Results tagged “freebsd”

Every once in awhile, I start receiving the following daily email notification from my web server:

newsyslog: can't notify daemon, pid 569: No such process

If I don't do anything, the very same message will keep on arriving in my mailbox every single day for the rest of my life. The solution is probably pretty trivial, but I cannot figure out what is causing this to occur. I've already wasted way too much time digging around in the innards of my FreeBSD box trying to discover something unusual, but to no avail.

Not that such a trivial warning means the end of the world, but it really bugs me for some reason. I'm impatient and easily aggravated by inconsistencies. Just kill everything by rebooting the system and hoping that it will not come back (but it always does).

$ sudo shutdown -r now

All of a sudden I started receiving daily crontab email notifications from my web server with the following warning:

expiretable: Error opening "/dev/pf": No such file or directory

I checked my /etc/rc.conf and as expected it contained the following required lines:

$ vi /etc/rc.conf
pf_enable="YES"
pf_rules="/etc/pf.conf"
pflog_enable="YES"

So in theory everything should have started without any problems. Well, maybe not so just in case I fired off the following two commands:

$ kldload pf
$ /etc/rc.d/pf start
$ /etc/rc.d/pf status
No ALTQ support in kernel
ALTQ related functions disabled
Status: Enabled for 0 days 00:10:34           Debug: Urgent
...

Now working. If things go wrong again I'll have to investigate the problems better.

# portupgrade --batch -arR

 

I try to run this at least once a week so that my web server stays up to date.

This weekend they were having this big 25% computer sale at Media Markt, so I went there and decided to splurge on an ASUS X59SL-AP275C for my upcoming birthday.

Although it comes pre-installed with Windows Vista, the first thing I'm going to do is remove it and replace it with the latest version of my favorite operating system.

I'll go for the bleeding edge version FreeBSD 7.1-BETA and recompile the kernel with the new and vastly improved ULE scheduler.

$ cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf
$ cp GENERIC LAPTOP
vi LAPTOP

There are two things to change in this file then we can move to compiling and installing the new and improved kernel.

ident      LAPTOP
options    SCHED_ULE

That's all there is to it. I certainly hope that it works.

Hurrah, the book I ordered last week from amazon.co.uk has arrived and it's called "Building a Server With FreeBSD 7" by Bryan J. Hong, and I can't wait to read it

Sub-titles "A Modular Approach" it's full of valuable hints on how to install and configure your very own dream machine.

I'm a little bit weary about upgrading FreeBSD, but the new version has so many new features and improvements that I'd be foolish to wait much longer.

Appendix D gives a nice, succinct overview of the protocols.