SAS Memories

by

SAS_Cpl_Spidey01, a personale history.

The first time I set foot in the ol’Training Grounds I remember following a SAS_Rct_Raptis around, A SAS_LCpl_Hollow and another LCpl_R some one where also on the server. That was roughly two years ago. I played on/off until I got serious maybe a few months before my Rct Tryout. I wasn’t yet sure if I liked RvS.

The next time I started playing on TG#1 I remember JB the cool guy with a AK47, Adze as ether LCpl or Cpl and a few other members. Bronco, DM, Count, Cobra, Blade, En4cer e.t.c. Some regular on the server by the name of Grayfox I think, thought me a few simple basics when we where on another Missions server. RvS was getting cool but I made friends in another game.

Later on I pop’d in when we had TG#1 and TG#2 going with RvS and one server was running Force on Force training (Advers HR/Pilot/Bomb). I hung around epecially amazed by SAS_Cpl’s Adze, Blade, and JB. Put in an app some months later, dropped away to join friends in another game awhile later. By this time I had an app in and was the only Non SAS member activly posting on the forums lol….

One day, I’ll never forget it no matter how hard. I remember Random and Coop were in the server. I was so excited to see how the LtCol and 1st LT played. They worked as a 2-Man element, other SAS and my self joining in from time to time. I was simply astonished by the way these two members played together so well. I started trying to mimic what I saw Coop do as #2 Cover man and it set my favorite duty. I’d usually try to find some one to give cover to and do my best. Awhile before I met Leon. Soon after I met Recon when Allystrike wa son the rotation. Not but least Matsuro 🙂

My next hop several months later, I remeber meeting a SAS_Trp_Wiz and SAS_Rct_Rand out of the blue. Wiz eventially got me and felt (Python) into some uber basic training. I spent a fair bit of time along side Rand who showed me a few things. I enjoyed very much when Rand and I did a tough map together working our way through the mud and tangos till we did it without rasing any alarms. I dropped for awhile for some league matches in MW4.

After some time I returned to RvS and Swat4 when it came out. At SAS_LCpl_Wizs’ advice I sent in a new app, I had cancled my origenal one b/c I had stopped playing RvS. I worked to improve my skill in hopes of being a decent applicant. The young SAS_Trp_Rand took me under his wing one day, showed me the basic training that I would need for passing a tryout. V-Coms, Movement, e.t.c. and helped me learn some Common Sense better then others did. During this time I spent most of my time training on TG#2 Iron Wrath with Rand, JB and Wiz and others hanging around. I played a good deal of S4 but I switched mostly to RvS so I could join faster. Blade got his Comp fixed and Wiz gave me TS Privs. British accents are nice. I soon got to know the members voices, ahh I remember wanting to strangle JB and Blade at first for confusing me. I wasn’t yet used to playing RvS with TS2 and there was plenty of jokes here and there at funny happenings on the server. Felt changed his name to Python and became a Rct.

Thanks to the fatherly guidence of a good Trooper and the faith of a new Cpl I took my troopers tryout and passed on the second try. Relish conducted it, Adze Soon the new Trooper Python was the perfect example, SAS_Cpl soon SAS_Sgt_Wiz a watchful mentor, SAS_Cpl_JB a nudging shadow when I needed guidence, SAS_Sgt_James my corrector, SAS_SSgt_En4cer a man of tactics, SAS_Cpl_Relish my Dynamic Instructor 🙂 I played more S4 and got to see alot more of CO Random but still kept around RvS and trained. SAS_Rct_Rasa and SAS_Rct_Leon aka “The Human Machine” where my training buddies. Around this period I noticed a few good lads. Coq_Rouge, Jso, SFC (aka Trp_Ghost), Fritz of Swat4, then another player we best know as Qwerty, and more I can’t remember everyone. I was hoping most of them (particually Coq & Fritz and later SFC) would put serious effort into becoming SAS members. During this time I know Taris and Moebious left.

Soon I became a Trooper, I worked hard to make my self the best I could be and still stuck around with my ol’training mates. Wiz was Sgt by now and I think Jay left around this time. One player I noticed really looked good was Coq_Rouge, I never knew if he had an app in but I liked his style. Soon enough in time Coq_Rouge became SAS_Rct_Rouge and then Trooper. Fritz became Rct but had to leave because of family matters. best damn Swat4 player I’ve ever seen when it came to covering. between the two of us, we could find an angle to cover any where. I sat in on several tryouts, attended some trainnig sessions led by James and Rand. I was generally a flounder as a Trooper IMHO. One day a greenish kid pops in to the server one Monday or so. He wanted a Tryout by Wednesday or Thursday. I tried to make sure he stayed out of trouble after he became serious. Soon he was SAS_Rct_Mando and made trooper after awhile. SFC changed his name to Ghost when he became Recruit IIRC. Dave came back from the dead Coop recruited Qwerty, Jso joined us and Qwerty left us. (to put it shortly). I met Darkwolf, SDSnipe, Sacer_Miles, Noer, and others. One day a man by the name of SJMerge dropped in on IG Olsons Estate. I was like WTH ether this guy was one of us or he’s like Green beret. Sure enough he was a SWAT officer home on pain meds from dential surgery and has never played so good again ! haha. I poke’d a bit for him to invistigate SAS and hoped very dearly he’d drop us an app. I was happy to see my friend Rasa become the first of us three stooges make JNCO (LCpl to yall). Eventially SJMerge,Hexen, Noer and Miles became Rct but much later on then this. Around this time after awhile LCpl_Rand dropp’d off the map. Some time in this period, Random stepped down and Heim became CO. Bronco left us and some AWOL members got took off the mighty page.

I met Lazkostriker and Foxthreat some time before or after but I was stopping to play S4 alot in the hopes of getting closer to training ops. Blade and JB became Sgts, I think some one must’ve sent GCHQ a few rounds of white russians because eventially Rouge, Leon, and Recon became LCpl and so did I. I resigned to the fact that I was given another chance, try and be helpful. I’ve done what I could. I lived to see desasitors strike. The “Sabre Incident” as I call it. Squabble between RSM_James, Capt_En4cer, SSM_Wiz, most of Sabre pissed. All three where demoted in the end, two trying self demotion /or resignation. GCHQ sorted it and things where water under the bridge. Shield had become CO a bit before this when Heim had stepped down. Mando left around this chuck of time requesting Vet from GCHQ and got it.

Fences mended and life continued. One day before or after Sabre our site got cracked and we fought back without sinking to there level – Heim even threatend to sick lawyers on him. You don’t want a Doctors lawyer after you !!!! That poor sods not coming back me thinks. Then one day a ruckus between the command structure aka the James incident. James was kicked out for disobeying Commanders orders about the Admin controls or some thing. Rand put forth his request to be removed from the roster after a few months abense. I don’t care to remeber or hear it put forward. Eventually this up roar ended in peace. One day Random made me cry, he went veteran. Noer became Trp, Fox and Lazko rcts soon enough Foxthreat was a Trooper. Blast him even as a new Rct he fitted in so well you’d hardly know he wasn’t born a [SAS] Trooper.

Wiz took care of the site, Shield kept order and joined the army and took care of liife while we grew stonger. Random returned, En4cer and Blade where home. We had a nice admin reform at a price of dear blood. I saw changes in the recruitment process and Sacer_Miles and Hexen become our gina pigs for testing it.

I saw my friends Leon and Rouge become Cpl and Recon go vet. Some one must have been drinking because I was asked to start learning about tryouts, after doing my first tryout I was promoted to Cpl soon after. I now work

Troubles with the site and idiots out to break into it caused problems, eventually the admins shut it down to stop attacks and Wiz rebuilt the site for us and eventually it was restored to working order.

This is as much of [SAS] history as I’ve lived through, more or less in cronological order with as many details as I can recal right now. I’ll probably edit in more if I remember it tonight, I also need to finish editing in my additions to my PC-BSD review before I post it in the PC-BSD Lounge.

PC-BSD Users Review

by

Well, I thought it was about time I got around to doing this properly.

I’ve been using PC-BSD for approx. 10 Months so I’ve had enough time to see what life throws at me with it. My first install was 1.0 Release Candidate (RC) 1 and I currently run PC-BSD 1.2 (the current release) on my laptop and have a beta version of 1.3 installed on my desktop for testing. This will cover PC-BSD 1.2 and PC-BSD in general.

