlinks?Symlinks do not have permissions, and by default,
&man.chmod.1; will follow symlinks to change the
permissions on the source file, if possible. For
the file, foo with a symlink named
bar, this command
will always succeed.&prompt.user; chmod g-w barHowever, the permissions on bar
will not have changed.When changing modes of the file hierarchies rooted in
the files instead of the files themselves, use
either or together
with to make this work. See
&man.chmod.1; and &man.symlink.7; for more
information. does a
recursive &man.chmod.1;. Be
careful about specifying directories or symlinks to
directories to &man.chmod.1;. To change the
permissions of a directory referenced by a symlink, use
&man.chmod.1; without any options and follow the symlink
with a trailing slash (/). For
example, if foo is a symlink to
directory bar, to
change the permissions of foo
(actually bar), do
something like:&prompt.user; chmod 555 foo/With the trailing slash, &man.chmod.1; will follow
the symlink, foo, to change the
permissions of the directory,
bar.Can I run DOS binaries under &os;?Yes. A DOS emulation program,
emulators/doscmd, is available in the
&os; Ports Collection.If doscmd will not suffice,
emulators/pcemu
emulates an 8088 and enough BIOS services to run many DOS
text-mode applications. It requires the X Window
System.The Ports Collection also has
emulators/dosbox. The main focus of
this application is emulating old DOS games using the
local file system for files.What do I need to do to translate a &os; document into
my native language?See the Translation
FAQ in the &os; Documentation Project
Primer.Why does my email to any address at FreeBSD.org
bounce?The FreeBSD.org mail
system implements some
Postfix checks on incoming mail
and rejects mail that is either from misconfigured relays
or otherwise appears likely to be spam. Some of the
specific requirements are: The IP address of the SMTP client must
"reverse-resolve" to a forward confirmed
hostname.The fully-qualified hostname given in the
SMTP conversation (either HELO or EHLO) must resolve
to the IP address of the client.Other advice to help mail reach its destination
include:Mail should be sent in plain text, and messages
sent to mailing lists should generally be no more than
200KB in length.Avoid excessive cross posting. Choose
one mailing list which seems most
relevant and send it there.If you still have trouble with email infrastructure at
FreeBSD.org,
send a note with the details to
postmaster@freebsd.org; Include a
date/time interval so that logs may be reviewed —
and note that we only keep one week's worth of mail logs.
(Be sure to specify the time zone or offset from
UTC.)Where can I find a free &os; account?While &os; does not provide open access to any of
their servers, others do provide open access &unix;
systems. The charge varies and limited services may be
available.Arbornet,
Inc, also known as M-Net,
has been providing open access to &unix; systems since
1983. Starting on an Altos running System III, the site
switched to BSD/OS in 1991. In June of 2000, the site
switched again to &os;. M-Net can be
accessed via telnet and
SSH and provides basic access
to the entire &os; software suite. However, network
access is limited to members and patrons who donate to the
system, which is run as a non-profit organization.
M-Net also provides an bulletin board
system and interactive chat.What is the cute little red guy's name?He does not have one, and is just called the
BSD daemon. If you insist upon using a name,
call him beastie. Note that
beastie is pronounced
BSD.More about the BSD daemon is available on his home
page.Can I use the BSD daemon image?Perhaps. The BSD daemon is copyrighted by Marshall
Kirk McKusick. Check his Statement
on the Use of the BSD Daemon Figure for detailed
usage terms.In summary, the image can be used in a tasteful
manner, for personal use, so long as appropriate credit
is given. Before using the logo commercially, contact
&a.mckusick.email; for permission. More details are
available on the BSD
Daemon's home page.Do you have any BSD daemon images I could use?Xfig and eps drawings are available under
/usr/share/examples/BSD_daemon/.I have seen an acronym or other term on the mailing
lists and I do not understand what it means. Where should
I look?Refer to the &os;
Glossary.Why should I care what color the bikeshed is?The really, really short answer is that you should
not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you
are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you
should stop others from building one just because you do
not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a
metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every
little feature just because you know enough to do so.
Some people have commented that the amount of noise
generated by a change is inversely proportional to the
complexity of the change.The longer and more complete answer is that after a
very long argument about whether &man.sleep.1; should take
fractional second arguments, &a.phk.email; posted a long
message entitled A
bike shed (any color will do) on greener
grass.... The appropriate portions of
that message are quoted below.
&a.phk.email; on &a.hackers.name;, October 2,
1999What is it about this bike shed?
Some of you have asked me.It is a long story, or rather it is an old story,
but it is quite short actually. C. Northcote Parkinson
wrote a book in the early 1960s, called
Parkinson's Law, which contains a lot of
insight into the dynamics of management.[snip a bit of commentary on the
book]In the specific example involving the bike shed, the
other vital component is an atomic power-plant, I guess
that illustrates the age of the book.Parkinson shows how you can go into the board of
directors and get approval for building a multi-million
or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you
want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in
endless discussions.Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic
plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that
people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall
back on the assumption that somebody else checked all
the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann
gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the
point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his
books.A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one
of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch
the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no
matter how reasonable you are with your proposal,
somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing
his job, that he is paying attention, that he is
here.In Denmark we call it setting your
fingerprint. It is about personal pride and
prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and
say There! I did
that. It is a strong trait in politicians, but
present in most people given the chance. Just think
about footsteps in wet cement.
The &os; FunniesHow cool is &os;?Q. Has anyone done any temperature testing while
running &os;? I know &linux; runs cooler than DOS, but
have never seen a mention of &os;. It seems to run really
hot.A. No, but we have done numerous taste tests on
blindfolded volunteers who have also had 250 micrograms of
LSD-25 administered beforehand. 35% of the volunteers
said that &os; tasted sort of orange, whereas &linux;
tasted like purple haze. Neither group mentioned any
significant variances in temperature. We eventually had
to throw the results of this survey out entirely anyway
when we found that too many volunteers were wandering out
of the room during the tests, thus skewing the results.
We think most of the volunteers are at Apple now, working
on their new scratch and sniff GUI. It is
a funny old business we are in!Seriously, &os; uses the HLT (halt)
instruction when the system is idle thus lowering its
energy consumption and therefore the heat it generates.
Also if you have ACPI (Advanced
Configuration and Power Interface) configured, then &os;
can also put the CPU into a low power mode.Who is scratching in my memory banks??Q. Is there anything odd that &os;
does when compiling the kernel which would cause the
memory to make a scratchy sound? When compiling (and for
a brief moment after recognizing the floppy drive upon
startup, as well), a strange scratchy sound emanates from
what appears to be the memory banks.A. Yes! You will see frequent references to
daemons in the BSD documentation, and what
most people do not know is that this refers to genuine,
non-corporeal entities that now possess your computer.
The scratchy sound coming from your memory is actually
high-pitched whispering exchanged among the daemons as
they best decide how to deal with various system
administration tasks.If the noise gets to you, a good fdisk
/mbr from DOS will get rid of them, but do not
be surprised if they react adversely and try to stop you.
In fact, if at any point during the exercise you hear the
satanic voice of Bill Gates coming from the built-in
speaker, take off running and do not ever look back!
Freed from the counterbalancing influence of the BSD
daemons, the twin demons of DOS and &windows; are often
able to re-assert total control over your machine to the
eternal damnation of your soul. Now that you know, given
a choice you would probably prefer to get used to the
scratchy noises, no?How many &os; hackers does it take to change a
lightbulb?One thousand, one hundred and sixty-nine:Twenty-three to complain to -CURRENT about the lights
being out;Four to claim that it is a configuration problem, and
that such matters really belong on -questions;Three to submit PRs about it, one of which is misfiled
under doc and consists only of it's
dark;One to commit an untested lightbulb which breaks
buildworld, then back it out five minutes later;Eight to flame the PR originators for not including
patches in their PRs;Five to complain about buildworld being broken;Thirty-one to answer that it works for them, and they
must have updated at a bad time;One to post a patch for a new lightbulb to
-hackers;One to complain that he had patches for this three
years ago, but when he sent them to -CURRENT they were
just ignored, and he has had bad experiences with the PR
system; besides, the proposed new lightbulb is
non-reflexive;Thirty-seven to scream that lightbulbs do not belong
in the base system, that committers have no right to do
things like this without consulting the Community, and
WHAT IS -CORE DOING ABOUT IT!?Two hundred to complain about the color of the bicycle
shed;Three to point out that the patch breaks
&man.style.9;;Seventeen to complain that the proposed new lightbulb
is under GPL;Five hundred and eighty-six to engage in a flame war
about the comparative advantages of the GPL, the BSD
license, the MIT license, the NPL, and the personal
hygiene of unnamed FSF founders;Seven to move various portions of the thread to -chat
and -advocacy;One to commit the suggested lightbulb, even though it
shines dimmer than the old one;Two to back it out with a furious flame of a commit
message, arguing that &os; is better off in the dark than
with a dim lightbulb;Forty-six to argue vociferously about the backing out
of the dim lightbulb and demanding a statement from
-core;Eleven to request a smaller lightbulb so it will fit
their Tamagotchi if we ever decide to port &os; to that
platform;Seventy-three to complain about the SNR on -hackers
and -chat and unsubscribe in protest;Thirteen to post unsubscribe,
How do I unsubscribe?, or Please
remove me from the list, followed by the usual
footer;One to commit a working lightbulb while everybody is
too busy flaming everybody else to notice;Thirty-one to point out that the new lightbulb would
shine 0.364% brighter if compiled with TenDRA (although it
will have to be reshaped into a cube), and that &os;
should therefore switch to TenDRA instead of GCC;One to complain that the new lightbulb lacks
fairings;Nine (including the PR originators) to ask what
is MFC?;Fifty-seven to complain about the lights being out two
weeks after the bulb has been changed.&a.nik.email; adds:I was laughing quite hard at
this.And then I thought, Hang on,
shouldn't there be '1 to document it.' in that list
somewhere?And then I was enlightened
:-)&a.tabthorpe.email; says:
None, real &os; hackers are
not afraid of the dark!Where does data written to
/dev/null go?It goes into a special data sink in the CPU where it
is converted to heat which is vented through the heatsink
/ fan assembly. This is why CPU cooling is increasingly
important; as people get used to faster processors, they
become careless with their data and more and more of it
ends up in /dev/null, overheating
their CPUs. If you delete /dev/null
(which effectively disables the CPU data sink) your CPU
may run cooler but your system will quickly become
constipated with all that excess data and start to behave
erratically. If you have a fast network connection you
can cool down your CPU by reading data out of
/dev/random and sending it off
somewhere; however you run the risk of overheating your
network connection and / or angering
your ISP, as most of the data will end up getting
converted to heat by their equipment, but they generally
have good cooling, so if you do not overdo it you should
be OK.Paul Robinson adds:There are other methods. As every good sysadmin
knows, it is part of standard practice to send data to the
screen of interesting variety to keep all the pixies that
make up your picture happy. Screen pixies (commonly
mis-typed or re-named as pixels) are
categorized by the type of hat they wear (red, green or
blue) and will hide or appear (thereby showing the color
of their hat) whenever they receive a little piece of
food. Video cards turn data into pixie-food, and then
send them to the pixies — the more expensive the
card, the better the food, so the better behaved the
pixies are. They also need constant stimulation —
this is why screen savers exist.To take your suggestions further, you could just throw
the random data to console, thereby letting the pixies
consume it. This causes no heat to be produced at all,
keeps the pixies happy and gets rid of your data quite
quickly, even if it does make things look a bit messy on
your screen.Incidentally, as an ex-admin of a large ISP who
experienced many problems attempting to maintain a stable
temperature in a server room, I would strongly discourage
people sending the data they do not want out to the
network. The fairies who do the packet switching and
routing get annoyed by it as well.My colleague sits at the computer too much, how
can I prank her?Install games/sl and
wait for her to mistype sl for
ls.Advanced TopicsHow can I learn more about &os;'s internals?See the &os;
Architecture Handbook.Additionally, much general &unix; knowledge is
directly applicable to &os;.How can I contribute to &os;?See the article on Contributing
to &os; for specific advice on how to do this.
