So well I think time has come to fill you all in on a little secret.

I got my FreeBSD box finally up and running quite nicely and I will now state my opinion and critisism on FreeBSD 4.6 Stable release.

First of all, installation is probably the most user friendly I have found on any Unix variant type system, that means Linux is included. It boots from CD and then just asks you some simple stuff which even my 3 year old brother could figure out if he was able to read.

You can customize your installation completely and referencing to customization I was able to install a complete system with about 120 megs, which is quite nice. No added crap that I dont want (e.g. Games!!! GUI and so on). It has a neat little option which is Post Installation Tasks, this is where you can tell it what packages to install and where to install them from.
I personally started by installing the system core from the FBSD Mini ISO after that I rebooted and after logging in just typed the following to bring the setup configuration menu up.

$ /stand/sysinstall

You will see the same menu as before, but this time it has no installation media selected, which you can change quite easely from Post Install Tasks -> Media, I prefer installing 3rd party components directly through FTP or NFS, so I told it to use one of the IPV6 ready servers, which are based in Japan, ok I first used the Brazillian FTPs that are closer to me right now, but every now and again it would drop the connection. After using the Japanese servers nothing went wrong it was dling quite smoothly at around 30kbs which is about 3 times slower than what I was getting from some of the Brazillian servers but its ok, I am quite satisfied with waiting when everything goes automatically.

Now like with any other Unix based system you can switch terminals by hitting Alt + any F1 to F8 key, its extremely useful when needing to make some system changes. Now something which I did notice and did not like is that you can log in multiple sessions as Root and well I really dont like the idea of having a superuser account run twice at the same time, so until I figure out how to limit the login count, which I will probably have to edit somewhere in /etc/profile, I have changed the access of root to

$ usermod -s /usr/bin/rsh root

which changes it so that if root should log in it will only be able to run the restriced shell, which pretty much is a waste of time to use.

Now besides that I have also added another superuser but restricted the user to certain commands, I am not letting him access umount which would be a very stupid thing to do should unauthorized malicious access occur. But then there are endless ways to change [censored], Security was not really my primary objective on install, but securing a system can be real fun at times smile

Which is what I am looking out for right now.

Now back to the install of the sys. On install it is best to config your network settings as it will ease everything during 3rd party package installation.

Well sorry got to run now I am late, keep checking back Ill publish my entire config here and so on.


The use of "hacker" to mean "security breaker" is a confusion on the part of the mass media. We hackers refuse to recognize that meaning, and continue using the word to mean, "Someone who loves to program and enjoys being clever about it."
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"Its not a bug, its a feature" (Epic Games)