FreeBSD

I began using FreeBSD upon starting employment at CipherTrust (later Secure Computing and now McAfee). Coming from ~8 years of Linux background, FreeBSD represented all of unpleasant surprises, interesting new solutions, and my first real new exploration through the UNIX/POSIXverse.

• Updating FreeBSD
• FreeBSD APIs

Useful things to do

• Edit /boot/loader.conf and add the line kern.vty=sc. Reboot. You can now manipulate your VGA console with vidcontrol.

Building Ports as a User

Read the ports(7) man page. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to document the INSTALL_AS_USER or PORT_DBDIR environment variables. There's two ways to do this:

• Replicate a Ports tree (for instance, using the portsnap tool with the -d and -p flags) of your own, and export PORTSDIR to point there. If you intend to do this, it's a good idea to copy and modify portsnap.conf; this can be specified to portsnap via the -f flag.

[zaebros](0) $ mkdir var/db/portsnap
[zaebros](0) $ portsnap -d ~/var/db/portsnap -p ~/usr/ports fetch
Looking up portsnap.FreeBSD.org mirrors... using portsnap2.FreeBSD.org
Fetching public key... done.
Fetching snapshot tag... done.
Fetching snapshot metadata... done.
Fetching snapshot generated at Mon Dec 29 01:47:08 UTC 2008:
6bf58ae284670960568d398d71f819924bd7d85ff37d9e100% of   54 MB  123 kBps 00m00s
Extracting snapshot... done.
Verifying snapshot integrity... done.
Fetching snapshot tag... done.
Latest snapshot on server matches what we already have.
No updates needed.
[zaebros](0) $ 

Getting sudo

Install security/sudo from the Ports Collection. Your sudoers file lives in /usr/local/etc/sudoers.

To add a user to the wheel group, use pw group mod wheel -m USER