Welcome 4.10!

FreeBSD 4.10 has finally been announced. This is probably the last 4.x point release I guess. Soon we'll be making the big move to 5.x. I'll probably wait until the excitement has died down before making the move myself.

FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE Announcement

Graphical firewall builder

One of the complaints in the Distrowatch.com review of FreeBSD was the lack of a graphical front end to build the firewall configuration file for ipfilter. Well, complain no more, for here it is:

Port description for security/fwbuilder

Of course, I can't use it, because I don't run X on my server. But if/when I get around to building my other machine, the backup machine, I might play with it then.

FreeBSD review on Distrowatch.com

A cool Linux site is Distrowatch.com. It lists all the gazillion different Linux distributions, and their current state, and how to get them. It's a pretty neat web site, and I sometimes surf over, download an interesting distro, try it out and move on. In fact, oddly enough, I am currently downloading one just recently mentioned on the web site - CRUX, which is a source distro, very much like FreeBSD!

It looks like they have added BSDen to their watch as well. And here is a very long article reviewing FreeBSD 5.x:

DistroWatch.com: FreeBSD review

portcheckout

What to do if you don't want to, or don't have, the entire ports tree and need to install a port? Well, portcheckout is one option. Using just the /usr/ports/INDEX file, it will dumpt to stdout the commands to be used to build the port. This way, you can just go get the parts needed, rather than the whole tree.

One note is that the man page isn't all that clear on exactly what is required. But the implication is that you need the INDEX file from the ports tree, and probably nothing else. Of course, in these days of 400gb hard drives, the ports tree is a miniscule disk hit!

FreeBSD Hypertext Man Pages: portcheckout

Forcing an update

The ports system can get quite confusing, and one of the tougher problems is getting something to update correctly. For instance, say you have v2.1 of something installed. But the latest is version 2.2 and you want to just skip to that version. But other ports depend on the 2.1, so you don't want to just pkg_deinstall (or you can't). The way to do it is to "force" the upgrade.

Most Unix commands have an option that says "I know better than you, so just let me do it already and stop complaining". For instance, the -f option for the rm command forces it to just work. A scary option, to be sure, but sometimes a necessary one.

The port utilities are no exception. Most of them have a -f option that just says "Do this and don't complain". pkg_delete has it, so it will delete the port even if there are other dependencies. And so does portupgrade. So the way to fix the above problem is:

$ portupgrade -o -f

This tells portupgrade to update with , and just do what I say, please. Read the voluminous man page here:

FreeBSD Hypertext Man Pages: portupgrade

FreeBSD security

A good starting point for securing your FreeBSD machine is the Security chapter in the all-important FreeBSD Handbook:

Introduction

searching ports

Something I always forget how to do is to search the ports collection for a particular port. For instance, I couldn't remember which directory my ftp server port (in this case bftpd - see link at bottom) was in. A very simple command would have told me:

$ cd /usr/ ports

$ make search name=bftpd

This searches the port collection for any ports that contain the search string. Simple!

bFTPD.org - FTP server for Linux, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, Solaris, DG-UX and Tru64 ]

IPFilter and PF resources

More info on setting up IPFilter. Someday I'll get my firewall up and running. I shouldn't keep putting it off, though, because when it is too late...

IPFilter and PF Resources of obfuscation.org