diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/config/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/config/chapter.sgml index fb2ea64f39..95a16aed31 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/config/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/config/chapter.sgml @@ -1,2238 +1,2238 @@ Chern Lee Written by Mike Smith Based on a tutorial written by Matt Dillon Also based on tuning(7) written by Configuration and Tuning Synopsis system configuration system optimization One of the important aspects of FreeBSD is system configuration. Correct system configuration will help prevent headaches during future upgrades. This chapter will explain much of the FreeBSD configuration process, including some of the parameters which can be set to tune a FreeBSD system. After reading this chapter, you will know: How to efficiently work with file systems and swap partitions. The basics of rc.conf configuration and /usr/local/etc/rc.d startup systems. How to configure and test a network card. How to configure virtual hosts on your network devices. How to use the various configuration files in /etc. How to tune FreeBSD using sysctl variables. How to tune disk performance and modify kernel limitations. Before reading this chapter, you should: Understand Unix and FreeBSD basics (). Be familiar with keeping FreeBSD sources up to date (), and the basics of kernel configuration/compilation (). Initial Configuration Partition Layout Partition layout /etc /var /usr Base Partitions When laying out file systems with &man.disklabel.8; or &man.sysinstall.8;, remember that hard drives transfer data faster from the outer tracks to the inner. Thus smaller and heavier-accessed file systems should be closer to the outside of the drive While larger partitions like /usr should be placed toward the inner. It is a good idea to create partitions in a similar order to: root, swap, /var, /usr. The size of /var reflects the intended machine usage. /var is used to hold mailboxes, log files, and printer spools. Mailboxes and log files can grow to unexpected sizes depending on how many users exist and how long log files are kept. Most users would never require a gigabyte, but remember that /var/tmp must be large enough to contain packages. The /usr partition holds much of the files required to support the system, the &man.ports.7; collection (recommended) and the source code (optional). Both of which are optional at install time. At least 2 gigabytes would be recommended for this partition. When selecting partition sizes, keep the space requirements in mind. Running out of space in one partition while barely using another can be a hassle. Some users have found that &man.sysinstall.8;'s Auto-defaults partition sizer will sometimes select smaller than adequate /var and / partitions. Partition wisely and generously. Swap Partition swap sizing swap partition As a rule of thumb, the swap partition should be about double the size of system memory (RAM). For example, if the machine has 128 megabytes of memory, the swap file should be 256 megabytes. Systems with less memory may perform better with more swap. Less than 256 megabytes of swap is not recommended and memory expansion should be considered. The kernel's VM paging algorithms are tuned to perform best when the swap partition is at least two times the size of main memory. Configuring too little swap can lead to inefficiencies in the VM page scanning code and might create issues later if more memory is added. On larger systems with multiple SCSI disks (or multiple IDE disks operating on different controllers), it is recommend that a swap is configured on each drive (up to four drives). The swap partitions should be approximately the same size. The kernel can handle arbitrary sizes but internal data structures scale to 4 times the largest swap partition. Keeping the swap partitions near the same size will allow the kernel to optimally stripe swap space across disks. Large swap sizes are fine, even if swap is not used much. It might be easier to recover from a runaway program before being forced to reboot. Why Partition? Several users think a single large partition will be fine, but there are several reasons why this is a bad idea. First, each partition has different operational characteristics and separating them allows the file system to tune accordingly. For example, the root and /usr partitions are read-mostly, without much writing. While a lot of reading and writing could occur in /var and /var/tmp. By properly partitioning a system, fragmentation introduced in the smaller write heavy partitions will not bleed over into the mostly-read partitions. Keeping the write-loaded partitions closer to the disk's edge, will increase I/O performance in the partitions where it occurs the most. Now while I/O performance in the larger partitions may be needed, shifting them more toward the edge of the disk will not lead to a significant performance improvement over moving /var to the edge. Finally, there are safety concerns. A smaller, neater root partition which is mostly read-only has a greater chance of surviving a bad crash. Core Configuration rc files rc.conf The principal location for system configuration information is within /etc/rc.conf. This file contains a wide range of configuration information, principally used at system startup to configure the system. Its name directly implies this; it is configuration information for the rc* files. An administrator should make entries in the rc.conf file to override the default settings from /etc/defaults/rc.conf. The defaults file should not be copied verbatim to /etc - it contains default values, not examples. All system-specific changes should be made in the rc.conf file itself. A number of strategies may be applied in clustered applications to separate site-wide configuration from system-specific configuration in order to keep administration overhead down. The recommended approach is to place site-wide configuration into another file, such as /etc/rc.conf.site, and then include this file into /etc/rc.conf, which will contain only system-specific information. As rc.conf is read by &man.sh.1; it is trivial to achieve this. For example: rc.conf: . rc.conf.site hostname="node15.example.com" network_interfaces="fxp0 lo0" ifconfig_fxp0="inet 10.1.1.1" rc.conf.site: defaultrouter="10.1.1.254" saver="daemon" blanktime="100" The rc.conf.site