PC-BSD is primarily for desktops but makes a darn good laptop/workstation system. I won’t cover installation details as this is changing in future versions and often reviewed. My reviews sole interest is in a End User perspective (imho).

The Desktop. Well the default desktop on PC-BSD is pretty simple, it uses a program called “KDE” to put it simply to offer use a sweet system. The prepared setup is what most users should feel comfortable with, bottom bar with a applications menu and a few icons (personal files and web browser/file manager IIRC). A system tray and a clock, task bar in the bottom bar showing all running windows e.t.c. Trashcan and a few Icons on the desktop with (currently) a nice blue PC-BSD wall paper, in the old days there was a yellow field of flowers on a mountain top. For stuff a new user might not be familiar with let me explain some stuff. We have a simple applications or “K-Menu” that you click on the icon (the red one, bottom left corner.) and it presents the usual. Neatly grouped into catagories such as Games, Internet, Multimedia e.t.c This is a lot more logical then a certain other OS which tries to hide and poorly sort it’s start menu by default 😛

You should probably have a “House” like icon, clicking this opens Konqueror in file manager mode to your home directory. A home directory is a users personal space, by default you have folders such as Documents, Images, Music, e.t.c. You should have another icon next to this that when clicked should open Konqueror ether as a File Manager or a Web browser (it does both). You can think of Konqueror as the Windows/Internet Explorer and Finder/Safari of PC-BSD. It’s got a Mozilla Firefox feel to its web browsing but is not a Mozilla. Useful options for it include tabbed browsing (soon to hit Internet Explorer via Suggested Updates), spell checking, downloader, password/form manager, Google tool bar and quick Wikipedia lookups and more. In your system tray you should see a number of little icons. A clip board named “Klipper” that helps with cut, copy, and paste operations. You can cut (control+x), copy (control+c), and paste (control+v) like normal and you can highlight text with your mouse and press in the mouse wheel (button 3) to paste it without using your usual CC&P stuff -> And keep two things copied ! If you ever want to recall some thing you copied you can click on klipper and find it to use again quickly. It can also be cleared for privacy needs.

You will have a network applet giving status of your internet connection, you can open it give it the admin password and toy with your network settings if needed. The tool is borrowed from DesktopBSD and supports WEP crypto for Wifi users. (PC-BSD supports real crypto but not in the DBSD gui). Laptop users are least, a battery monitor, KOrganizer a nice Organizer program and possibly a volume control. A number of programs can be made to use or not use the system tray, so with things like Kopete (instant messenger) you can choose if you want a system tray icon or not. You might notice a little set of boxes around ether side of the panel. This is called a “Pager”, how it works is simple. If you open konqueror it is on the current “Virtual Desktop”, you click one of the boxes and your on another “Virtual Desktop”, you can open KMail and check your mail then click the first box again and go back to konqueror. Completely different sets of windows on different work spaces. For new computer users this is not some thing you need to care about but for “Multi-taskers” it rocks and rolls. Theres also some eye-candy replacements for the pager you can install. (I recommend kompose).

Configuring your desktop is pretty easy, right click on the desktop and click configure desktop. It’ll open a nice window to setup options such as: Desktop background (Wallpaper), which can be set to a different one for each virtual desktop. A number of expected options are available including the option of making your wallpaper change over time automatically (Slide show). On the behavior tab you can change how the desktop works. Things like what the mouse buttons do, device icons e.t.c. On the Multiple Desktops tab you can specify the number and names of the Virtual Desktops you want. I’ll have 2 to 4 depending on wall paper moods. Currently I run 3 Virtual Desktops. On the Screen saver tab you can set your screen saver and it’s settings. Clicking the Display tab lets you adjust your screen resolution, refresh rate, and monitor power saving scheme. Usually you should have 800×600 or 1024×768, on the PC-BSD beta I got about 1280×1024 out of the box. If you can’t select the res you want you will need to edit a settings file with the details of your monitor. (You can try to have it do auto-detection). You can click on the bottom bar or “Panel” to configure it as well as add extra “applets”, icons, more panels, external task bars, a kasbar (which would be more familiar to Windowmaker users) and all kinds of stuff – as well as configure your panel. I usually run my panel(s) transparent. Currently I have 3, a really small one lower left-hand for the K-Menu, a Konqueror profiles applet, and Seamonkey. One lower right hand for a system tray and one up top that is a “External task bar” that I have set to auto hide it self. By default you just get one panel across the bottom of the screen. If you click the little arrow on the edge you can hide/unhide it all together.

A lot more settings can be tuned from the control center under the K-Menu or there applets listed in the K-Menu under “Settings” including user management.

Ok lets talk turkey, uh software. What can we do out of the box with PC-BSD? Well lets have a look see. We have a number of games listed in Games-> Arcade, Board Games, Card Games, Tactics & Strategy, and one under Kids in the K-Menus games folder. Good fun for wasting time, I’ll let you decide what to play. My only complaint is no Chess or Centipede included out of the box :@ But for solitaire lovers there is kpatience which is like 20 different solitaire games in one, found in Games->Card Games on the K-Menu.

If you need some graphical software we can use Kolour Paint for simple art, KSnapshot for taking a screen shot of the desktop. As well as a bunch of image/file viewers including decent software for viewing .pdf and .ps files. I suggest Inkscape or Gimp for real work, see www.pbidir.com or ports.

For the Internet lover in all of us we have a lot of software. We have Akregator a RSS/Atom news reader – I like it and it exports/imports to OPML and XML. KGet download manager, a nice app if you need it which also has konqueror and system tray embedding options. KMail the default E-Mail client. It’s nothing special but it does have Pretty Good Privacy (Crypto) support built in afaik. Works ok but I prefer Seamonkies mail&newsgroups. It has import for *Mozilla/Netscape, Outlook Express, Evolution mailboxes and more. KNetAttach a Wizard for network resources. KNode a rock’n News reader (USENET or NNTP Newsgroup). I like it very much although I’ve yet to be able to find a decent news server. KPPP a GUI for dealing with Dial up. Best forget Dial up in this age IMHO but if it’s all you got… Ksirc a very simple, user friendly if not feature full IRC (Internet Relay Chat) Client. Konqueror a web browser and file manager with good standards compliance. Safari or Firefox users should feel homey with it (layout and UI respectively). Kopete a Instant Messaging Client that supports MSN, AIM, Gadu-Gadu, Novell Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, Jabber, SMS, Yahoo, and it’s own prototype protocol out of the box. You can be logged into multiple networks at once in one buddy window. I don’t care to much for the client, it feels more like traditional MSN/AOL/IMs in general. – I like Gaim which is like the new AOL AIM client but without the adds or bloat. Kopete is great for Joe user though. A few MSN clones are available on www.pbidir.com as of this writing called. One called aMSN is made to make MSN users feel at home in many ways. You also have Remote Desktop connection and sharing. You can even connect via VNC and RDP. On Windows XP Pro you can use RDP for desktop sharing but on Home and older systems you basically can only connect not share I think. KDE has two programs one to share one to connect. The X Windows System offers a limited form of this as well using it’s own technology.