Assistance is more than welcome!What are snapshots and releases?There are currently &rel.numbranch; active/semi-active
branches in the &os; Subversion
Repository. (Earlier branches are only changed
very rarely, which is why there are only &rel.numbranch;
active branches of development):&rel2.releng; AKA
&rel2.stable;&rel.releng; AKA
&rel.stable;&rel.head.releng; AKA
-CURRENT AKA
&rel.head;HEAD is not an actual branch tag.
It is a symbolic constant for
the current, non-branched development
stream known as
-CURRENT.Right now, -CURRENT is the
&rel.head.relx; development stream; the &rel.stable;
branch, &rel.releng;, forked off from
-CURRENT in &rel.relengdate; and the
&rel2.stable; branch, &rel2.releng;, forked off from
-CURRENT in &rel2.relengdate;.I have written a kernel extension, who do I send it
to?Take a look at the article on Contributing
to &os; to learn how to submit code.And thanks for the thought!How can I make the most of the data I see when my
kernel panics?Here is typical kernel panic:Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
fault virtual address = 0x40
fault code = supervisor read, page not present
instruction pointer = 0x8:0xf014a7e5
stack pointer = 0x10:0xf4ed6f24
frame pointer = 0x10:0xf4ed6f28
code segment = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b
= DPL 0, pres 1, def32 1, gran 1
processor eflags = interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL = 0
current process = 80 (mount)
interrupt mask =
trap number = 12
panic: page faultThis message is not enough. While the instruction
pointer value is important, it is also configuration
dependent as it varies depending on the kernel image.
If it is a GENERIC kernel
image from one of the snapshots, it is possible for
somebody else to track down the offending function, but
for a custom kernel, only you can tell us where the fault
occurred.To proceed:Write down the instruction pointer value. Note
that the 0x8: part at the beginning
is not significant in this case: it is the
0xf0xxxxxx part that we
want.When the system reboots, do the following:&prompt.user; nm -n kernel.that.caused.the.panic | grep f0xxxxxxwhere f0xxxxxx is the
instruction pointer value. The odds are you will not
get an exact match since the symbols in the kernel
symbol table are for the entry points of functions and
the instruction pointer address will be somewhere
inside a function, not at the start. If you do not
get an exact match, omit the last digit from the
instruction pointer value and try again:&prompt.user; nm -n kernel.that.caused.the.panic | grep f0xxxxxIf that does not yield any results, chop off
another digit. Repeat until there is some sort of
output. The result will be a possible list of
functions which caused the panic. This is a less than
exact mechanism for tracking down the point of
failure, but it is better than nothing.However, the best way to track down the cause of a
panic is by capturing a crash dump, then using
&man.kgdb.1; to generate a stack trace on the crash
dump.In any case, the method is this:Make sure that the following line is included in
the kernel configuration file:makeoptions DEBUG=-g # Build kernel with gdb(1) debug symbolsChange to the /usr/src
directory:&prompt.root; cd /usr/srcCompile the kernel:&prompt.root; make buildkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNELWait for &man.make.1; to finish compiling.&prompt.root; make installkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNELReboot.If KERNCONF is not included,
the GENERIC kernel will instead
be built and installed.The &man.make.1; process will have built two kernels.
/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MYKERNEL/kernel
and
/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MYKERNEL/kernel.debug.
kernel was installed as
/boot/kernel/kernel, while
kernel.debug can be used as the
source of debugging symbols for &man.kgdb.1;.To capture a crash dump, edit
/etc/rc.conf and set
dumpdev to point to either the swap
partition or AUTO. This will cause the
&man.rc.8; scripts to use the &man.dumpon.8; command to
enable crash dumps. This command can also be run
manually. After a panic, the crash dump can be recovered
using &man.savecore.8;; if dumpdev is
set in /etc/rc.conf, the &man.rc.8;
scripts will run &man.savecore.8; automatically and put
the crash dump in /var/crash.&os; crash dumps are usually the same size as
physical RAM. Therefore, make sure there is enough
space in /var/crash to hold the
dump. Alternatively, run &man.savecore.8; manually
and have it recover the crash dump to another directory
with more room. It is possible to limit the
size of the crash dump by using options
MAXMEM=N where
N is the size of kernel's
memory usage in KBs. For example, for 1 GB
of RAM, limit the kernel's memory usage to
128 MB, so that the crash dump size
will be 128 MB instead of 1 GB.Once the crash dump has been recovered , get a
stack trace as follows:&prompt.user; kgdb /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MYKERNEL/kernel.debug /var/crash/vmcore.0(kgdb)backtraceNote that there may be several screens worth of
information. Ideally, use &man.script.1; to
capture all of them. Using the unstripped kernel image
with all the debug symbols should show the exact line of
kernel source code where the panic occurred. The stack
trace is usually read from the bottom up to trace
the exact sequence of events that lead to the crash.
&man.kgdb.1; can also be used to print out the contents of
various variables or structures to examine the system
state at the time of the crash.If a second computer is available, &man.kgdb.1; can
be configured to do remote debugging, including setting
breakpoints and single-stepping through the kernel
code.If DDB is enabled and the
kernel drops into the debugger, a panic
and a crash dump can be forced by typing
panic at the ddb
prompt. It may stop in the debugger again during the
panic phase. If it does, type
continue and it will finish the crash
dump.Why has dlsym() stopped working
for ELF executables?The ELF toolchain does not, by default, make the
symbols defined in an executable visible to the dynamic
linker. Consequently dlsym()
searches on handles obtained from calls to
dlopen(NULL, flags) will fail to find
such symbols.To search, using
dlsym(), for symbols present in the
main executable of a process, link the
executable using the
option to the ELF linker (&man.ld.1;).How can I increase or reduce the kernel address space
on i386?By default, the kernel address space is 1 GB
(2 GB for PAE) for i386. When running a
network-intensive server or using
ZFS, this will probably not be
enough.Add the following line to the kernel configuration
file to increase available space and rebuild the
kernel:options KVA_PAGES=NTo find the correct value of
N, divide the desired address
space size (in megabytes) by four. (For example, it is
512 for 2 GB.)AcknowledgmentsThis innocent little Frequently Asked Questions document has
been written, rewritten, edited, folded, spindled, mutilated,
eviscerated, contemplated, discombobulated, cogitated,
regurgitated, rebuilt, castigated, and reinvigorated over the
last decade, by a cast of hundreds if not thousands.
Repeatedly.We wish to thank every one of the people responsible, and we
encourage you to join
them in making this FAQ even
better.
&bibliography;
Index: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bsdinstall/chapter.xml
===================================================================
--- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bsdinstall/chapter.xml (revision 50124)
+++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bsdinstall/chapter.xml (revision 50125)
@@ -1,2746 +1,2746 @@
Installing &os;JimMockRestructured, reorganized, and parts rewritten
by GavinAtkinsonUpdated for bsdinstall by WarrenBlockAllanJudeUpdated for root-on-ZFS by SynopsisinstallationBeginning with &os; 9.0-RELEASE, &os; provides an easy
to use, text-based installation
program named bsdinstall. This
chapter describes how to install &os; using
bsdinstall.In general, the installation instructions in this chapter
are written for the &i386; and AMD64
architectures. Where applicable, instructions specific to other
platforms will be listed. There may be minor differences
between the installer and what is shown here, so use this
chapter as a general guide rather than as a set of literal
instructions.Users who prefer to install &os; using a graphical
installer may be interested in
pc-sysinstall, the installer used
- by the PC-BSD Project. It can be used to install either a
- graphical desktop (PC-BSD) or a command line version of &os;.
- Refer to the PC-BSD Users Handbook for details (http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Colophon).After reading this chapter, you will know:The minimum hardware requirements and &os; supported
architectures.How to create the &os; installation media.How to start
bsdinstall.The questions bsdinstall will
ask, what they mean, and how to answer them.How to troubleshoot a failed installation.How to access a live version of &os; before committing
to an installation.Before reading this chapter, you should:Read the supported hardware list that shipped with the
version of &os; to be installed and verify that the system's
hardware is supported.Minimum Hardware RequirementsThe hardware requirements to install &os; vary by
architecture. Hardware architectures and devices supported by a
&os; release are listed on the &os; Release
Information page. The &os; download page
also has recommendations for choosing the correct image for
different architectures.A &os; installation requires a minimum of 96 MB of
RAM and 1.5 GB of free hard drive space.
However, such small amounts of memory and disk space are really
only suitable for custom applications like embedded appliances.
General-purpose desktop systems need more resources.
