I have built a few servers following the instructions given by Bryan J. Hong in his very thorough book: “Building a Server with FreeBSD 7.” For anybody wanting to build a web server, mail server, FTP server, or just a local network server, this book makes the process as easy as possible.
No Starch Press, the publisher, has an Errata page for this book. I found some additional errors when I built my servers, which I document here. Please check the official Errata page on No Starch’s site, and make the following corrections to your copy of the book before building your server. As of this writing, the official Errata page does not include these corrections:
- On p. 25, in step 6., before “cd /usr/ports” issue this command:
- touch /usr/ports/INDEX-7
- On p. 46, just above step 2., the two commands should NOT include “.sh” and should be:
- /usr/local/etc/rc.d/courier-imap-imapd start
- /usr/local/etc/rc.d/courier-imap-imapd-ssl start
- On p. 184, the directory link (the second command on the page) should be:
- ln -s /usr/local/www/apache22/data www
Using the default settings and following the directions in the book, the above corrections should all work perfectly.
Note: I have written a post on installing FreeBSD. It covers a good starter library of books on FreeBSD.
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Thanks for the errata notes. I just noticed another bit that seems to have helped on my n-th install of FreeBSD 7.x:
On P. 122, after installing openssh-portable, it seems we should enter the following:
# rehash
I never did it on that install, and it always gave me an old version when testing via telnet-ing to port 22. This time it worked great with “rehash.”
This might be obvious to veteran *-nix admins, but I’m learning. I find Hong’s book to be outstanding as a practical setup guide! I also have Absolute FreeBSD and Wicked Cool Shell Scripts.
I’m wondering about the Postfix, IMAP, and PF books you also have in your book list. Are these dated? I have them on my Amazon wishlist. We use Leopard Server for mail, firewall, etc., and we’re building a FreeBSD server on some killer hardware to match as closely as we can to Leopard Server. So I’m learning a TON of Unix and loving it. O how I wish I had converted sooner!
I’ve found UNIX in a Nutshell, 4th ed. from O’Reilly to be great for BSD and OS X.
Kevin, Thanks so much for the comments. I have the Postfix and IMAP books for the purpose of understanding building a mail server with virtual domains and virtual users. Since then, I wrote a post that links to a HOWTO that I found that gives a step-by-step solution to my server needs. The post is here: http://www.officecafe.com/blog/2009/03/freebsd-postfix-dovecot-mysql-virtual-domains/
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