For Multimedia work we have a few nice apps. Since various countries have laws and such you may as well go to www.pbidir.com, run a search for codecs & download the “Essential Codecs PBI” so you can watch encrypted DVDs and play MP3/WMV/WMA files and the like. We have KAduioCreator for CD Ripping. You will need to setup the encoders. I’ve never used it as I don’t really buy or download music often but you can setup most you will need. You have OggEnc (.ogg files), Lame (.mp3 files), and FLAC (.flac files). KMix for adjusting sound settings. KRec a recording tool, Kaffeine the standard media player. I personally find kaffeine a bit jumpy but in PC-BSD 1.3 it’s looking at better stability as it’s been upgraded but still not perfect. You can play DVD, .avi, .mkv, .wma,.wmv, .wav, .ogg, .flac, .mpg, .m4a, allot of stuff basically if you install the Codecs PBI. I personally prefer Amarok for music and MPlayer for video. You have KsCD a Analog CD Player – if you can’t use this it’s because your computer does not have the cable between CD-ROM and Sound card for analog playback, use kaffine instead. I think KsCD will be dropped soon ! Theres a few more stuff here but it’s not important. There is also MPlayer for the advanced Move Player in all of us. The new All Codecs PBI works with MPlayer unlike the Essential Codecs PBI and should be able to replace Essential Codecs. If you uninstall the Essential Codecs you’ll have to change settings in Kaffeine to play *WMV files. In 1.2 MPlayer was poorly compiled and doesn’t have GUI support but in the 1.3Beta it’s done right (includes gui support). I recommend the Amarok and VLC PBIs as well as the codecs:)

For Office users we have basically a few good apps including Kontact which combines a number of programs into a single personal information manager. From it you can use the supplied E-Mail, Notes, Newsgroups reader, RSS/Atom news reader, To-Do Lists, Organizer, Alarm clock, Address book, and theres even a few tools for Palm pilot people, I don’t own a PDA that advanced so I can’t help you there brother. If you want some solid office work go to www.pbidir.com and look in the office category. You can find word processors, spread sheets e.t.c. There is also the OpenOffice.org and KOffice office suites that each give you a full featured office suite. I love MS Word as much as the next person but I prefer OpenOffice to the other options. Especially since Open and K Office are Free and Open Source where most Office suites are closed source and cost ALOT. OO.o gives a word proc, spread sheet, database, image, formulas, and presentation program at least. KOffice gives you the mother load.

A number of basic utils are around including. KSysGuard a task manager, KInfoCenter a detailed system information tool, KNotes sticky notes for your desktop (I love this app), KJots out liner, KCron task scheduler, Disk Usage, Floppy formatter, and a removable media util. USB, CD/DVD disks should auto-mount with a pop-up asking what to do (usually).

We have a bunch of accessibility tools which I hope will be expanded in future releases. For utils and candy – We’ve got KCalc the most important item (a calculator), SuperKaramba desktop widgets which might be familer to Mac OS X users more so. You can have little applets on your desktop like system monitors or Media player controls e.t.c. You’ve got KPGP a crypto tool and shedder (hoozah), Groupware Wizard, Alarm program, news ticker and a few other apps. Theres an Archiving tool named “ark” that will handle compressed archives. It can handle Gzip, BZip2, Zip, Tar, LHA, LZopped, BZip, Debian pkg, AR Archive (.a), and with support tools added via PBI or ports 7z and RAR files, Users of OLD versions of PC-BSD had to install support for .ZIP but now it’s included. You’ll still need 7Zip and RAR from www.pbidir.com though 😀

Most people should be familiar with .Zip no matter what OS your used to. I reccomend using GZip which gives .tgz or .tar.tgz files depending on how you use it. For when your making a compressed file on PC-BSD. Use the .zip for sharing with Windows users. Bzip2 (.bz2, .tar.bz2) or 7Zip (.7z) is nice if you need smaller files too. Unix likes are a bit different about this then just Zipp’ing it and that warrants an article on it’s own. I just suggest Zip and GZip formats depending on your needs.

For the most important programs we have the Text Editors. KEdit, KWrite, and Kate. KEdit is a very simple editor, think of it like Notepad. It’s ok for quick edits and supports some basic key combos. KWrite is a more powerful editor and what I recommend. It has syntax highlighting which makes life easier when you edit a config file or if your writing HTML or a script e.t.c. I think you can also do spell checking IIRC. My favorite is Kate, you could say it’s the Midnight Commander of editors. It has a small file browser, terminal, and embedded KWrite editor in one window. It’s very good for writing console software and it’s geared towards programmers. It uses KWrite for editing afaik but with more just for programming 🙂

Kate is very nice and is more configurable then KWrite or KEdit. Also last but not least you have the humble “Konsole” a Terminal Emulator like cmd.exe or XTerm. It’s very nice and supports tabs, my favorite way to use the command line. CLI Warriors and GNU/Linux/BSD/Unix avids will find a Bourne style shell as sh, the Tenix C-Shell (tcsh), and he Bourne Again Shell (bash) installed. The “sh” is based on ash not linked to bash so be careful when scripting.

I find that PC-BSD is very configurable and allots me a lot of freedom without me having to break it’s arm. A lot of the software is Free and Open Source (two different things). Theres a few commercial apps that come as PBI as well. Underneath PC-BSD you have a full FreeBSD 6.1-Release (as of this writing) system. You can do every thing with it you can on PC-BSD but keep aware that PC-BSD add ins are centered around KDE/QT. So if your heart is set on running GNOME your likely to run into problems here and there. In my humble opinion the weakest point for PC-BSD is multimedia. Generally you can play any thing but some times it can be a little bit of a hassle if you don’t like Kaffine and Realplayer (see www.pbidir.com or ports). The biggest issue is that it’s currently limited to flashplayer7 which only works in Konqueror. For some reason it crashes all other browsers. Some people have had better luck using ports but I don’t like flash content very much so I have not toyed with it. As GNU/Linux gets flashplayer9 support so will we soon. After all you can run GNU/Linux binaries on *BSD hehehehehehe.

I’ve found you oh most never need to use the command line but it does make life easier. It’s so much more powerful then DOS based stuff it rocks. Usually you can do a lot of “hand tweaking” by editing files, this is also how a lot of special operating system oriented changes are done (system admin stuff). Yet most programs you can modify it by text files as well if you wish. Some times you can access settings not tunable from the GUI 🙂

There is full access to PBI, FreeBSD ports, packages, and even GNU/Linux RPMs via a Linux Compatibility loader but that means dealing with GNU/Linux Redheaded Pest Management (RPM) or installing other GNU/Linux packmans by hand. You will find approx 16,000 programs available for PC-BSD right now and many GNU/Linux applications. The stock of PBI are picking up as well but still are very few in comparison.

What about security? Well we have 3 professional grade firewalls included, they are a little bit involved to setup but heck if it’s good enough for Yahoo’s security it should be ok on a desktop <_> In the next release or the one after we should be getting an easy way to configure the OpenBSD firewall “pf”, the foundation of which I feel has been laid in the 1.3 Beta1 installers advanced mode.

The system follows the old school approach to user security. The core concepts dates back to like MULTICS in the late 1960s for Multi-User systems – they still are as useful today as they where then. By multi-user I mean any computer used by more then one person. If your the only user of it, user management is only as much concern as what you have on the system. You see back in the days when a Computer cost so much no one could own one. You had to be like a University or IBM to have one. So time was very valuable and one computer had to serve many users. Once a true “Multi-User” oriented systems came about instead of the limit of one user at a time, computers could have many users using them at once. PC-BSD supports this as well in modern style. You could actually have 10 people working via a Remote Desktop or Secure Shell (or both) setup on 1 box + some one sitting on it while the others are logged in via the network. To be honest outside of business use, all this matters to use is the concepts that makes the system inherently more secure by default practice.

Every person has a user “account” to log on with, preferably with a password. You can use a blank password but it defeats the purpose of security -> Any one can then use the account. The account should consist of your login name and password. Your first name or your initials are good choices for a account name. Passwords should be 6 to 10 characters and contain more then numbers or letters. Because of internationalization you can only use letters and numbers in the installer but you can change it to any thing you want after boot up. Ever user has a group, a group is like a department. At a small business you might groups like accounting, clerks, billing, e.t.c. Every file is owned by both a user and a group and has certain permissions for three kinds of users. Permissions for the owning user, the owning group, and permissions for every body else. You can be a member of any number of groups. Permissions are for Read, Write, and Execute. So you can control who can do what with your files. A good example:

User           Group
Joe            Joe
Jane           Jane
Tim            Tim, Joe

If Joe wants Tim to be able to edit one of his documents he can set the file permissions to allow members of his group Read and Write access. So if the file “Tax Returns.doc” was owned by Joe of group Joe. With permissions Read&Write for Joe User, and Read&Write for Joe Group, and Read Only for every body else. Tim could edit the file because he is a member of Joes group. Thats the basic thing about it, it’s really very easy to set up such things if you own the file. PC-BSD uses FreeBSD underneath so you have support for Mandatory Access Controls if you want to set those up.