2-4 GB RAM and at least 8 GB hard drive space is a
good starting point.These are the processor requirements for each
architecture:&arch.amd64;This is the most common desktop and laptop processor
type, used in most modern systems. &intel; calls it
Intel64. Other manufacturers sometimes
call it x86-64.Examples of &arch.amd64; compatible processsors
include: &amd.athlon;64, &amd.opteron;,
multi-core &intel; &xeon;, and
&intel; &core; 2 and later processors.&arch.i386;Older desktops and laptops often use this 32-bit, x86
architecture.Almost all i386-compatible processors with a floating
point unit are supported. All &intel; processors 486 or
higher are supported.&os; will take advantage of Physical Address
Extensions (PAE) support on
CPUs with this feature. A kernel with
the PAE feature enabled will detect
memory above 4 GB and allow it to be used by the
system. However, using PAE places
constraints on device drivers and other features of &os;.
Refer to &man.pae.4; for details.ia64Currently supported processors are the &itanium; and
the &itanium; 2. Supported chipsets include the HP zx1,
&intel; 460GX, and &intel; E8870. Both Uniprocessor
(UP) and Symmetric Multi-processor
(SMP) configurations are
supported.pc98NEC PC-9801/9821 series with almost all
i386-compatible processors, including 80486, &pentium;,
&pentium; Pro, and &pentium; II, are all supported. All
i386-compatible processors by AMD, Cyrix, IBM, and IDT are
also supported. EPSON PC-386/486/586 series, which are
compatible with NEC PC-9801 series, are supported. The
NEC FC-9801/9821 and NEC SV-98 series should be
supported.High-resolution mode is not supported. NEC
PC-98XA/XL/RL/XL^2, and NEC PC-H98 series are supported in
normal (PC-9801 compatible) mode only. The
SMP-related features of &os; are not
supported. The New Extend Standard Architecture
(NESA) bus used in the PC-H98, SV-H98,
and FC-H98 series, is not supported.&arch.powerpc;All New World ROM &apple;
&mac; systems with built-in USB
are supported. SMP is supported on
machines with multiple CPUs.A 32-bit kernel can only use the first 2 GB of
RAM.&arch.sparc64;Systems supported by &os;/&arch.sparc64; are listed at
the FreeBSD/sparc64
Project.SMP is supported on all systems
with more than 1 processor. A dedicated disk is required
as it is not possible to share a disk with another
operating system at this time.Pre-Installation TasksOnce it has been determined that the system meets the
minimum hardware requirements for installing &os;, the
installation file should be downloaded and the installation
media prepared. Before doing this, check that the system is
ready for an installation by verifying the items in this
checklist:Back Up Important DataBefore installing any operating system,
always backup all important data first.
Do not store the backup on the system being installed.
Instead, save the data to a removable disk such as a
USB drive, another system on the network,
or an online backup service. Test the backup before
starting the installation to make sure it contains all of
the needed files. Once the installer formats the system's
disk, all data stored on that disk will be lost.Decide Where to Install &os;If &os; will be the only operating system installed,
this step can be skipped. But if &os; will share the disk
with another operating system, decide which disk or
partition will be used for &os;.In the &arch.i386; and &arch.amd64; architectures, disks
can be divided into multiple partitions using one of two
partitioning schemes. A traditional Master Boot
Record (MBR) holds a
partition table defining up to four primary
partitions. For historical reasons, &os;
calls these primary partition
slices. One of these primary
partitions can be made into an extended
partition containing multiple
logical partitions. The
GUID Partition Table
(GPT) is a newer and simpler method of
partitioning a disk. Common GPT
implementations allow up to 128 partitions per disk,
eliminating the need for logical partitions.Some older operating systems, like &windows; XP,
are not compatible with the GPT
partition scheme. If &os; will be sharing a disk with
such an operating system, MBR
partitioning is required.The &os; boot loader requires either a primary or
GPT partition. If all of the primary or
GPT partitions are already in use, one
must be freed for &os;. To create a partition without
deleting existing data, use a partition resizing tool to
shrink an existing partition and create a new partition
using the freed space.A variety of free and commercial partition resizing
tools are listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_partitioning_software.
GParted Live (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php)
is a free live CD which includes the
GParted partition editor.
GParted is also included with
many other Linux live CD
distributions.When used properly, disk shrinking utilities can
safely create space for creating a new partition. Since
the possibility of selecting the wrong partition exists,
always backup any important data and verify the integrity
of the backup before modifying disk partitions.Disk partitions containing different operating systems
make it possible to install multiple operating systems on
one computer. An alternative is to use virtualization
() which allows multiple
operating systems to run at the same time without modifying
any disk partitions.Collect Network InformationSome &os; installation methods require a network
connection in order to download the installation files.
After any installation, the installer will offer to setup
the system's network interfaces.If the network has a DHCP server, it
can be used to provide automatic network configuration. If
DHCP is not available, the following
network information for the system must be obtained from the
local network administrator or Internet service
provider:Required Network InformationIP addressSubnet maskIP address of default
gatewayDomain name of the networkIP addresses of the network's
DNS serversCheck for &os; ErrataAlthough the &os; Project strives to ensure that
each release of &os; is as stable as possible, bugs
occasionally creep into the process. On very rare occasions
those bugs affect the installation process. As these
problems are discovered and fixed, they are noted in the
&os; Errata (http://www.freebsd.org/releases/&rel.current;R/errata.html)
on the &os; web site. Check the errata before installing to
make sure that there are no problems that might affect the
installation.Information and errata for all the releases can be found
on the release information section of the &os; web site
(http://www.freebsd.org/releases/index.html).Prepare the Installation MediaThe &os; installer is not an application that can be run
from within another operating system. Instead, download a
&os; installation file, burn it to the media associated with
its file type and size (CD,
DVD, or USB), and boot
the system to install from the inserted media.&os; installation files are available at www.freebsd.org/where.html#download.
Each installation file's name includes the release version of
&os;, the architecture, and the type of file. For example, to
install &os; 10.2 on an &arch.amd64; system from a
DVD, download
FreeBSD-10.2-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso, burn
this file to a DVD, and boot the system
with the DVD inserted.Installation files are available in several formats.
The formats vary depending on computer architecture and media
type.Additional
installation files are included for computers that boot with
UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware
Interface). The names of these files include the string
uefi.File types:-bootonly.iso: This is the smallest
installation file as it only contains the installer. A
working Internet connection is required during
installation as the installer will download the files it
needs to complete the &os; installation. This file should
be burned to a CD using a
CD burning application.-disc1.iso: This file contains all
of the files needed to install &os;, its source, and the
Ports Collection. It should be burned to a
CD using a CD
burning application.-dvd1.iso: This file contains all
of the files needed to install &os;, its source, and the
Ports Collection. It also contains a set of popular
binary packages for installing a window manager and some
applications so that a complete system can be installed
from media without requiring a connection to the Internet.
This file should be burned to a DVD
using a DVD burning application.-memstick.img: This file contains
all of the files needed to install &os;, its source, and
the Ports Collection. It should be burned to a
USB stick using the instructions
below.-mini-memstick.img: Like
-bootonly.iso, does not include
installation files, but downloads them as needed. A
working internet connection is required during
installation. Write this file to a USB
stick as shown in .After downloading the image file, download
CHECKSUM.SHA256 from
the same directory. Calculate a
checksum for the image file.
&os; provides &man.sha256.1; for this, used as sha256
imagefilename.
Other operating systems have similar programs.Compare the calculated checksum with the one shown in
CHECKSUM.SHA256. The checksums must
match exactly. If the checksums do not match, the image file
is corrupt and must be downloaded again.Writing an Image File to USBThe *.img file is an
image of the complete contents of a
memory stick. It cannot be copied to
the target device as a file. Several applications are
available for writing the *.img to a
USB stick. This section describes two of
these utilities.Before proceeding, back up any important data on the
USB stick. This procedure will erase
the existing data on the stick.Using dd to Write the
ImageThis example uses /dev/da0 as
the target device where the image will be written. Be
very careful that the correct
device is used as this command will destroy the existing
data on the specified target device.The &man.dd.1; command-line utility is
available on BSD, &linux;, and &macos; systems. To burn
the image using dd, insert the
USB stick and determine its device
name. Then, specify the name of the downloaded
installation file and the device name for the
USB stick. This example burns the
&arch.amd64; installation image to the first
USB device on an existing &os;
system.&prompt.root; dd if=FreeBSD-10.2-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1M conv=syncIf this command fails, verify that the
USB stick is not mounted and that the
device name is for the disk, not a partition. Some
operating systems might require this command to be run
with &man.sudo.8;. Systems like &linux; might buffer
writes. To force all writes to complete, use
&man.sync.8;.Using &windows; to Write the ImageBe sure to give the correct drive letter as the
existing data on the specified drive will be overwritten
and destroyed.Obtaining Image Writer for
&windows;Image Writer for
&windows; is a free application that can
correctly write an image file to a memory stick.
Download it from https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/
and extract it into a folder.Writing the Image with Image WriterDouble-click the
Win32DiskImager icon to start
the program. Verify that the drive letter shown under
Device is the drive
with the memory stick. Click the folder icon and select
the image to be written to the memory stick. Click
[ Save ] to accept the
image file name. Verify that everything is correct, and
that no folders on the memory stick are open in other
windows. When everything is ready, click
[ Write ] to write the
image file to the memory stick.You are now ready to start installing &os;.Starting the InstallationBy default, the installation will not make any changes to
the disk(s) before the following message:Your changes will now be written to disk. If you
have chosen to overwrite existing data, it will
be PERMANENTLY ERASED. Are you sure you want to
commit your changes?The install can be exited at any time prior to this
warning. If
there is a concern that something is incorrectly configured,
just turn the computer off before this point and no changes
will be made to the system's disks.This section describes how to boot the system from the
installation media which was prepared using the instructions in
. When using a
bootable USB stick, plug in the USB stick
before turning on the computer. When booting from
CD or DVD, turn on the
computer and insert the media at the first opportunity. How to
configure the system to boot from the inserted media depends
upon the architecture.Booting on &i386; and &arch.amd64;These architectures provide a BIOS
menu for selecting the boot device. Depending upon the
installation media being used, select the
CD/DVD or
USB device as the first boot device. Most
systems also provide a key for selecting the boot device
during startup without having to enter the
BIOS. Typically, the key is either
F10, F11,
F12, or Escape.If the computer loads the existing operating system
instead of the &os; installer, then either:The installation media was not inserted early enough
in the boot process. Leave the media inserted and try
restarting the computer.The BIOS changes were incorrect or
not saved. Double-check that the right boot device is
selected as the first boot device.This system is too old to support booting from the
chosen media. In this case, the Plop Boot
Manager ()
can be used to boot the system from the selected
media.Booting on &powerpc;On most machines, holding C on the
keyboard during boot will boot from the CD.
