Tuesday, January 20, 2004

FreeBSD LiveCD project

What a great idea! A set of scripts that builds an image to burn on a CD. This image is a complete, bootable FreeBSD installation. This would be especially nice for doing full backups.



The FreeBSD LiveCD Project



Burning CDs

Quick List of apps for burning CDs on FreeBSD:


  • mkisofs --- for creating iso's

  • burncd --- for ATAPI CDRW

  • cdrecord --- for SCSI CDRW, and SCSI emulation of ATAPI CDRW



Thanks to Shantanoo Mahajan on the Freebsd-questions list for such a concise listing.





Friday, January 2, 2004

Ports help

Ports Tricks by Dru Lavigne -- One of FreeBSD's biggest benefits is its ports collection. You can go years without learning more than just make install clean, but there are dozens of features built into the ports tools. Dru Lavigne demonstrates several of these tricks to simplify your life.



Tuesday, December 30, 2003

BSDForums

bsdforums.org - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MacOS X, Darwin, Linux, Unix forums, message boards, discussions and news.


Cool looking discussion site for all forms of BSDen.




syslog info

Yes, I'm reading the FreeBSD Questions mailing list again. It is amazing how much good info you can get from there, even if the traffic is heavy:

lists.freebsd.org Mailing Lists


This time, it lead me to a cool command:

FreeBSD Hypertext Man Pages: newsyslog

This command has a config file that lists all the log files that syslogd creates. You can control how often the log files are rotated. One neat thing is just seeing all the various log files listed. You can also find more syslog info in the man entry for syslog.conf.




Drive testing utility

Hitachi Downloads - Some free utilities from Hitachi. Most important is their Drive Fitness Test. You download an installer (either Windows or Linux) that creates a bootable floppy. You boot this floppy and run the test. Looks quite useful.