Every user account has it’s own folder called a “Home Directory” for there personal files, for the most part you can’t delete or edit any thing outside this directory from your user account. So no worries about some one trying to delete part of the Operating System or installing some program globally without a heck of a good fight 😀

What if you want to do some thing like edit a configuration file? For that there is a special account called “root” or the super user account. This account is like the GOD account. As root you have unlimited power over the system – even files root does not own. This is why the root account is used for admin work, changing special settings for the OS, installing software e.t.c. You can create more if you want or make yourself a super user. It’s not worth it unless your prepared to risk screwbing up the box though. ^_^ You can switch user to root in the command line at any time if you belong to the group “wheel”. I don’t know why they call it that, you could change it if you really want as the computer only sees User ID and Group ID numbers (which you can set/change/view too). If you want to run a program as root, you can type “kdesu appname” into the run dialog (wihout quotes). Logging into the Desktop as root directly even over the network is disabled by default. You can allow this if you want to reduce security. PC-BSD is not the worlds most secure OS, OpenBSD is but it tries to make it reasonably secure for every one. You can make it as insecure as you want if that rocks you boat…

Using the “root” account directly is just like running as an Administrator on Windows XP only you never need to do so directly. When you try to reach an option menu only root can or install a PBI. The system will ask you for the root password in order to launch the program or applet. You can even have it remember the password if your lazy. For day to day work you shouldn’t need to care about this, it’s when you do some thing only the person who owns the computer should allow done or in the case of business the guy/gal who is responsible for every bodies computers at work. I use PC-BSD daily and usually don’t need to use a password after I’ve logged in unless I want to install software. It makes e feel better that malicious stuff can screw up my files easy enough if I let it but can’t delete my operating system so easy. Don’t even have to worry about your employees installing Doom behind your back if they are not admin and few have need to be. Nore do I have to put up with other people being able to edit my files out of the box unless they have my permission 😀

Pros:
It’s free
It’s Open Source under a BSD Style license
It’s a custom FreeBSD system not a Fork.
It’s Easy to use and intends to be
A lot of good software is available at no cost
Extremely limited Virus or Spy ware threats. (Currently)
Can run most GNU/Linux software (not tied into the kernel, i.e. drivers)
C/C++/Perl/Python developers should feel at home, QT/X11 Open Source Edition included.
Many languages and developer tools available.
Updates are easy (PBI) and full access to FreeBSD methods.
Solid update path between releases (no BETAs !)
It’s stable and has good reliability
Low total cost of ownership
Custom kernel builds for better Desktop use (Video support, PF, e.t.c.)
Includes a kernel build for Single Processor and SMP systems (Multi-processor and Dual Core machines).
Free Community tech support
PBI makes installing some software quick, easy, and painless
Most common desktop software needs met out of the box or with ease
Has a KDE based Desktop and Integration
A lot of information available online.
Can dual boot with many other OSes.
Java Runtime and SDK can be installed with a few mouse clicks
nVidia wants FreeBSD to have good drivers and PC-BSD makes installing them a snap.
Runs pretty well with a 500Mhz Pentium 3 and 384MB of Memory.
The FreeBSD handbook is very good for a lot of things
Can be good for Laptops/Desktops/Workstations, possibly small business file servers.

Cons:
It sucks for DirectX (Win) Gaming.
Getting a working flashplayer can be sticky (for now) this is a pro imho hehee.
May not support all hardware
Supports newer hardware slower then Linux.
Support for many popular multimedia formats require a easy install package.
Limited support for Windows software (via WINE) -> very crappy imho for any thing major
Wireless support takes some additional configuration right now, easy setup is limited to WEP – full support via conventional methods as of PC-BSDv1.2.
Professional phone support costs money.
PBI installed programs cannot interface with traditional FreeBSD ports/packages most times
Most “Special needs”, Shareware, and Mal ware softwares do not support GNU/Linux, *BSD, or Mac OS X.
Poor integration if Gnome desktop is wished (not fun to do, curse the Gnome heads for it though)
Most businesses only offer Wintel support (see below)
Uninstalling Windows or Mac OS will probably void your vendors warranty.
Included boot loader is poor for multi-hard drive setups (use GAG or GRUB)
Does not support VisualBasic or natively Microsoft/Apple extensions to languages
Don’t even think about DirectX…
Cannot run as a 64-Bit OS (but supports the 64-Bit CPUs in 32-Bit mode)
Intel graphics cards are poorly supported (but thats true any where !)
Does not support _very_ old CPU architectures(< i686). Such as AMD K6, Intel 80486, 80386, or 80286s. Needs at least 384~512MB of DDR Memory or 256+ MB of DDR2 memory to run fast enough for me. The FreeBSD handbook only covers traditional FreeBSD methods. PC-BSD website
The PBI Directory
PC-BSD Forums

More Unix basics are not within the scope of this review and are for another Blog entry.

If any one actually reads this, feel free to drop a comment or a question about PC-BSD or visit the PC-BSD support forums.

What better place to write a review of some thing then on my Blog 
                       ^^<(^^__^^)>^^

As for parting words I’ve just got to say 🙂

We don’t have any Blue Screens of Death, we have a Blue Wallpaper !

Stable, Free, Open, Powerful, Functional, Secure, Easy, Customizable -> PC-BSD is fun muahuahuah.

Edit — as of 2008-09-09, comments have been closed. It’s been ~two years and I’m tired of managing spam-bots.

Fuuy

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Note to self, don’t trust LJ’s auto backup to retain what I’ve written when I’ve got to leave before finishing a post. Always save it to /Lexar/var/tmp or G:vartmp first !

Ugh

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Loneliness is the worst pain in this world. It constantly eats away the person’s heart, and can cause the person to hate, to feel enraged–the same rage and hate that can cause one person to kill another. It is like a wound of the heart; the type of wounds that cannot go away with a kiss or a hug. The only thing that can make this great pain go away is love and compassion, another human heart to pull them out of this hell. —Diana

Too true…

Any way, spent a bit of the day thinking about a Shell written in ruby that gives access to ruby and possibly shell commands at the same time – right on the command line. Also about a plugin for vim that might let me post to my LJ from Vim xD

Being a man of many shells among other things I’ve been toying with the Z-Shell. It’s about has heavy as KDE or GNOME as far as shells meets Desktops but still good. The man pages are a bit of flood but thenew user config thingy is nice. I’ve set up a nice little .zshrc file. I’ve ported my aliases over and it has most of my enviroment specs all ready. Usually you get a default prompt of ether $ or % but zsh’s was hostname$, which is what I use for root so hehe never mind. I’ve got the prompt setup to be like Username@hostname$ only the hostname is really in bold and the $ is green 😀

Also I’ve got a time display at the end of line or “Right Prompt”, if I type till I hit it the clock hides it self. So far nice shell even if it seems to have a built in FTP client. ZSH is very configurable and it looks like it even has typo correction ability. You really just got to look through the config program and a few FAQs.