Otherwise, hold CommandOptionOF, or
WindowsAltOF on non-&apple; keyboards. At the
0 > prompt, enterboot cd:,\ppc\loader cd:0Booting on &sparc64;Most &sparc64; systems are set up to boot automatically
from disk. To install &os; from a CD
requires a break into the PROM.To do this, reboot the system and wait until the boot
message appears. The message depends on the model, but should
look something like this:Sun Blade 100 (UltraSPARC-IIe), Keyboard Present
Copyright 1998-2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
OpenBoot 4.2, 128 MB memory installed, Serial #51090132.
Ethernet address 0:3:ba:b:92:d4, Host ID: 830b92d4.If the system proceeds to boot from disk at this point,
press L1A
or StopA
on the keyboard, or send a BREAK over the
serial console. When using tip or
cu, ~# will
issue a BREAK. The PROM prompt will be
ok on systems with one
CPU and ok {0} on
SMP systems, where the digit indicates the
number of the active CPU.At this point, place the CD into the
drive and type boot cdrom from the
PROM prompt.&os; Boot MenuOnce the system boots from the installation media, a menu
similar to the following will be displayed:By default, the menu will wait ten seconds for user input
before booting into the &os; installer or, if &os; is already
installed, before booting into &os;. To pause the boot timer
in order to review the selections, press
Space. To select an option, press its
highlighted number, character, or key. The following options
are available.Boot Multi User: This will
continue the &os; boot process. If the boot timer has
been paused, press 1, upper- or
lower-case B, or
Enter.Boot Single User: This mode can be
used to fix an existing &os; installation as described in
. Press
2 or the upper- or lower-case
S to enter this mode.Escape to loader prompt: This will
boot the system into a repair prompt that contains a
limited number of low-level commands. This prompt is
described in . Press
3 or Esc to boot into
this prompt.Reboot: Reboots the system.Configure Boot Options: Opens the
menu shown in, and described under, .The boot options menu is divided into two sections. The
first section can be used to either return to the main boot
menu or to reset any toggled options back to their
defaults.The next section is used to toggle the available options
to On or Off by pressing
the option's highlighted number or character. The system will
always boot using the settings for these options until they
are modified. Several options can be toggled using this
menu:ACPI Support: If the system hangs
during boot, try toggling this option to
Off.Safe Mode: If the system still
hangs during boot even with ACPI
Support set to Off, try
setting this option to On.Single User: Toggle this option to
On to fix an existing &os; installation
as described in . Once
the problem is fixed, set it back to
Off.Verbose: Toggle this option to
On to see more detailed messages during
the boot process. This can be useful when troubleshooting
a piece of hardware.After making the needed selections, press
1 or Backspace to return to
the main boot menu, then press Enter to
continue booting into &os;. A series of boot messages will
appear as &os; carries out its hardware device probes and
loads the installation program. Once the boot is complete,
the welcome menu shown in will be displayed.Press Enter to select the default of
[ Install ] to enter the
installer. The rest of this chapter describes how to use this
installer. Otherwise, use the right or left arrows or the
colorized letter to select the desired menu item. The
[ Shell ] can be used to
access a &os; shell in order to use command line utilities to
prepare the disks before installation. The
[ Live CD ] option can be
used to try out &os; before installing it. The live version
is described in .To review the boot messages, including the hardware
device probe, press the upper- or lower-case
S and then Enter to access
a shell. At the shell prompt, type more
/var/run/dmesg.boot and use the space bar to
scroll through the messages. When finished, type
exit to return to the welcome
menu.Using bsdinstallThis section shows the order of the
bsdinstall menus and the type of
information that will be asked before the system is installed.
Use the arrow keys to highlight a menu option, then
Space to select or deselect that menu item.
When finished, press Enter to save the
selection and move onto the next screen.Selecting the Keymap MenuDepending on the system console being used,
bsdinstall may initially display
the menu shown in .To configure the keyboard layout, press
Enter with
[ YES ] selected, which will
display the menu shown in . To instead use the
default layout, use the arrow key to select
[ NO ] and press
Enter to skip this menu screen.When configuring the keyboard layout, use the up and down
arrows to select the keymap that most closely represents the
mapping of the keyboard attached to the system. Press
Enter to save the selection.Pressing Esc will exit this menu and
use the default keymap. If the choice of keymap is not
clear, United States of America
ISO-8859-1 is also a safe option.In &os; 10.0-RELEASE and later, this menu has been
enhanced. The full selection of keymaps is shown, with the
default preselected. In addition, when selecting a different
keymap, a dialog is displayed that allows the user to try the
keymap and ensure it is correct before proceeding.Setting the HostnameThe next bsdinstall menu is
used to set the hostname for the newly installed
system.Type in a hostname that is unique for the network. It
should be a fully-qualified hostname, such as machine3.example.com.Selecting Components to InstallNext, bsdinstall will prompt to
select optional components to install.Deciding which components to install will depend largely
on the intended use of the system and the amount of disk space
available. The &os; kernel and userland, collectively known
as the base system, are always
installed. Depending on the architecture, some of these
components may not appear:doc - Additional documentation,
mostly of historical interest, to install into
/usr/share/doc. The documentation
provided by the FreeBSD Documentation Project may be
installed later using the instructions in .games - Several traditional
BSD games, including
fortune,
rot13, and others.lib32 - Compatibility libraries for
running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit version of
&os;.ports - The &os; Ports Collection
is a collection of files which automates the downloading,
compiling and installation of third-party software
packages. discusses how to use
the Ports Collection.The installation program does not check for
adequate disk space. Select this option only if
sufficient hard disk space is available. The &os; Ports
Collection takes up about &ports.size; of disk
space.src - The complete &os; source code
for both the kernel and the userland. Although not
required for the majority of applications, it may be
required to build device drivers, kernel modules, or some
applications from the Ports Collection. It is also used
for developing &os; itself. The full source tree requires
1 GB of disk space and recompiling the entire &os;
system requires an additional 5 GB of space.Installing from the NetworkThe menu shown in only appears when
installing from a -bootonly.iso
CD as this installation media does not hold
copies of the installation files. Since the installation
files must be retrieved over a network connection, this menu
indicates that the network interface must be first
configured.To configure the network connection, press
Enter and follow the instructions in . Once the
interface is configured, select a mirror site that is
located in the same region of the world as the computer on
which &os; is being installed. Files can be retrieved more
quickly when the mirror is close to the target computer,
reducing installation time.Installation will then continue as if the installation
files were located on the local installation media.Allocating Disk SpaceThe next menu is used to determine the method for
allocating disk space. The options available in the menu
depend upon the version of &os; being installed.Guided partitioning automatically sets up
the disk partitions, Manual partitioning
allows advanced users to create customized partitions from menu
options, and Shell opens a shell prompt where
advanced users can create customized partitions using
command-line utilities like &man.gpart.8;, &man.fdisk.8;, and
&man.bsdlabel.8;. ZFS partitioning, only
available in &os; 10 and later, creates an optionally encrypted
root-on-ZFS system with support for boot
environments.This section describes what to consider when laying out the
disk partitions. It then demonstrates how to use the different
partitioning methods.Designing the Partition Layoutpartition layout/etc/var/usrWhen laying out file systems, remember that hard drives
transfer data faster from the outer tracks to the inner.
Thus, smaller and heavier-accessed file systems should be
closer to the outside of the drive, while larger partitions
like /usr should be placed toward the
inner parts of the disk. It is a good idea to create
partitions in an order similar to: /,
swap, /var, and
/usr.The size of the /var partition
reflects the intended machine's usage. This partition is
used to hold mailboxes, log files, and printer spools.
Mailboxes and log files can grow to unexpected sizes
depending on the number of users and how long log files are
kept. On average, most users rarely need more than about a
gigabyte of free disk space in
/var.Sometimes, a lot of disk space is required in
/var/tmp. When new software is
installed, the packaging tools extract a temporary copy of
the packages under /var/tmp. Large
software packages, like Firefox,
Apache OpenOffice or
LibreOffice may be tricky to
install if there is not enough disk space under
/var/tmp.The /usr partition holds many of the
files which support the system, including the &os; Ports
Collection and system source code. At least 2 gigabytes of space is
recommended for this partition.When selecting partition sizes, keep the space
requirements in mind. Running out of space in one partition
while barely using another can be a hassle.swap sizingswap partitionAs a rule of thumb, the swap partition should be about
double the size of physical memory (RAM).
Systems with minimal RAM may perform
better with more swap. Configuring too little swap can lead
to inefficiencies in the VM page scanning
code and might create issues later if more memory is
added.On larger systems with multiple SCSI
disks or multiple IDE disks operating on
different controllers, it is recommended that swap be
configured on each drive, up to four drives. The swap
partitions should be approximately the same size. The
kernel can handle arbitrary sizes but internal data structures
scale to 4 times the largest swap partition. Keeping the swap
partitions near the same size will allow the kernel to
optimally stripe swap space across disks. Large swap sizes
are fine, even if swap is not used much. It might be easier
to recover from a runaway program before being forced to
reboot.By properly partitioning a system, fragmentation
introduced in the smaller write heavy partitions will not
bleed over into the mostly read partitions. Keeping the
write loaded partitions closer to the disk's edge will
increase I/O performance in the
partitions where it occurs the most. While
I/O performance in the larger partitions
may be needed, shifting them more toward the edge of the disk
will not lead to a significant performance improvement over
moving /var to the edge.Guided PartitioningWhen this method is selected, a menu will display the
available disk(s). If multiple disks are connected, choose
the one where &os; is to be installed.Once the disk is selected, the next menu prompts to
install to either the entire disk or to create a partition
using free space. If
[ Entire Disk ] is
chosen, a general partition layout filling the whole disk is
automatically created. Selecting
[ Partition ] creates a
partition layout from the unused space on the disk.After the partition layout has been created, review it to
ensure it meets the needs of the installation. Selecting
[ Revert ] will reset the
partitions to their original values and pressing
[ Auto ] will recreate the
automatic &os; partitions. Partitions can also be manually
created, modified, or deleted. When the partitioning is
correct, select [ Finish ] to
continue with the installation.Manual PartitioningSelecting this method opens the partition editor:Highlight the installation drive
(ada0 in this example) and select
[ Create ] to display a menu
of available partition schemes:GPT is usually the most appropriate
choice for &arch.amd64; computers. Older computers that are
not compatible with GPT should use
MBR. The other partition schemes are
generally used for uncommon or older computers.
