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The 3/2009 issue of BSDmag

Let’s help save BSDmag, either buy a PDF or the paper mag. To the left is the cover of the latest issue and here’s the contents.

Finally an update!

I finally have some time to update my blog, I was bitten by a spider and the Doc wanted me off of my feet for a few days until the swelling went down.
So here goes. A lot has happened in the last 3 months. Let me see if I can remember it all and try to keep it short.

Work Related:
- work has been mighty hectic, a lot of projects, tasks, problems, etc... But I have learned a lot from it. As they say experience is the best teacher.
- I am studying for my ITIL certification.
- I am also studying for my LPI certification.
- I will be studying for my Solaris certification after my ITIL and LPI exams.
- I will be studying for my BSD certification after my Solaris exam.
- I will be studying for my COBIT certification after my Solaris and FreeBSD exams.
- Future - Study for my Cisco CCNA.
- Future - study for my Cisco CCSP.

Computer Related:
- I have dropped the rylos.co.cc domain! CO.CC was going to charge me for it when I subscribed for free. It's going to take me a while to update all my personal info on all the sites I have accounts on.
- Since I have gotten the BSD fever again. I decided to reordered my old domain onlybsd.com from GoDaddy.com.
- I also setup Google Apps for onlybsd.com.
- I redesigned my old site for www.OnlyBSD.com.
- I also setup a Tumblr site, Daily.OnlyBSD.com for daily updates.
- I also setup a FreeBSD wallpaper site for the the FreeBSD community.

Ports management in FreeBSD

After re-installing FreeBSD 7.1 for testing numerous time, I decided to not use portupgrade anymore. I have decided to switch to a non-db backend system with bpkg and portmaster for my ports management. Bpkg is da bomb, you can do all types of queries on installed/not-installed ports. My favorite is "bpkg -p $1 | egrep '^[a-z]'". I have added it as a function called "sp" to my .zshrc file. With the output I can just copy and paste to a portmaster line, now that's super easy. Be sure to check out all the options for bpkg.

My server install of FreeBSD

Well, after trying a few test install of FreeBSD 7.1, I have finally decided to stick with this one. This will be my network management headless server. This system will not have X installed so I have added "WITHOUT_X11=yes" to my /etc/rc.conf file to make sure nothing X will be installed. I always make sure before I install a port just in case it has some type of X dependencies.

Also, I will be testing out jails on this server. I'll keep notes and create a blog entry.

Checking a script for Bashisms on FreeBSD

First you need to read the web page DashAsBinSh. It will explain a lot.

1. Then install 'archivers/dpkg' from ports.
2. Then download the deb package from the bottom of this page - devscripts
---- I picked the x86 package.
3. Then unarchive the downloaded deb packed to a temporary directory,
---- dpkg -X devscripts_2.10.26ubuntu15_i386.deb tempdirname.
4. The files that are needed are
---- tempdir/usr/bin/checkbashisms
---- tempdir/usr/share/man/man1/checkbashisms.1.gz
5. copy these files to the appropiate location in /usr/local
6. Now you can delete the packges installed by step 1, just be sure they aren't need by other packages
---- devel/p5-ExtUtils-CBuilder
---- devel/p5-ExtUtils-ParseXS
---- textproc/p5-YAML
---- devel/p5-Module-Build
---- devel/p5-Term-ReadKey
---- textproc/libtext-charwidth-perl
---- textproc/libtext-wrapi18n-perl
---- textproc/p5-SGMLSpm
---- textproc/po4a
---- devel/patch
---- sysutils/coreutils
---- archivers/dpkg

FreeBSD Again! 3

After reading Contributing to FreeBSD I felt kind of sad. I have used FreeBSD since 1993 and I have not given back that much to the BSD community. That is going to change! I have created a Picasa FreeBSD Wallpaper Album and I am drafting some posts of a fresh FreeBSD 7.1 install that will include a basic setup. There will be hopefully the following entries.

- What do I do after the install
- Different ways to update the OS
- Different ways to install ports
- Installing Jails with ezjail

And a lot more, but please read Contributing to FreeBSD, it might change your mind about contributing to your favorite free software project.

FreeBSD Again! 2

After installing and testing FreeBSD 7.1, I have decided to change course for this Blog. I am going to write a few FreeBSD entries. So stay tuned, they might be of interest to some one I hope.

FreeBSD Again!

Well I have been bitten by the FreeBSD bug again. After looking at FreeBSD 7.1 and the upcoming 8 release I have decided to install it on a spare box and not a VM. Here is some pages with the 7.1 notes and the 8.0 notes. FreeBSD 8 looks awesome with Jails V2, XEN dom-u support, and Network stack virtualization. Kinda makes me want to do network stack programming again!