I’ve switched my laptop from KDE/BB back to KDE/KWin, replacing the blackbox toolbar on the bottom with a transparent auto-hiding external taskbar up top. Now if I just had a clock easier to read then GKrellM2 without running a shell or any thing >_< Most of the rest of my day, what else can I say? Life sucks some times. It feels like I get blamed for every thing.. Maybe I should get more into computers or more into "regular" things I just don't know any more. Online, I have a life worth living. I'm a corpral in the [SAS], I can teach people my trade and help others to grow. Who knows in time maybe Miles will follow it into NCO'hood. I hang around PC-BSDs community support forum and drop by ZoomCities forum from time to time (an IT nettunity for say). At least I've learned enough about this system I can be a little bit useful. One of the reasons I love computers, is that they are like me. A computer will do what you tell it, not what you wanted it to do. Obiously if I say iterate over this 10 times and do this the machine will. If I'm told to get a book off the top shelf by george I'm looking for one on the top shelf and wondering what book they wanted me to get >_< HEhehehe I can't help but chuckle alittle. Here, I'm free. Yet here I'm $#!+. At least online, well I wouldn't say I'm usually respected but I'm not disrespected. They don't threat me like a retard on the net. If any one whose ever followed my forum activity (which is freaking embarrasing really). You can see I've got about 7,500+ posts between 3 forums over the course of > 2 years to < 1 year depending on which one. I've rarly failed to put forth my opinoin of comments.. yet in the real world I'm rarly talk. Who do I have to talk too that really gives a crap ? Ya know a plugin for *Mozilla and Konqi to use nvi editing on text posts would be nice. I love computers and I love CQ Tactics and the team work that goes with them. I think if I put the haul into the PT I might even be able to make it as a Cop with some luck. My time with the [SAS] has broken me for the typcial erratic gaming group, I need teamwork. I usually prefer tactical play with a realistic PoV. We play in a very simular mater to real world units and I enjoy that. Needless to say few people even gamings are close to what the [SAS] has and less care about "tactics". Yes I do prefer a good game of chess when I can get one :-P Sigh.. I'm also the only one here with, well any compentcy (if you call it that) with a Unix like system. Most people I know, I don't mean to be mean to friends or any thing but PEBKAC issues are more likly then Windows crapouts some times I think when some one can be counted as Joe User. Love life? Why bother. I've got about $10 to my name till December and it's likly every thing I get then will half to go for bills. A new company took over so the rent is due the 1st or you get $80/day late feels and a 8+ year resident family gets paid on the 3rd of the month. This means when the lease is up it's time to move or be one month ahead, so yeah... Ballocks as always. I don't mind the $, but it's not fair to the tennents. What does love mean to me? Every thing that matters. I have nothing but the shirt on my back and the computer'dexed info in my brains measly 340Kb. I just feel like screaming Serria Hotel India Tango repeatidly and loudly. I don't really curse alot (off work...) I did for a while and when I was little. When I was about 5 I desided not to curse any more. Well my family is known to use profanity often ^_^ Around the times one of my friends died, I started out cursing a wing mate online (a US Marine to boot). Eventually it was [SAS]_Sgt_James who rung me in as I was a [SAS] Recruit at the time. So now I generally keep things PG13'ish and PG on the servers. I know it wouldn't do any good but it would feel good. What was tha told tag line? "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!" Well I agree with that, only theres not much I can do. Usually I'm the "Chopping block" for stress releif more often then I can releve my own. Fuuy, I'm not sure whats worse. Thinking about my life as I right in a journal or not being able to sleep because my brain won't take a nap. Usually when I t hink about things I want to post, or do I have no time to do them and little to no computer access. So when things do catch up it's a long blog post. I really would like to get more into Ruby programming, it's a good language and I know I could go farther in it. I've been learning more about sed and I've been righting a little "YANSHELLFAQ" or Yet Another Shell FAQ, well it's really a tutorial/guide book really. I'm trying to get it sorted and it's basically ment for newbies. I intend to append a link to the post here (where else would I put it then my blog) in my PC-BSD forum sig. That way maybe this blog could help some one, especially if they are like I was not to long ago. Yarning to learn but with little aid to do it. I don't think nothing would please me more then to have the love of my life with me. Some one to share my soul with and vice versa.. but I know its not going to happen any time soon. Lovers are easier then loves. My mind seems to bleep between subjects doesn't it ? Oh well, can't really help the way my mind works. Usually my thinking is half structured. I'm very good at holding a thought and working it over piece by piece, if it interests me intently. The problem is by the time I can implement it I've moved on to other things. Just like this sentance >_< sigh… What to do, oh what to do this far 0620Z in the morning. I just don’t know any more but at least it feels better to flow through keyboad then roll with thoughts. I suppose a live journal is a poor outlet for things that should be shared with a live person… but well how many live people would I can talk to would I like to share every thing with ? Not many, even family (I’m generally family oriented).

One thing I do hate about putting together 20-Year plans is that if your approching your 20s in a few years you gotta remember what good starting 5 years ago would have done. I hope maybe, when I’m around 21~22 I can see if I can get a company to pay for my certifications and give me a job. Heck, if they’d pay me a good $2500 a month and give me good terms for network usage of my _personal_ computer they’d get a hard worker.

What I mean by that ^^ is I can run what I want on my own computer (personal laptop) without any ballocking. As long as it’s on my own time. I’m usually on a few forums, several web sites, a terminal, a console and a few IMs / IRC channels just at home. Thats not appriate for work but I’m not going to be forced not to run what to get my job done. If I want to use Seamonkey for my browser/mail I’m sure doing it ! I’ll PGP the mbox before going home if they want and only use it for business but I’m using my choice of client when it’s the computer I paid for!

Other then that, hell as long as I can make enough to live I don’t care what they pay me if I’m around computers. I get the concept of $2500 from basic bills where I live. S’bout a good $650~800 rent any where I know of for an apartment. Figure money for utilities and supples (like FOOD!!!). + Transport e.t.c. It adds up. If I don’t have to spend my time worrying how to make ends meat, I can keep my brain on the computers. >_< I remember we once figured out it would take a couple about $1600 a month just to handle a roof over head, food on the table, and utilties. Cars and Kids not included so lol it’s not a bright picture. I know one of my friends in the [SAS], he’s got to be like 30 and still lives at home for one simple reason. It costs to darn much to move out ! A man and a woman together can be hard pressed let along a single person. If I ever get god work I’d hope to get an apartment. To be honest, I’m more likly to not be able to well, can’t talk about probably. Then to end up married any time soon. Some things in life are just painful, love and hate are but a hairline. Passion and pleasure how far apart ? What once was thus no longer. RIddles eh? I’m not proud of this world but it’s all I have to keep sane. If the “Private” post option wasn’t stll viewable by the administration I’d probably post more about a few things just to get it off me chest. It’s funny though, how two people could go so far yet sink so low. To the point of knowing anothers mind, yet through a course of life that is hard to explain. **** I quit. Mmm odd my HDD light is on and gkrellm showed a nice low bust of I/O on ad0. Maybe it’s a cron job set to run around 0640Z. It’s just I want more to life and less of certain matters. Whats my 20 year out look shaping out like? Well… Get at least a good level of scripting ability and manage time to learn programming properly by retirement. Would be nice to be meet a sweet woman. Job that lets me work with, on, and around computers for most if it. Learn every thing I can about using, running, and adminsitrating a FreeBSD system. Advance in my networking knowedlge and computer ability. Maybe learn how to spell this time of morning Hopefully have an apartment of my own A few bits of change Try to wok out some method where I can put 10% away as sort of a “Carry over” fund to save for the future and bad days. 10% to let me be giving when I see a chance to help out. And keep bills paid. I’d love very much to be a father and a husband some day Eventually, get to be Free offline in public as I am online or when with friends or alone. I’d love it if I could implement all this, a few parts are just in GOD and fates hands but the rest I know I can try to do. What sucks about planning to meet my goals is knowing I’d be there on ideal time if I started earlier. I really started getting into computers maybe 3 years ago, now in less then a year of *BSD look at how far I’ve come? I’m sure a shell no exbert but I’m learning, I’mloving, I’m having joy. Even the idea of spending all day to install NetBSD, set it up (not an easy task), and get it cooking for duty would be my cup of tea. I love this stuff. I know if I had the ability and freedom to do a few things I could work on the other issues. Having a few bucks around and transport helps. Mmm what to do with another matter… I just don’t know any more. I’ve got to do some ting, maybe I’ll go to bed..

Vi, Macs, and Shells

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I’ve so got to get or make a Vim plug in or some thing for this.

So far I’ve come to a cross roads, I can keep my editor or I can become more Emacs compatible. On Windows I use PuTTY for a ssh client. I don’t know what the terminal emulator is but it sucks. When working on Vectra I effectively have no insert/home keys e.t.c. or Numpad which is bad because I’m accustomed to using the home and end keys in my line editing. This means ether live with only cursor keys and backspace for line editing or relearn the Emacs navigation commands. Control+key is used, b for back one char, f for forward one char. p for previous command (up) and N for Next command (down). e for end of line while a is used for end and home key replacements. Using the meta key (generally alt) turns this up a notch and uses larger units such as forward a word instead of a char. I’m used to using control+u and control+w in line editing – I don’t know if control+w has effect in Emacs but control+u doesn’t.

Needless to say I don’t like Emacs ! I used XEmacs as my editor at first but I fell in love with Vim after I started getting into shell use. You could say learning the shell helped me learn Vim and vice versa. I didn’t like vim at first and I’m only now starting to use gvim off windows (konsole is better then cmd.exe). I’m very used to Vim so I am also used to Vi. My vimrc file makes it easier to use but since Vectra is very light on the software I didn’t install vim. Vi is good enough and ee for when I’m just pissed.