Partitioning SchemesAbbreviationDescriptionAPMApple Partition Map, used by &powerpc;.BSDBSD label without an
MBR, sometimes called
dangerously dedicated mode as
non-BSD disk utilities may not
recognize it.GPTGUID Partition Table (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table).MBRMaster Boot Record (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record).PC98MBR variant used by NEC PC-98
computers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pc9801).VTOC8Volume Table Of Contents used by Sun SPARC64 and
UltraSPARC computers.
After the partitioning scheme has been selected and
created, select [ Create ]
again to create the partitions.A standard &os; GPT installation uses
at least three partitions:freebsd-boot - Holds the &os; boot
code.freebsd-ufs - A &os;
UFS file system.freebsd-swap - &os; swap
space.Another partition type worth noting is
freebsd-zfs, used for partitions that will
contain a &os; ZFS file system (). Refer to &man.gpart.8; for
descriptions of the available GPT partition
types.Multiple file system partitions can be created and some
people prefer a traditional layout with separate partitions
for /, /var,
/tmp, and /usr. See
for an
example.The Size may be entered with common
abbreviations: K for kilobytes,
M for megabytes, or
G for gigabytes.Proper sector alignment provides the best performance,
and making partition sizes even multiples of 4K bytes helps
to ensure alignment on drives with either 512-byte or
4K-byte sectors. Generally, using partition sizes that are
even multiples of 1M or 1G is the easiest way to make sure
every partition starts at an even multiple of 4K. There is
one exception: the freebsd-boot
partition should be no larger than 512K due to current boot
code limitations.A Mountpoint is needed if the partition
will contain a file system. If only a single
UFS partition will be created, the
mountpoint should be /.The Label is a name by which the
partition will be known. Drive names or numbers can change if
the drive is connected to a different controller or port, but
the partition label does not change. Referring to labels
instead of drive names and partition numbers in files like
/etc/fstab makes the system more tolerant
to hardware changes. GPT labels appear in
/dev/gpt/ when a disk is attached. Other
partitioning schemes have different label capabilities and
their labels appear in different directories in
/dev/.Use a unique label on every partition to avoid
conflicts from identical labels. A few letters from the
computer's name, use, or location can be added to the label.
For instance, use labroot or
rootfslab for the UFS
root partition on the computer named
lab.Creating Traditional Split File System
PartitionsFor a traditional partition layout where the
/, /var,
/tmp, and /usr
directories are separate file systems on their own
partitions, create a GPT partitioning
scheme, then create the partitions as shown. Partition
sizes shown are typical for a 20G target disk. If more
space is available on the target disk, larger swap or
/var partitions may be useful. Labels
shown here are prefixed with ex for
example, but readers should use other unique
label values as described above.By default, &os;'s gptboot expects
the first UFS partition to be the
/ partition.Partition TypeSizeMountpointLabelfreebsd-boot512Kfreebsd-ufs2G/exrootfsfreebsd-swap4Gexswapfreebsd-ufs2G/varexvarfsfreebsd-ufs1G/tmpextmpfsfreebsd-ufsaccept the default (remainder of the
disk)/usrexusrfsAfter the custom partitions have been created, select
[ Finish ] to continue with
the installation.Root-on-ZFS Automatic PartitioningSupport for automatic creation of root-on-ZFS
installations was added in &os; 10.0-RELEASE. This
partitioning mode only works with whole disks and will erase
the contents of the entire disk. The installer will
automatically create partitions aligned to 4k boundaries and
force ZFS to use 4k sectors. This is safe
even with 512 byte sector disks, and has the added benefit of
ensuring that pools created on 512 byte disks will be able to
have 4k sector disks added in the future, either as additional
storage space or as replacements for failed disks. The
installer can also optionally employ GELI
disk encryption as described in .
If encryption is enabled, a 2 GB unencrypted boot pool
containing the /boot directory is
created. It holds the kernel and other files necessary to
boot the system. A swap partition of a user selectable size
is also created, and all remaining space is used for the
ZFS pool.The main ZFS configuration menu offers
a number of options to control the creation of the
pool.Select T to configure the Pool
Type and the disk(s) that will constitute the
pool. The automatic ZFS installer
currently only supports the creation of a single top level
vdev, except in stripe mode. To create more complex pools,
use the instructions in to create the pool. The
installer supports the creation of various pool types,
including stripe (not recommended, no redundancy), mirror
(best performance, least usable space), and RAID-Z 1, 2, and 3
(with the capability to withstand the concurrent failure of 1,
2, and 3 disks, respectively). while selecting the pool type,
a tooltip is displayed across the bottom of the screen with
advice about the number of required disks, and in the case of
RAID-Z, the optimal number of disks for each
configuration.Once a Pool Type has been selected, a
list of available disks is displayed, and the user is prompted
to select one or more disks to make up the pool. The
configuration is then validated, to ensure enough disks are
selected. If not, select <Change
Selection> to return to the list of disks, or
<Cancel> to change the pool
type.If one or more disks are missing from the list, or if
disks were attached after the installer was started, select
- Rescan Devices to repopulate the list
of available disks.
To avoid accidentally erasing the wrong disk, the
- Disk Info menu can be used to inspect
each disk, including its partition table and various other
information such as the device model number and serial number,
if available.The main ZFS configuration menu also
allows the user to enter a pool name, disable forcing 4k
sectors, enable or disable encryption, switch between
GPT (recommended) and
MBR partition table types, and select the
amount of swap space. Once all options have been set to the
desired values, select the
>>> Install option at the
top of the menu.If GELI disk encryption was enabled,
the installer will prompt twice for the passphrase to be used
to encrypt the disks.The installer then offers a last chance to cancel before
the contents of the selected drives are destroyed to create
the ZFS pool.The installation then proceeds normally.Shell Mode PartitioningWhen creating advanced installations, the
bsdinstall partitioning menus may
not provide the level of flexibility required. Advanced users
can select the Shell option from the
partitioning menu in order to manually partition the drives,
create the file system(s), populate
/tmp/bsdinstall_etc/fstab, and mount the
file systems under /mnt. Once this is
done, type exit to return to
bsdinstall and continue the
installation.Committing to the InstallationOnce the disks are configured, the next menu provides the
last chance to make changes before the selected hard drive(s)
are formatted. If changes need to be made, select
[ Back ] to return to the main
partitioning menu.
[ Revert & Exit ]
will exit the installer without making any changes to the hard
drive.To instead start the actual installation, select
[ Commit ] and press
Enter.Installation time will vary depending on the distributions
chosen, installation media, and speed of the computer. A series
of messages will indicate the progress.First, the installer formats the selected disk(s) and
initializes the partitions. Next, in the case of a bootonly
media, it downloads the selected components:Next, the integrity of the distribution files is verified
to ensure they have not been corrupted during download or
misread from the installation media:Finally, the verified distribution files are extracted to
the disk:Once all requested distribution files have been extracted,
bsdinstall displays the first
post-installation configuration screen. The available
post-configuration options are described in the next
section.Post-InstallationOnce &os; is installed,
bsdinstall will prompt to configure
several options before booting into the newly installed system.
This section describes these configuration options.Once the system has booted,
bsdconfig provides a menu-driven method for
configuring the system using these and additional
options.Setting the
root
PasswordFirst, the root
password must be set. While entering the password, the
characters being typed are not displayed on the screen. After
the password has been entered, it must be entered again. This
helps prevent typing errors.Configuring Network InterfacesNext, a list of the network interfaces found on the
computer is shown. Select the interface to configure.The network configuration menus will be skipped if the
network was previously configured as part of a
bootonly installation.If an Ethernet interface is selected, the installer will
skip ahead to the menu shown in . If a wireless
network interface is chosen, the system will instead scan for
wireless access points:Wireless networks are identified by a Service Set
Identifier (SSID), a short, unique name
given to each network. SSIDs found during
the scan are listed, followed by a description of the
encryption types available for that network. If the desired
SSID does not appear in the list, select
[ Rescan ] to scan again. If
the desired network still does not appear, check for problems
with antenna connections or try moving the computer closer to
the access point. Rescan after each change is made.Next, enter the encryption information for connecting to
the selected wireless network. WPA2
encryption is strongly recommended as older encryption types,
like WEP, offer little security. If the
network uses WPA2, input the password, also
known as the Pre-Shared Key (PSK). For
security reasons, the characters typed into the input box are
displayed as asterisks.Next, choose whether or not an IPv4
address should be configured on the Ethernet or wireless
interface:There are two methods of IPv4
configuration. DHCP will automatically
configure the network interface correctly and should be used
if the network provides a DHCP server.
Otherwise, the addressing information needs to be input
manually as a static configuration.Do not enter random network information as it will not
work. If a DHCP server is not available,
obtain the information listed in from
the network administrator or Internet service
provider.If a DHCP server is available, select
[ Yes ] in the next menu to
automatically configure the network interface. The installer
will appear to pause for a minute or so as it finds the
DHCP server and obtains the addressing
information for the system.If a DHCP server is not available,
select [ No ] and input the
following addressing information in this menu:IP Address - The
IPv4 address assigned to this computer.
The address must be unique and not already in use by
another piece of equipment on the local network.Subnet Mask - The subnet mask for
the network.Default Router - The
IP address of the network's default
gateway.The next screen will ask if the interface should be
configured for IPv6. If
IPv6 is available and desired, choose
[ Yes ] to select it.IPv6 also has two methods of
configuration. StateLess Address AutoConfiguration
(SLAAC) will automatically request the
correct configuration information from a local router. Refer
to http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4862
for more information. Static configuration requires manual
entry of network information.If an IPv6 router is available, select
[ Yes ] in the next menu to
automatically configure the network interface. The installer
will appear to pause for a minute or so as it finds the router
and obtains the addressing information for the system.If an IPv6 router is not available,
select [ No ] and input the
following addressing information in this menu:IPv6 Address - The
IPv6 address assigned to this computer.
