Using Samba

Complete text for the invaluable O'Reilly book, Using Samba :

Using Samba

Samba HOWTO Collection

Probably one of the most used, least understood and most problematic port is SAMBA. You use Samba to interface with Windows network shares, either mountint them on your FreeBSD machine (that's how I use it), or mounting FreeBSD folders on Windows machines. It's kind of a pain to configure and get running, so there's lots and lots of questions on it on the freebsd-questions mailing list. Here's a link to the canonical list of Samba HOWTOs:

Samba HOWTO Collection

PPP

How to use PPP article. I think the title is supposed to be on a cable modem, not or a cable modem, though. Also note that a user who wishes to do this needs to be a member of the dialer group, as well as the network group as mentioned in the article, or so I've read about FreeBSD 5.x. Not sure about 4.x, as I don't use PPP.

ONLamp.com: Connecting to the Internet Using PPP or a Cable Modem [Jun. 14, 2000]

Also, see the man page for ppp:

FreeBSD Hypertext Man Pages: ppp

Monitoring Programs

A couple programs you can use to monitor your computer. They will check various statuses and email you if there is a problem. I'm going to probably give Nagios a try, as it is in the ports:

• 
  Port description for net/nagios
  


• Big Brother is the free version of Big Brother Professional; the pro version adds lots of configuration stuff and ease of use. Big Brother System and Network Monitor
  

BSDNexus.com

Interesting little site with lots of BSD links:

BSDnexus.com - home of the daemon

Updating a Binary FreeBSD

If you've installed FreeBSD via a binary, rather than from the source, it can be a bit of a pain getting the updates. Here's a site that runs a server that rebuilds all the security updates, and provides them as an update to binary systems, ala the Windows Update tool in WinNT/WinXP. I do it from the source (via cvsup), so I don't use this service, but it probably is a life-saver for some!

FreeBSD Update

FreeBSD firewall config

Yet Another Page showing a HOW-TO configure a firewall for FreeBSD. Oddly enough, it doesn't say whether it is ipfw or ipfilter, but I'm pretty sure it is ipfw:

FreeBSD Firewall Configuration