Vim/Vi is very simple to use once you get the hang of it, Emacs is just wrist strain. So now I ask my self the question: What about Vi editing mode? The Bourne and Korn shells support it as does the Z shell AFAIK. However I use tcsh which does not. So if I want to use this editing mode that means use another shell. Vectra only has sh and tcsh. Being FreeBSD the csh is actually tcsh but not like how bash is commonly GNU/Linuxes sh. FreeBSD uses ash as s, a very light Bourne shell clone. I could install any other shell I want really and a ruby shell would be kind of cool if it could fuse an interactive shell, scripting and ruby into one package. The problem is if I get used to vi line editing in a shell I’ll be ruined for any other shell !. I’ve yet to decide but to be honest with the Vi editing mode I think sh is livable. It nets the use of cursor keys and command history.

nvi/Vim is very simple. Vi is a modal editor, if you press escape you are in a command mode, if you press “i” or insert you are in insert mode and it’s like most text editors. You litterly change the entire keyboard into/out of modes. In insert mode your keys always insert chars, most consoles let you use the arrow keys, home/end/delete/backspace like normal. In normal mode which can be reached by pressing escape. Every key stroke is a command or switches to other modes. You can move the cursor with the h,j,k,and l keys. The h and l keys move left and right while the j and k keys move down and up. I’ve heard that Bill Joys console had arrow keys on these so that’s probably why they are used this way. It was a little weird at first but now I’m getting used to it. I’ve generally used the cursors.You can delete a char using the “x” key.

You can delete directionally by prefixing a movement key with d. So dh and dl deletes one char to the left or right. Pressing dj or dk will delete the current line and the line below or above. To kill the whole line use dd. You can repeat commands by appending a number, example: dd3 will delete 3 lines. You can move to the start or end of line by pressing ^ and $ this also works with d. You might notice ^ and $ from some studies in regular expressions – I do from a bit of sed/grep/awk learning. You can move forward and back a word at a time with the w and b keys. Much faster then control+key combo and easier on the wrists IMHO! Pressing i puts you into insert mode to enter text, pressing v puts you in visual mode. Escape will bring you back to normal mode. I never used visual mode very much at first but now I find it useful. In visual mode most normal mode commands for movement work the same. Yet when you move the cursor you always highlight or “select” text. You can copy it or “yank” it with the y command and put or “paste” it with the p command. If you want to cut it use the c command. Usually after a cut I think Vim puts you in insert. Pressing : gives you a little command line.

Here you can enter commands but internal and external, set options and more. To edit a file type e /file/name after pressing : for speed I bound ; to do the same as : in my vimrc. To save it’s :w also know as write ! To quit it’s :q note that you press the ” : ” you don’t type it as part of the command. You can override it by suffixing it with a !. Example: force a quit by doing a :q!

We can run shell commands by prefixing them with a “!” like this :!ls ~/Documents. File name completion works and a UNIX shell is better at it then cmd.exe (vim is very portable). Vim might seem a bit awkward at first but once your used to it it’s very fast and effeienct. TO get help type :help to get context sensitive help try :help topic_or_cmd

Using vi line editing in a shell works the same was using Vi only you start off in insert mode instead of normal mode. I haven’t decided what to do yet.

Ya know whats funny…. I started out to write a short post about my feelings but I end up trying to knock out a Vi/Vim intro before my batteries run out.

All roads lead to Vi !!!

The day rolls on

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Well I’ve finally gotton ntpd working the way I want it, I think. My laptop is showing Vectra as a peer in ntpq. As to SAL1600, windows can’t nativly talk to ntpd on unix without a kick in the registry AFAIK. So instead of hacking apart my registry I’ve installed nettime after reading an article. It’s an abandonded project but I’m lazy.

I installed nettime and set it up to start the service at boot and use my time serving machine Vectra. Since I run a firewall on Windows that is set to block any thing not matching a rule, I made one.

WARNING: low qaulity 1600×1200 Jpeg

I need to setup ntpd on Ubuntu and run a tcpdump in less I can find an equivulent for Windows XP. This fire wall rule will do for right now and I can edit it later if I find I need to.

Waiting on a full scale distclean of my ports collection on Vectra and a du after that. On the 15th Vectra dropped off the lan , was totally dead to the world in regards to the network. After work when I got back to the computer I unplugged the router for a short count of twenty sec then replugged it in. Five minutes later when I got back to my desk I powered Vectra up and she recived her DCHPOFFER from the router. Interestingly, a post I made about it on a forum I vist ocasionally the first reccomendation was what I was affriad it would be the ol’yank, wait, plug the router bit. Awhile after posting that it solved the issue the forum owner posted this:

“I should’ve elaborated my first answer when I said “reboot the router” unplugging it is the best way because it clears the excess voltage in its capacitors which causes invalid data in its memory therefore the router will not function properly! Good on you TerryP!”

I find this an interesting idea, I can see how excess voltage in the capacitors could be aproblem for it’s memory (all 8MB of RAM and 2MB of flash memory of it). What I don’t get is why it should be neccesary to flip a device on/off, why not design it to deal with it or some thing? Eh maybe I just don’t know crap or it was made by a Windows fan.

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I’ve been fooling with ntpd allot, if I’d stop editing the file maybe I could be sure of my configurations hehe. I keep the below blog entry fairly up to date.

Installed the PC-BSD 1.3BETA1 on my desktop heres a copy of the notes I wrote myself before posting on PC-BSD.

Notes:

First installer screen needs to say KDE is a DE not a WM, it will confuse people.

Installer didn’t allow an option toggle autologin.

Glad to see installer says PC-BSD not FreeBSD in the ASCII art and boot menu which is also used now at boot up. < I never did a 1.2 install so I wouldn't know if this is new or not. Installer detected my SATAII (ad0) drive and some free USB ports (da0-3). Drive layout was 180GB NTFS (WinXP), 79GB Ext3 (Ubuntu), 120+GB Freespace, Extended partition /w 4 logical drives (linux swap, home, and backups) Partitions detected right, NTFS, EXT3, DOS Extended. -> Didn’t detected my freespace ! Rebooted and manually fdisked me a UFS2 slice to use.

Installer doesn’t make it clear in the adv. Setup if PF will (if it needs to) be configured accordingly if you choose to use NTPD.

Installer could use tooltips.

Using the quick guide pressing “Index” in pages sends you to /PCBSD/docs/guide/ on the FS not /PCBSD/docs/guide/index.html (Time for a sed script)

Icon setup is great opens the right profiles to, only the “Start” Menu should be named some thing less Windows like and more consistant with the documentation that refers to it as a “K-Menu” -> We don’t need confused people saying “Whats a K-Menu” and it’s probably patented by Microsoft or Apple.

The pictures in the quick guide do not match the window decore, K-Menu, or Panel of the actual system

~/looks good, although some sample images and/or a PC-BSD_theme_song.ogg would be nice as would be a Video interview with the dev’s talking about the system. All in the right dirs of course.

There should be a fairly consistant (simular) rc file for each shell. (sh, csh/tcsh, bash). It should at least set the same basic env vars and the prompt.

/etc has a few .bak files and shells only shows bash by it’s symlink in /bin not both /bin and /usr/local/bin.

The “Start” menu looks nice but is a bit scrungy looking, the PC-BSD side img that used to be used /was/ nice tho

nice to see GTK 1.2 and 2.8 installed along with gtkglarea and python bindings. gtk-qt-engine+ Control Center entry -> Nice !

Noticed the new style lipstik used, PCBSD style should be renamed PCBSD Classic or v1.2 or something. I like what you’ve done with the Crystal windecore, think I might clone it to my lappy next time I change my windecore.

I wish KDE would fix the Component Chooser. (installed version is 3.5.4)

ruby, portaudit, portupgrade are installed among the 255 pkg’s (including a pair for the KDE style/windecore).

I see ispell is setup in KDE but pkg_info | grep spell only returns aspell dunno if thats right or not.

I get a default resolution of 1280×1024 just like in Ubuntu, I call it the “livable” res since I prefer 1600×1200 or larger + large fonts xD

Would be nice if NUMLOCK was turned on automaticly when booting a Desktop. It’s kinda expected.