The address must be unique and not already in use by
another piece of equipment on the local network.Default Router - The
IPv6 address of the network's default
gateway.The last network configuration menu is used to configure
the Domain Name System (DNS) resolver,
which converts hostnames to and from network addresses. If
DHCP or SLAAC was used
to autoconfigure the network interface, the Resolver
Configuration values may already be filled in.
Otherwise, enter the local network's domain name in the
Search field. DNS #1
and DNS #2 are the IPv4
and/or IPv6 addresses of the
DNS servers. At least one
DNS server is required.Setting the Time ZoneThe next menu asks if the system clock uses
UTC or local time. When in doubt, select
[ No ] to choose the more
commonly-used local time.The next series of menus are used to determine the correct
local time by selecting the geographic region, country, and
time zone. Setting the time zone allows the system to
automatically correct for regional time changes, such as
daylight savings time, and perform other time zone related
functions properly.The example shown here is for a machine located in the
Eastern time zone of the United States. The selections will
vary according to the geographical location.The appropriate region is selected using the arrow keys
and then pressing Enter.Select the appropriate country using the arrow keys and
press Enter.The appropriate time zone is selected using the arrow keys
and pressing Enter.Confirm the abbreviation for the time zone is correct. If
it is, press Enter to continue with the
post-installation configuration.Enabling ServicesThe next menu is used to configure which system services
will be started whenever the system boots. All of these
services are optional. Only start the services that are
needed for the system to function.Here is a summary of the services which can be enabled in
this menu:sshd - The Secure Shell
(SSH) daemon is used to remotely access
a system over an encrypted connection. Only enable this
service if the system should be available for remote
logins.moused - Enable this service if the
mouse will be used from the command-line system
console.ntpd - The Network Time Protocol
(NTP) daemon for automatic clock
synchronization. Enable this service if there is a
&windows;, Kerberos, or LDAP server on
the network.powerd - System power control
utility for power control and energy saving.Enabling Crash DumpsThe next menu is used to configure whether or not crash
dumps should be enabled. Enabling crash dumps can be useful
in debugging issues with the system, so users are encouraged
to enable crash dumps.Add UsersThe next menu prompts to create at least one user account.
It is recommended to login to the system using a user account
rather than as root.
When logged in as root, there are essentially no
limits or protection on what can be done. Logging in as a
normal user is safer and more secure.Select [ Yes ] to add new
users.Follow the prompts and input the requested information for
the user account. The example shown in creates the asample user account.Here is a summary of the information to input:Username - The name the user will
enter to log in. A common convention is to use the first
letter of the first name combined with the last name, as
long as each username is unique for the system. The
username is case sensitive and should not contain any
spaces.Full name - The user's full name.
This can contain spaces and is used as a description for
the user account.Uid - User ID.
Typically, this is left blank so the system will assign a
value.Login group - The user's group.
Typically this is left blank to accept the default.Invite user into
other groups? - Additional groups to which the
user will be added as a member. If the user needs
administrative access, type wheel
here.Login class - Typically left blank
for the default.Shell - Type in one of the listed
values to set the interactive shell for the user. Refer
to for more information about
shells.Home directory - The user's home
directory. The default is usually correct.Home directory permissions -
Permissions on the user's home directory. The default is
usually correct.Use password-based authentication?
- Typically yes so that the user is
prompted to input their password at login.Use an empty password? -
Typically no as it is insecure to have
a blank password.Use a random password? - Typically
no so that the user can set their own
password in the next prompt.Enter password - The password for
this user. Characters typed will not show on the
screen.Enter password again - The password
must be typed again for verification.Lock out the account after
creation? - Typically no so
that the user can login.After entering everything, a summary is shown for review.
If a mistake was made, enter no and try
again. If everything is correct, enter yes
to create the new user.If there are more users to add, answer the Add
another user? question with
yes. Enter no to finish
adding users and continue the installation.For more information on adding users and user management,
see .Final ConfigurationAfter everything has been installed and configured, a
final chance is provided to modify settings.Use this menu to make any changes or do any additional
configuration before completing the installation.Add User - Described in .Root Password - Described in .Hostname - Described in .Network - Described in .Services - Described in .Time Zone - Described in .Handbook - Download and install the
&os; Handbook.After any final configuration is complete, select
Exit.bsdinstall will prompt if there
are any additional configuration that needs to be done before
rebooting into the new system. Select
[ Yes ] to exit to a shell
within the new system or
[ No ] to proceed to the last
step of the installation.If further configuration or special setup is needed,
select [ Live CD ] to
boot the install media into Live CD
mode.If the installation is complete, select
[ Reboot ] to reboot the
computer and start the new &os; system. Do not forget to
remove the &os; install media or the computer may boot from it
again.As &os; boots, informational messages are displayed.
After the system finishes booting, a login prompt is
displayed. At the login: prompt, enter the
username added during the installation. Avoid logging in as
root. Refer to
for instructions on how to
become the superuser when administrative access is
needed.The messages that appeared during boot can be reviewed by
pressing Scroll-Lock to turn on the
scroll-back buffer. The PgUp,
PgDn, and arrow keys can be used to scroll
back through the messages. When finished, press
Scroll-Lock again to unlock the display and
return to the console. To review these messages once the
system has been up for some time, type less
/var/run/dmesg.boot from a command prompt. Press
q to return to the command line after
viewing.If sshd was enabled in , the first boot may be
a bit slower as the system will generate the
RSA and DSA keys.
Subsequent boots will be faster. The fingerprints of the keys
will be displayed, as seen in this example:Generating public/private rsa1 key pair.
Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key.
Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
10:a0:f5:af:93:ae:a3:1a:b2:bb:3c:35:d9:5a:b3:f3 root@machine3.example.com
The key's randomart image is:
+--[RSA1 1024]----+
| o.. |
| o . . |
| . o |
| o |
| o S |
| + + o |
|o . + * |
|o+ ..+ . |
|==o..o+E |
+-----------------+
Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.
Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
7e:1c:ce:dc:8a:3a:18:13:5b:34:b5:cf:d9:d1:47:b2 root@machine3.example.com
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ DSA 1024]----+
| .. . .|
| o . . + |
| . .. . E .|
| . . o o . . |
| + S = . |
| + . = o |
| + . * . |
| . . o . |
| .o. . |
+-----------------+
Starting sshd.Refer to for more information
about fingerprints and SSH.&os; does not install a graphical environment by default.
Refer to for more information about
installing and configuring a graphical window manager.Proper shutdown of a &os; computer helps protect data and
hardware from damage. Do not turn off the power
before the system has been properly shut down! If
the user is a member of the wheel group, become the
superuser by typing su at the command line
and entering the root password. Then, type
shutdown -p now and the system will shut
down cleanly, and if the hardware supports it, turn itself
off.TroubleshootinginstallationtroubleshootingThis section covers basic installation
troubleshooting, such as common problems people have
reported.Check the Hardware Notes (http://www.freebsd.org/releases/index.html)
document for the version of &os; to make sure the hardware is
supported. If the hardware is supported and lock-ups or other
problems occur, build a custom kernel using the instructions in
to add support for devices which
are not present in the GENERIC kernel. The
default kernel assumes that most hardware devices are in their
factory default configuration in terms of
IRQs, I/O addresses, and
DMA channels. If the hardware has been
reconfigured, a custom kernel configuration file can tell &os;
where to find things.Some installation problems can be avoided or alleviated by
updating the firmware on various hardware components, most
notably the motherboard. Motherboard firmware is usually
referred to as the BIOS. Most motherboard
and computer manufacturers have a website for upgrades and
upgrade information.Manufacturers generally advise against upgrading the
motherboard BIOS unless there is a good
reason for doing so, like a critical update. The upgrade
process can go wrong, leaving the
BIOS incomplete and the computer
inoperative.If the system hangs while probing hardware during boot, or
it behaves strangely during install, ACPI may
be the culprit. &os; makes extensive use of the system
ACPI service on the &arch.i386;,
&arch.amd64;, and ia64 platforms to aid in system configuration
if it is detected during boot. Unfortunately, some bugs still
exist in both the ACPI driver and within
system motherboards and BIOS firmware.
ACPI can be disabled by setting the
hint.acpi.0.disabled hint in the third stage
boot loader:set hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"This is reset each time the system is booted, so it is
necessary to add hint.acpi.0.disabled="1" to
the file /boot/loader.conf. More
information about the boot loader can be found in .Using the Live CDThe welcome menu of bsdinstall,
shown in , provides a
[ Live CD ] option. This
is useful for those who are still wondering whether &os; is the
right operating system for them and want to test some of the
features before installing.The following points should be noted before using the
[ Live CD ]:To gain access to the system, authentication is
required. The username is root and the password is
blank.As the system runs directly from the installation media,
performance will be significantly slower than that of a
system installed on a hard disk.This option only provides a command prompt and not a
graphical interface.
Index: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/introduction/chapter.xml
===================================================================
--- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/introduction/chapter.xml (revision 50124)
+++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/introduction/chapter.xml (revision 50125)
@@ -1,1311 +1,1311 @@
IntroductionJimMockRestructured, reorganized, and parts rewritten
by SynopsisThank you for your interest in &os;! The following chapter
covers various aspects of the &os; Project, such as its
history, goals, development model, and so on.After reading this chapter, you will know:How &os; relates to other computer operating
systems.The history of the &os; Project.The goals of the &os; Project.The basics of the &os; open-source development
model.And of course: where the name &os; comes
from.Welcome to &os;!4.4BSD-Lite&os; is a 4.4BSD-Lite based operating system for Intel (x86
and &itanium;), AMD64, Sun &ultrasparc; computers. Ports to
other architectures are also under way. You can also read about
the history of &os;, or the
current release.
