cvsup examples

Here is the path to example command files for the very important cvsup command:

/usr/share/examples/cvsup

chkrootkit

Interesting package that checks all your system files to make sure there a trojan horse program hasn't modified any of them:

chkrootkit -- locally checks for signs of a rootkit

Port description for security/chkrootkit

BSD History lesson

Nice BSD history lesson. Only goes up to about 2000, but still gives a nice, in-depth view of how BSD in general came up.

O'Reilly Network: 20 Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable [Mar. 14, 2000]

Find the fastest cvsup server

Cool little PERL utility to ping all the various cvsup servers and find the "fastest" one - ie, the one that currently has the lowest response time. Actually, it gives you the top three. So of course it is merely a slice in time, but hey, at least it gives you something to go off of.

A sample command line might be:

$ fastest_cvsup -c us

This will find the fastest ones in the United States.

Port description for sysutils/fastest_cvsup

Upgrade!

Well, I just upgraded my FreeBSD 4.7 system to 4.9 and things are looking pretty good so far. Sometimes, bugs show up in the strangest places, but the server and such are all running okay, so I'm pretty happy with the move. Now I just need to figure out how to best keep it up to date vis-a-vis the 4.9-RELENG tag. I do a cvsup as required, but I just need to nail down the exact steps needed to keep the actual installation up to date. Like when exactly do I need to do more? Do I just do the complete cycle, including mergemaster? Or is just building the kernel enough? Ahh, things to figure out...

m0n0wall

Another small FreeBSD variant, which gives you a complete embedded firewall. It also claims to have the "first" boot-time php configuration.:

m0n0wall

NetBoz

An interesting FreeBSD variant - a single bootable CD that will turn your old Pentium class PC into a FreeBSD firewall machine. I just might give this one a try:

NetBoz Firewall