Printers section gives an error

root has a pair of msg from june and the MOTD is still FreeBSD

PCBSDv1.3 conf still references itself ontop as the GENERIC FreeBSD conf. It’s set for machine i386 and cpu’s 486-686.

There is no sound drivers being loaded in my loader.conf. Usually FreeBSDs OSS doesn’t notice my audigy4 and I have to install the emu10kx driver. On Ubuntu ALSA can use it with the included standard driver (emu10k1 I think, or maybe emu10k3).

paths should be set to automatically have the users “Documents path” set to /usr/home/${USER}/Documents since you give them a dir for it.

There are no help items for the PC-BSD related Control Center entries. This is more a standard policy imho for PC-BSD. Want help? Get GNOME, want functionality? Get KDE !

I think the menu editor might be fixed finally !!!

Launching KDE reports it can’t find the codecs or libdvdcss since they are in the Essential Codecs PBI.

It also reports “DVD Drive” Can’t check DMA mode. Permission denied or no such device: “/dev/dvd”

I hope 0.8.2 fixes the stability problems in 0.8.1 (PC-BSD v1.2)

The X config file is XF86Config but we still use Xorg 6.9

Some interesting changes in /PCBSD/cardDetect which appear to come from RoFreeSBIE

__________________END___________________

Really I think they are making an improvement, I just don’t care for what they have done with the K-Menu. Also for some odd reason Keramilk, crystal, and polyester window decore keeps coming back to me.

NTPd

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Well, today I noticed my windows machine was running 39 minutes past the hour, my freebsd machine 37 minutes past the hour (SAL and Vectra respectivly). I sync’d SALs clock with the defualt server and found my bsd box behind. Origenally I set the CMOS clock on Vectra to GMT time using my wristwatch, so a few min off after a month isn’t bad.

I’ve desided to run ntpd (network time protocal daemon) on Vectra and use her to sync my other machines with. After a little researching I found out my ISP has a ntp server so I’m using that. The NTP daemon should come preinstalled on a FreeBSD box, it’s also in ports if you need to update it without the whole computer. Since my ports tree is up to date and I need to update the system and ntpd takes less time to compile then FreeBSD this was my method of making sure it was up to date.

#cd /usr/ports/net/ntp && make install clean

That netted me ntp-4.2.2p3 which should be fairly current. Running portaudit tonite has showed me that python, ruby, and pgp have issues. Checking for outdated ports:

Vectra# portversion -v | grep "<"
fastest_cvsup-0.2.9_3       <  needs updating (port has 0.2.9_4)
portaudit-0.5.10            <  needs updating (port has 0.5.11)
portupgrade-2.0.1_1,1       <  needs updating (port has 2.1.3.3_1,2)
ruby-1.8.4_4,1              <  needs updating (port has 1.8.5,1)

Gotta love portupgrade giving some nice tools, gotta do some updates over the weekend of course. The NTP daemon is pretty simple, all the compucated stuff is basically done for you by the program and Network Time Protocol. We need to create a configuration file, being part of the system it’s in the et cetera directory of the root file system (/etc). The only editors installed on FreeBSD I know of are ed, ee, and vi. Ed was the first unix editor I think and probably would be a good choice if your using some type of telitype terminal, for the sake of ease of use I suggest you use ee or vi. PC-BSD and DesktopBSD should include kwrite, kedit, and kate, xedit as well. I personally prefer vi as it’s vim like (funny as vim is supposed to be vi like 😛 ). 

Vectra#vi /etc/ntp.conf
#Simple ntpd configuration for Vectra

driftfile /var/db/ntpd.drift

server ntp.bellsouth.net version 2

#Broadcast NTP signals over the LAN
restrict 192.168.1.255 mask 255.255.255.0 notrust nomodify

logfile /var/log/ntp.log

Like many config files and a fair number of scripting languages any use of “#” is a comment. To explain NTP quickly. You have a clock, like all clocks your lose accuracy as time goes on. Infact my wristwatches manual stats that it’ll gain like 0.001 seconds a year. I’m not the most tech-headed person but I’d reckon a machine that’s not up 24/7/365 a year is going to be less accurate them my watch. So we need to “syncronize” our watches to do that we need some thing to sync to, thats where time servers come in. A primary time server should be hooked up to a decent time source, like an atomic clock or GPS gizmo e.t.c. and filter down through things, need less to say primary/secondary time servers should be fairly accurate and NTP takes into account trying to keep it that way between systems. The configuration file specifies my ISP’s time server using the syntax “server Server_To_Sync_With”, you need to query at least one server, two is more reliable but you should be considerate of the server maintainers. The driftfile is used to help store information to keep accuracy of the time. The server is limited to broadcasting on the given LAN with several options (taken from the man page). notrust Treat these hosts normally in other respects, but never use them as synchronization sources nomodify Ignore all NTP mode 6 and 7 packets which attempt to modify the state of the server (i.e., run time reconfiguration). Queries which return information are permitted. We can start the daemon now using the command: 

Vectra#ntpd -c /etc/ntp.conf -f /var/db/ntpd.drift

To get this setup at boot time we enable ntpd in /etc/rc.conf, edit it as root in your editor of choice. Add ntpd_enable=”YES” and ntpd_falgs=”-c /etc/ntp.conf -f /var/db/ntpd.drift”, below is a copy of my rc.conf file including the ntpd lines. 


# -- sysinstall generated deltas -- # Sat Sep  2 19:29:45 2006
# Created: Sat Sep  2 19:29:45 2006
# Enable network daemons for user convenience.
# Please make all changes to this file, not to /etc/defaults/rc.conf.
# This file now contains just the overrides from /etc/defaults/rc.conf.
hostname="Vectra"
ifconfig_xl0="DHCP"
saver="daemon"
sshd_enable="YES"
usbd_enable="YES"
update_motd="NO"

#Services

#enable CUPS
#cupsd_enable="YES"
#background_cupsd="YES"
#boot samba
#samba_enable="YES"
#enable ntpd
ntpd_program="/usr/local/bin/ntpd"
ntpd_enable="YES"
ntpd_falgs="-c /etc/ntp.conf -f /var/db/ntpd.drift"

#Security

#clear temp files
clear_tmp_enable="YES"
#Make sendmail  listin only on the local host
sendmail_enable="NO"
#Ignore ICMP redirect packets
icmp_drop_redirect="YES"

I’ve organized it in the form of things that came standard, services, and security for now. To sync my computers with Vectra I’ve to set them up to use ntpd with the FreeBSD box as the time server. If you’ve got to sync multiple machines you should use one as a local time server and sync the others on it rather then say ask your internet time server for the time 10 times ! Also you can use ntpdate timeserver for a one time update instead of running ntpd on the clients.

Ok, I think I’ve accidently not done my history test enough, time for bed I’ll worry about getting windows clients syncing off it and the box updated tomorrow !!!

PC-BSD Quick Guide

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This is the draft I sent in for the PC-BSD Quick Guides 4th chapter, I’ve replaced my HTML Comments with C Style /* Comments */

Common tasks

In this chapter we will go over a number of common tasks faced by every day users and administrators. We will discuss such matters using plain English and describe it using graphical user interfaces and the command line interfaces as well as configuration files. This will allow you to chose which method you prefer and to be more productive.

We have broken down common tasks into the following:

  • Installing applications
  • Adding new users
  • Adding custom fonts
  • Downloading system updates

Installing Applications

There are several methods of installing software on a PC-BSD system. Each method will be discribed in more detail below.

  • PBI Installer, the easy way
  • Packages, the quick FreeBSD way
  • Ports, the traditional FreeBSD way

When you install software from a PBI you will be presented with a simple graphical way to install software. Simular to many other popular operating systems you just click and go. Since PBI programs are created from traditional FreeBSD ports and packages they are fewer and less up to date then ports.

Ports and Packages are the traditional ways of installing software. You can get the most up to date software by compiling from ports. You may also quickly install allot software using packages, but not all software is available as a package or PBI.

Installing software via PBI

When you install a program through the PcBsdInstaller system it is placed with all required files in it’s own folder in /Programs and linked into the system. This is very simple and safe to the persons system as person is not changed more then necessary to allow the packages to function.