If you are interested in contributing something to the Project
(code, hardware, funding), see the Contributing
to &os; article.What Can &os; Do?&os; has many noteworthy features. Some of these
are:Preemptive multitaskingpreemptive multitasking with dynamic priority adjustment to ensure
smooth and fair sharing of the computer between
applications and users, even under the heaviest of
loads.Multi-user facilitiesmulti-user facilities which allow many people to use a &os; system
simultaneously for a variety of things. This means, for
example, that system peripherals such as printers and tape
drives are properly shared between all users on the system
or the network and that individual resource limits can be
placed on users or groups of users, protecting critical
system resources from over-use.Strong TCP/IP
networkingTCP/IP networking with support for industry standards such as
SCTP, DHCP, NFS, NIS, PPP, SLIP, IPsec, and IPv6. This
means that your &os; machine can interoperate easily with
other systems as well as act as an enterprise server,
providing vital functions such as NFS (remote file access)
and email services or putting your organization on the
Internet with WWW, FTP, routing and firewall (security)
services.Memory protectionmemory protection ensures that applications (or users) cannot
interfere with each other. One application crashing will
not affect others in any way.The industry standard
X Window SystemX Window System (X11R7) can provide a graphical user
interface (GUI) on any machine and comes with full
sources.binary compatibilityLinuxbinary compatibilitySCObinary compatibilitySVR4binary compatibilityBSD/OSbinary compatibilityNetBSDBinary compatibility with many
programs built for Linux, SCO, SVR4, BSDI and
NetBSD.Thousands of ready-to-run
applications are available from the &os;
ports and
packages collection. Why search the
net when you can find it all right here?Thousands of additional and
easy-to-port applications are
available on the Internet. &os; is source code compatible
with most popular commercial &unix; systems and thus most
applications require few, if any, changes to
compile.Demand paged virtual
memoryvirtual memory and merged VM/buffer cache
design efficiently satisfies applications with large
appetites for memory while still maintaining interactive
response to other users.SMPSymmetric Multi-Processing
(SMP) support for machines with multiple
CPUs.compilersCcompilersC++
A full complement of C
and C++
development tools.
Many additional languages for advanced research
and development are also available in the ports and
packages collection.Source codesource code for the entire system means you have the
greatest degree of control over your environment. Why be
locked into a proprietary solution at the mercy of your
vendor when you can have a truly open system?Extensive online
documentation.And many more!&os; is based on the 4.4BSD-Lite4.4BSD-Lite release from Computer
Systems Research Group (CSRG)Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California at Berkeley, and
carries on the distinguished tradition of BSD systems
development. In addition to the fine work provided by CSRG,
the &os; Project has put in many thousands of hours in
fine tuning the system for maximum performance and reliability
in real-life load situations. &os; offers performance and
reliability on par with commercial offerings, combined with
many cutting-edge features not available anywhere else.The applications to which &os; can be put are truly
limited only by your own imagination. From software
development to factory automation, inventory control to
azimuth correction of remote satellite antennae; if it can be
done with a commercial &unix; product then it is more than
likely that you can do it with &os; too! &os; also benefits
significantly from literally thousands of high quality
applications developed by research centers and universities
around the world, often available at little to no cost.
Commercial applications are also available and appearing in
greater numbers every day.Because the source code for &os; itself is generally
available, the system can also be customized to an almost
unheard of degree for special applications or projects, and in
ways not generally possible with operating systems from most
major commercial vendors. Here is just a sampling of some of
the applications in which people are currently using
&os;:Internet Services: The robust
TCP/IP networking built into &os; makes it an ideal
platform for a variety of Internet services such
as:World Wide Web serversweb servers
(standard or secure [SSL])IPv4 and IPv6 routingFirewallsfirewall
and NATNAT
(IP masquerading) gatewaysFTP serversFTP serverselectronic mailemailemail
Electronic Mail serversAnd more...Education: Are you a student of
computer science or a related engineering field? There
is no better way of learning about operating systems,
computer architecture and networking than the hands on,
under the hood experience that &os; can provide. A number
of freely available CAD, mathematical and graphic design
packages also make it highly useful to those whose primary
interest in a computer is to get
other work done!Research: With source code for
the entire system available, &os; is an excellent platform
for research in operating systems as well as other
branches of computer science. &os;'s freely available
nature also makes it possible for remote groups to
collaborate on ideas or shared development without having
to worry about special licensing agreements or limitations
on what may be discussed in open forums.Networking: Need a new
router?router A name server (DNS)?DNS Server A firewall to keep people out of your
internal network? &os; can easily turn that unused
PC sitting in the corner into an advanced router with
sophisticated packet-filtering capabilities.Embedded: &os; makes an
excellent platform to build embedded systems upon.
embedded
With support for the &arm;, &mips; and &powerpc;
platforms, coupled with a robust network stack, cutting
edge features and the permissive BSD
license &os; makes an excellent foundation for
building embedded routers, firewalls, and other
devices.X Window SystemGNOMEKDEDesktop: &os; makes a
fine choice for an inexpensive desktop solution
using the freely available X11 server.
&os; offers a choice from many open-source desktop
environments, including the standard
GNOME and
KDE graphical user interfaces.
&os; can even boot diskless from
a central server, making individual workstations
even cheaper and easier to administer.Software Development: The basic
&os; system comes with a full complement of development
tools including a full
C/C++Compiler
compiler and debugger suite.
Support for many other languages are also available
through the ports and packages collection.&os; is available to download free of charge, or can be
obtained on either CD-ROM or DVD. Please see
for more information about obtaining
&os;.Who Uses &os;?userslarge sites running &os;&os;'s advanced features, proven security, predictable
release cycle, and permissive license have led to its use as a
platform for building many commercial and open source
appliances, devices, and products. Many of the world's
largest IT companies use &os;:Apache
Apache - The Apache Software Foundation runs most of
its public facing infrastructure, including possibly one
of the largest SVN repositories in the world with over 1.4
million commits, on &os;.Apple
Apple - OS X borrows heavily from &os; for the
network stack, virtual file system, and many userland
components. Apple iOS also contains elements borrowed
from &os;.Cisco
Cisco - IronPort network security and anti-spam
appliances run a modified &os; kernel.Citrix
Citrix - The NetScaler line of security appliances
provide layer 4-7 load balancing, content caching,
application firewall, secure VPN, and mobile cloud network
access, along with the power of a &os; shell.Dell
KACE
Dell KACE - The KACE system management appliances run
&os; because of its reliability, scalability, and the
community that supports its continued development.Experts
Exchange
Experts Exchange - All public facing web servers are powered
by &os; and they make extensive use of jails to isolate
development and testing environments without the overhead
of virtualization.Isilon
Isilon - Isilon's enterprise storage appliances
are based on &os;. The extremely liberal &os; license
allowed Isilon to integrate their intellectual property
throughout the kernel and focus on building their product
instead of an operating system.iXsystems
iXsystems - The TrueNAS line of unified storage
appliances is based on &os;. In addition to their
commercial products, iXsystems also manages development of
- the open source projects PC-BSD and FreeNAS.
+ the open source projects TrueOS and FreeNAS.
Juniper
Juniper - The JunOS operating system that powers all
Juniper networking gear (including routers, switches,
security, and networking appliances) is based on &os;.
Juniper is one of many vendors that showcases the
symbiotic relationship between the project and vendors of
commercial products. Improvements generated at Juniper
are upstreamed into &os; to reduce the complexity of
integrating new features from &os; back into JunOS in the
future.McAfee
McAfee - SecurOS, the basis of McAfee enterprise
firewall products including Sidewinder is based on
&os;.NetApp
NetApp - The Data ONTAP GX line of storage
appliances are based on &os;. In addition, NetApp has
contributed back many features, including the new BSD
licensed hypervisor, bhyve.Netflix
Netflix - The OpenConnect appliance that Netflix
uses to stream movies to its customers is based on &os;.
Netflix has made extensive contributions to the codebase
and works to maintain a zero delta from mainline &os;.
Netflix OpenConnect appliances are responsible for
delivering more than 32% of all Internet traffic in North
America.Sandvine
Sandvine - Sandvine uses &os; as the basis of their
high performance realtime network processing platforms
that make up their intelligent network policy control
products.Sony
Sony - The PlayStation 4 gaming console runs a
modified version of &os;.Sophos
Sophos - The Sophos Email Appliance product is based
on a hardened &os; and scans inbound mail for spam and
viruses, while also monitoring outbound mail for malware
as well as the accidental loss of sensitive
information.Spectra
Logic
Spectra Logic - The nTier line of archive grade storage
appliances run &os; and OpenZFS.Stormshield
Stormshield - Stormshield Network Security appliances
are based on a hardened version of &os;. The BSD license
allows us to integrate our own intellectual property with
the system while returning a great deal of interesting
development to the community.The Weather
Channel
The Weather Channel - The IntelliStar appliance that is installed
at each local cable providers headend and is responsible
for injecting local weather forecasts into the cable TV
network's programming runs &os;.Verisign
Verisign - Verisign is responsible for operating the
.com and .net root domain registries as well as the
accompanying DNS infrastructure. They rely on a number of
different network operating systems including &os; to
ensure there is no common point of failure in their
infrastructure.Voxer
Voxer - Voxer powers their mobile voice messaging
platform with ZFS on &os;. Voxer switched from a Solaris
derivative to &os; because of its superior documentation,
larger and more active community, and more developer
friendly environment. In addition to critical features
like ZFS and DTrace, &os; also offers
TRIM support for ZFS.WhatsApp
WhatsApp - When WhatsApp needed a platform that would
be able to handle more than 1 million concurrent TCP
connections per server, they chose &os;. They then
proceeded to scale past 2.5 million connections per
server.Wheel
Systems
Wheel Systems - The FUDO security appliance allows
enterprises to monitor, control, record, and audit
contractors and administrators who work on their systems.
Based on all of the best security features of &os;
including ZFS, GELI, Capsicum, HAST, and
auditdistd.&os; has also spawned a number of related open source
projects:BSD
Router
BSD Router - A &os; based replacement for large
enterprise routers designed to run on standard PC
hardware.FreeNAS
FreeNAS - A customized &os; designed to be used as a
network file server appliance. Provides a python based
web interface to simplify the management of both the UFS
and ZFS file systems. Includes support for NFS, SMB/CIFS,
AFP, FTP, and iSCSI. Includes an extensible plugin system
based on &os; jails.GhostBSD
GhostBSD - A desktop oriented distribution of &os;
bundled with the Gnome desktop environment.mfsBSD
mfsBSD - A toolkit for building a &os; system image
that runs entirely from memory.NAS4Free
NAS4Free - A file server distribution based on &os;
with a PHP powered web interface.OPNSense
OPNsense - OPNsense is an open source, easy-to-use and
easy-to-build FreeBSD based firewall and routing platform.
OPNsense includes most of the features available in
expensive commercial firewalls, and more in many cases.