/* Update the URL if it ever changes */

To install a PBI we need to go to the PBI Directory and download a program

/* Stick screen shot(s) of PBIDir here */

Once the download is completed simply double click on the file to launch the installer. It will prompt you once for the super users password before beginning the installation process. This is to ensure you are installing the program and not any one that may have sat down at your computer. It’s both effective as a security measure and parental control.

Click next at the welcome screen, you will then be asked to read any license agreements that comes with the program you are installing. Check the I agree box and click next to continue installation. You may have the options of placing icons on your desktop and entries in the PBI Programs section of the K-Menu. Check all boxes that apply to what you wish done and click install. Once it has completed the installation click finished and tryout your program

If at a later date you wish to add an icon to your desktop for some thing you did do during a PBI install, or when using ports/packages you may do so by right clicking on the desktop and selecting “Create new link to application”. This will open a menu where you can set thename of the icon, it’s picture (click the cog image), click the Application tab. Here you will have to set the program you wish to create an icon for, you can also set a comment, disrisption, work path, and file types as you feel necessary. You can also install in text mode from a console by changing directory to the location of the PBI and run the following as the super user.

./PBI_File -text

Fetching packages

Packages are prepared files for installing software, they install software into the system and can cause dependancy issues. The package system is comparable to RPM, Dpkg, and Apt-Get used in several Linux Distros. Installing packages requires you to open a console with root permissions. You can type kdesu konsole in a run dialog from the K-Menu or open a konsole from the K-Menu in super user mode, or open a konsole and type su and press enter. You will be prompted for the root (super user) password, it will nto display the password on screen for security reasons. After switching to the super user account you have complete access to the system and can install software at will.

You can install a program using the package system like so:

#pkg_add -r irssi

will install the irssi program with all required files but not update the K-Menu or desktop. You can generally find the binary (executable) in /usr/local/bin, configuration files in /usr/local/share// or your home directory and the libraries (like .dll) will be placed into the system as needed and shared between applications. This is true for ports as well, the PBI system is favored by users wanting to avoid this at the minor expense of some disk space. As PBI install all files into /Programs/ but ports are kept up to date and contain many more programs.
/* Special thanks to adamant1988 on #pcbsd for coming up with the package. I don’t think a CLI IRC client is right for this but I needed a quick program thats not a PBI yet */

You can uninstall a package by using the pkg_delete command and the name and version of the package or a wild card.

pkg_delete irssi-0.8.10_2 and pkg_delete “irssi-*” are equavilent.

You can get info about an installed package the same way using the pkg_info command.

#pkg_info “irssi-*”

Installing software using ports

Traditionally BSD installs software from source, the ports collection is a easy to use system that makes this as painless as possible. You first need to install an up to date ports collection before you may use ports to install software. New users coming from Gentoo GNU/Linux will find this similar to the Emerge system which is based on FreeBSD ports.

To install the ports collection click on the K-Menu and navigate to settings, administration, PC-BSD System. Enter the super users password to access the admin panel and click on the tasks tab. Now click fetch ports and it will begin downloading the necessary files and installing them.
This will take awhile depending on your Internet connection and Processor speed.

/* picture of the tasks tab here */
/* Probably delete this part for the quick guide */

If you wish to do this from the command line open a console as the super user as described in fetching packages and run the following command

#cvsup -g -L 1 /root/ports-supfile

You can also use the portsnap method

#portsnap fetch && portsnap extract

If you install ports using portsnap you should not update the ports collection with cvsup, instead use:

#portsnap fetch && portsnap update

if you installed ports using cvsup you may update them in the same way as before:

#cvsup -g -L 1 /root/ports-supfile

You can edit the supfiles and set a download mirror closer to you, please see the FreeBSD handbook for more information on using CVSUP

Now that the ports collection is installed if you look in /usr/ports you will see a simple tree structure of folders. The structure is in the format of catagory, program name.

Adding new users

The two best ways to add a new user to your system is by using the User Manager program or the adduser script. User manager is a graphical program and easy to use with the mouse. Adduser is a very flexible command line method.

Open the K-Menu and go to settings, Security & Privacy, User Manager. Here you can add, remove, and lock users, change the super users (system) password). To add a new user you will need to have a user name and password, you may also input the full name of the user for reference.

/* Insert screen shot of user manager */

To add a new user with adduser open a konsole in super user mode and run:

adduser

Here is an example of running the adduser script, the options listed in side brackets are the default used when merely pressing enter to continue.

Dixie# adduser
Username: joe
Full name: Joe User
Uid (Leave empty for default):
Login group [joe]: wheel
Login group is wheel. Invite joe into other groups? []: operator
Login class [default]:
Shell (sh csh tcsh bash nologin) [sh]: bash
Home directory [/home/joe]:
Use password-based authentication? [yes]: yes
Use an empty password? (yes/no) [no]: no
Use a random password? (yes/no) [no]: no
Enter password:
Enter password again:
Lock out the account after creation? [no]: no
Username   : joe
Password   : *****
Full Name  : Joe User
Uid        : 1002
Class      :
Groups     : wheel operator
Home       : /home/joe
Shell      : /usr/local/bin/bash
Locked     : no
OK? (yes/no):

Here we have added a new user named joe to the groups wheel and operator giving him greator access to hardware and the ability to switch user to root, that is run programs as the super user. The choice of shells include the bourne SHell, C Shell and the Bourne Again SHell. More shells can be installed using PBI, Ports, or Packages. You should only add users to the wheel or operator groups that you want to have administrator access to the machine. An example of this would be some one you would give the super user password too, is someone who should be in the wheel group. Some one who you do not want to have the ability to switch to the super user should not be in the wheel group!

. An example of this is a child you may not want to be able to modify important files should not be in the wheel group. While a spouse you wish to be able to install software should be.

Adding Custom Fonts

To install additional fonts that you have downloaded from the Internet. Open the K-Menu and go to Settings, System Administration and click Font Installer. You can install personal fonts for use with your account or you can install fonts to be used system wide. Only the super user can install system wide fonts.

/* Screen shot of font installer, admin mode */

To install a new font click add font and locate the .ttf font file you wish to add. If you click administrator mode you will be prompted for the super user or “root” password. Then you will be able to view and add system wide fonts in the same was as personal fonts. The font installer program only shows you fonts installed for yourself when not in administrator mode.

Downloading System Updates

Updating a PC-BSD system is a very simple process unlike many GNU/Linux distributions, PC-BSD is updated in a similar matter to installing software using PBI. You can check if your system is up to date by running the Online update utility.

Open the K-Menu and browse to Settings, System Administration and click Online Update. It will prompt you for the super users password before allowing you to alter the system. You will have the option of setting the system to check for updates at a specified time daily or weekly, default is not to check. However the system will always check for updates at startup and you can manually check here by clicking “Check now”. After editing any settings here be sure to click the “Save” button to save your changes. You will then be able to select, fetch, and install any updates it finds.

/* Screen shot of Online Update */

To manually download an update go to www.pcbsd.org and find the download system updates section (under the downloads menu on top of the site. As of this writing you can obtain updates from here. Download the patch for your version, such as PC-BSD 1.11a to 1.2. Once the download has finished double click on the PBI file to begin the installation, it works just like installing a PBI but simpular.

DO NOT cancel the update while a patch is running, restart the computer or other wise disrupt the update even if it appears to be stalled, an update can take time to complete. You will be notified when the update has been completed and be asked to reboot for all changes to take effect.

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I’m very tempted to try and put Python + QT to work. A good reference should be able to deal with the diffrences between the C Standard library and what Python offers. I know KPorts is available as a crazy PBI for PC-BSD to give people a gui frontend for ports/packages but. While it gets the job done it’s too darn crashy !

If I could manage to do it (would be learning my first toolkit), a frontend thats got full support for portupgrade and portaduit, strong searching and is reliable + configurable is nice. Functionality, Ease of Use, something thats easy for a newbie but powerful enough to be a professionals tool. Maybe add support for pkgsrc or emerge and stuff in the future. I dunno if I could with how much I know about programming now but there’s always the future.

If I did it I’d want to try and keep things tidy, like so:

Implement code to manage ports

Create a graphical interface using QT

Trim things to allow a great deal of seperation between functional code and user interaction so that it’d be possible to have diffrent GUI’s but not have to rewrite all of or edit most of the code that actually does the job.