It brings the rich feature set of commercial offerings
with the benefits of open and verifiable sources.PC-BSD
+ xlink:href="https://www.trueos.org">TrueOS
- PC-BSD
+ TrueOS - A customized version of &os; geared towards
desktop users with graphical utilities to exposing the
power of &os; to all users. Designed to ease the
transition of Windows and OS X users.pfSense
pfSense - A firewall distribution based on &os; with
a huge array of features and extensive IPv6
support.ZRouter
ZRouter - An open source alternative firmware for
embedded devices based on &os;. Designed to replace the
proprietary firmware on off-the-shelf routers.&os; is also used to power some of the biggest sites on
the Internet, including:Yahoo!
Yahoo!Yandex
YandexRambler
RamblerSina
SinaPair
Networks
Pair NetworksSony
Japan
Sony JapanNetcraft
NetcraftNetflix
NetflixNetEase
NetEaseWeathernews
WeathernewsTELEHOUSE
America
TELEHOUSE Americaand many more. Wikipedia also maintains a list
of products based on &os;.About the &os; ProjectThe following section provides some background information
on the project, including a brief history, project goals, and
the development model of the project.A Brief History of &os;386BSD PatchkitHubbard, JordanWilliams, NateGrimes, RodFreeBSD ProjecthistoryThe &os; Project had its genesis in the early part
of 1993, partially as an outgrowth of the Unofficial
386BSDPatchkit by the patchkit's last 3 coordinators: Nate
Williams, Rod Grimes and Jordan Hubbard.386BSDThe original goal was to produce an intermediate snapshot
of 386BSD in order to fix a number of problems with it that
the patchkit mechanism just was not capable of solving. The
early working title for the project was 386BSD 0.5 or 386BSD
Interim in reference of that fact.Jolitz, Bill386BSD was Bill Jolitz's operating system, which had been
up to that point suffering rather severely from almost a
year's worth of neglect. As the patchkit swelled ever more
uncomfortably with each passing day, they decided to assist
Bill by providing this interim cleanup
snapshot. Those plans came to a rude halt when Bill Jolitz
suddenly decided to withdraw his sanction from the project
without any clear indication of what would be done
instead.Greenman, DavidWalnut Creek CDROMThe trio thought that the goal remained worthwhile, even
without Bill's support, and so they adopted the name "&os;"
coined by David Greenman. The initial objectives were set
after consulting with the system's current users and, once it
became clear that the project was on the road to perhaps even
becoming a reality, Jordan contacted Walnut Creek CDROM with
an eye toward improving &os;'s distribution channels for those
many unfortunates without easy access to the Internet. Walnut
Creek CDROM not only supported the idea of distributing &os;
on CD but also went so far as to provide the project with a
machine to work on and a fast Internet connection. Without
Walnut Creek CDROM's almost unprecedented degree of faith in
what was, at the time, a completely unknown project, it is
quite unlikely that &os; would have gotten as far, as fast, as
it has today.4.3BSD-LiteNet/2U.C. Berkeley386BSDFree Software
FoundationThe first CD-ROM (and general net-wide) distribution was
&os; 1.0, released in December of 1993. This was based
on the 4.3BSD-Lite (Net/2) tape from U.C.
Berkeley, with many components also provided by 386BSD and the
Free Software Foundation. It was a fairly reasonable success
for a first offering, and they followed it with the highly
successful &os; 1.1 release in May of 1994.NovellU.C. BerkeleyNet/2AT&TAround this time, some rather unexpected storm clouds
formed on the horizon as Novell and U.C. Berkeley settled
their long-running lawsuit over the legal status of the
Berkeley Net/2 tape. A condition of that settlement was U.C.
Berkeley's concession that large parts of Net/2 were
encumbered code and the property of Novell, who
had in turn acquired it from AT&T some time previously.
What Berkeley got in return was Novell's
blessing that the 4.4BSD-Lite release, when
it was finally released, would be declared unencumbered and
all existing Net/2 users would be strongly encouraged to
switch. This included &os;, and the project was given until
the end of July 1994 to stop shipping its own Net/2 based
product. Under the terms of that agreement, the project was
allowed one last release before the deadline, that release
being &os; 1.1.5.1.&os; then set about the arduous task of literally
re-inventing itself from a completely new and rather
incomplete set of 4.4BSD-Lite bits. The Lite
releases were light in part because Berkeley's CSRG had
removed large chunks of code required for actually
constructing a bootable running system (due to various legal
requirements) and the fact that the Intel port of 4.4 was
highly incomplete. It took the project until November of 1994
to make this transition, and in December it released
&os; 2.0 to the world. Despite being still more than a
little rough around the edges, the release was a significant
success and was followed by the more robust and easier to
install &os; 2.0.5 release in June of 1995.Since that time, &os; has made a series of releases each
time improving the stability, speed, and feature set of the
previous version.For now, long-term development projects continue to take
place in the 10.X-CURRENT (trunk) branch, and snapshot
releases of 10.X are continually made available from the
snapshot server as work progresses.&os; Project GoalsJordanHubbardContributed by FreeBSD ProjectgoalsThe goals of the &os; Project are to provide software
that may be used for any purpose and without strings attached.
Many of us have a significant investment in the code (and
project) and would certainly not mind a little financial
compensation now and then, but we are definitely not prepared
to insist on it. We believe that our first and foremost
mission is to provide code to any and all
comers, and for whatever purpose, so that the code gets the
widest possible use and provides the widest possible benefit.
This is, I believe, one of the most fundamental goals of Free
Software and one that we enthusiastically support.GNU General Public License (GPL)GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)BSD CopyrightThat code in our source tree which falls under the GNU
General Public License (GPL) or Library General Public License
(LGPL) comes with slightly more strings attached, though at
least on the side of enforced access rather than the usual
opposite. Due to the additional complexities that can evolve
in the commercial use of GPL software we do, however, prefer
software submitted under the more relaxed BSD copyright when
it is a reasonable option to do so.The &os; Development ModelSatoshiAsamiContributed by FreeBSD Projectdevelopment modelThe development of &os; is a very open and flexible
process, being literally built from the contributions of
thousands of people around the world, as can be seen from our
list
of contributors. &os;'s development infrastructure
allow these thousands of contributors to collaborate over the
Internet. We are constantly on the lookout for new developers
and ideas, and those interested in becoming more closely
involved with the project need simply contact us at the
&a.hackers;. The &a.announce; is also available to those
wishing to make other &os; users aware of major areas of
work.Useful things to know about the &os; Project and its
development process, whether working independently or in close
cooperation:The SVN repositoriesCVSCVS RepositoryConcurrent Versions SystemCVSSubversionSubversion RepositorySVNSubversion
For several years, the central source tree for &os;
was maintained by
CVS
(Concurrent Versions System), a freely available source
code control tool. In June 2008, the Project switched
to using SVN
(Subversion). The switch was deemed necessary, as the
technical limitations imposed by
CVS were becoming obvious due
to the rapid expansion of the source tree and the amount
of history already stored. The Documentation Project
and Ports Collection repositories also moved from
CVS to
SVN in May 2012 and July
2012, respectively. Please refer to the Synchronizing your source
tree section for more information on obtaining
the &os; src/ repository and Using the Ports
Collection for details on obtaining the &os;
Ports Collection.The committers listThe committerscommitters are the people who have
write access to the Subversion
tree, and are authorized to make modifications to the
&os; source (the term committer comes
from commit, the source control
command which is used to bring new changes into the
repository). Anyone can submit a bug to the Bug
Database. Before submitting a bug report, the
&os; mailing lists, IRC channels, or forums can be used to
help verify that an issue is actually a bug.The FreeBSD core teamThe &os; core teamcore team would be equivalent to the board of
directors if the &os; Project were a company. The
primary task of the core team is to make sure the
project, as a whole, is in good shape and is heading in
the right directions. Inviting dedicated and
responsible developers to join our group of committers
is one of the functions of the core team, as is the
recruitment of new core team members as others move on.
The current core team was elected from a pool of
committer candidates in July 2014. Elections are held
every 2 years.Like most developers, most members of the
core team are also volunteers when
it comes to &os; development and do not benefit from
the project financially, so commitment
should also not be misconstrued as meaning
guaranteed support. The
board of directors analogy above is not
very accurate, and it may be more suitable to say that
these are the people who gave up their lives in favor
of &os; against their better judgement!Outside contributorsLast, but definitely not least, the largest group of
developers are the users themselves who provide feedback
and bug fixes to us on an almost constant basis. The
primary way of keeping in touch with &os;'s more
non-centralized development is to subscribe to the
&a.hackers; where such things are discussed. See
for more information about
the various &os; mailing lists.The
&os; Contributors Listcontributors is a long and growing one, so why not join
it by contributing something back to &os; today?Providing code is not the only way of contributing
to the project; for a more complete list of things that
need doing, please refer to the &os; Project
web site.In summary, our development model is organized as a loose
set of concentric circles. The centralized model is designed
for the convenience of the users of &os;,
who are provided with an easy way of tracking one central code
base, not to keep potential contributors out! Our desire is to
present a stable operating system with a large set of coherent
application programs that the
users can easily install and use — this model works very
well in accomplishing that.All we ask of those who would join us as &os; developers
is some of the same dedication its current people have to its
continued success!Third Party ProgramsIn addition to the base distributions, &os; offers a
ported software collection with thousands of commonly
sought-after programs. At the time of this writing, there
were over &os.numports; ports! The list of ports ranges from
http servers, to games, languages, editors, and almost
everything in between. The entire Ports Collection requires
approximately &ports.size;. To compile a port, you simply
change to the directory of the program you wish to install,
type make install, and let the system do
the rest. The full original distribution for each port you
build is retrieved dynamically so you need only enough disk
space to build the ports you want. Almost every port is also
provided as a pre-compiled package, which can
be installed with a simple command
(pkg install) by those who do not wish to
compile their own ports from source. More information on
packages and ports can be found in
.Additional DocumentationAll recent &os; versions provide an option in the
installer (either &man.sysinstall.8; or &man.bsdinstall.8;) to
install additional documentation under
/usr/local/share/doc/freebsd during the
initial system setup. Documentation may also be installed at
any later time using packages as described in
. You may view the
locally installed manuals with any HTML capable browser using
the following URLs:The FreeBSD Handbook/usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/handbook/index.htmlThe FreeBSD FAQ/usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/faq/index.htmlYou can also view the master (and most frequently updated)
copies at http://www.FreeBSD.org/.