file can then be distributed to every system using rsync or a similar program, while the rc.conf file remains unique. Upgrading the system using &man.sysinstall.8; or make world will not overwrite the rc.conf file, so system configuration information will not be lost. Application Configuration Typically, installed applications have their own configuration files, with their own syntax, etc. It is important that these files be kept separate from the base system, so that they may be easily located and managed by the package management tools. /usr/local/etc Typically, these files are installed in /usr/local/etc. In the case where an application has a large number of configuration files, a subdirectory will be created to hold them. Normally, when a port or package is installed, sample configuration files are also installed. These are usually identified with a .default suffix. If there are no existing configuration files for the application, they will be created by copying the .default files. For example, consider the contents of the directory /usr/local/etc/apache: -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2184 May 20 1998 access.conf -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2184 May 20 1998 access.conf.default -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 9555 May 20 1998 httpd.conf -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 9555 May 20 1998 httpd.conf.default -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 12205 May 20 1998 magic -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 12205 May 20 1998 magic.default -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2700 May 20 1998 mime.types -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2700 May 20 1998 mime.types.default -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 7980 May 20 1998 srm.conf -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 7933 May 20 1998 srm.conf.default - The filesize difference shows that only the srm.conf + The file sizes show that only the srm.conf file has been changed. A later update of the Apache port would not overwrite this changed file. Starting Services services It is common for a system to host a number of services. These may be started in several different fashions, each having different advantages. /usr/local/etc/rc.d Software installed from a port or the packages collection will often place a script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d which is invoked at system startup with a argument, and at system shutdown with a argument. This is the recommended way for starting system-wide services that are to be run as root, or that expect to be started as root. These scripts are registered as part of the installation of the package, and will be removed when the package is removed. A generic startup script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d looks like: #!/bin/sh echo -n ' FooBar' case "$1" in start) /usr/local/bin/foobar ;; stop) kill -9 `cat /var/run/foobar.pid` ;; *) echo "Usage: `basename $0` {start|stop}" >&2 exit 64 ;; esac exit 0 The startup scripts of FreeBSD will look in /usr/local/etc/rc.d for scripts that have an .sh extension and are executable by root. Those scripts that are found are called with an option at startup, and at shutdown to allow them to carry out their purpose. So if you wanted the above sample script to be picked up and run at the proper time during system startup, you should save it to a file called FooBar.sh in /usr/local/etc/rc.d and make sure it is executable. You can make a shell script executable with &man.chmod.1; as shown below: &prompt.root; chmod 755 FooBar.sh Some services expect to be invoked by &man.inetd.8; when a connection is received on a suitable port. This is common for mail reader servers (POP and IMAP, etc.). These services are enabled by editing the file /etc/inetd.conf. See &man.inetd.8; for details on editing this file. Some additional system services may not be covered by the toggles in /etc/rc.conf. These are traditionally enabled by placing the command(s) to invoke them in /etc/rc.local. As of FreeBSD 3.1 there is no default /etc/rc.local; if it is created by the administrator it will however be honored in the normal fashion. Note that rc.local is generally regarded as the location of last resort; if there is a better place to start a service, do it there. Do not place any commands in /etc/rc.conf. To start daemons, or run any commands at boot time, place a script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d instead. It is also possible to use the &man.cron.8; daemon to start system services. This approach has a number of advantages, not least being that because &man.cron.8; runs these processes as the owner of the crontab, services may be started and maintained by non-root users. This takes advantage of a feature of &man.cron.8;: the time specification may be replaced by @reboot, which will cause the job to be run when &man.cron.8; is started shortly after system boot. Tom Rhodes Contributed by Configuring the <command>cron</command> utility Configuring the cron utility One of the most useful utilities in FreeBSD is &man.cron.8;. The cron utility runs in the background and constantly checks the /etc/crontab file. The cron utility also checks the /var/cron/tabs directory, in search of new crontab files. These crontab files store information about specific functions which cron is supposed to perform at certain times. Let us take a look at the /etc/crontab file: # /etc/crontab - root's crontab for FreeBSD # # $FreeBSD: src/etc/crontab,v 1.32 2002/11/22 16:13:39 tom Exp $ # SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin HOME=/var/log # #minute hour mday month wday who command # */5 * * * * root /usr/libexec/atrun # # Save some entropy so that /dev/random can re-seed on boot. */11 * * * * operator /usr/libexec/save-entropy # # Rotate log files every hour, if necessary. 0 * * * * root newsyslog # # Perform daily/weekly/monthly maintenance. 1 3 * * * root periodic daily 15 4 * * 6 root periodic weekly 30 5 1 * * root periodic monthly # # Adjust the time zone if the CMOS clock keeps local time, as opposed to # UTC time. See adjkerntz(8) for details. 1,31 0-5 * * * root adjkerntz -a Like most of the configuration files in FreeBSD, the # character represents a comment. Notice we have several lines here. Each line has seven fields. The first five of these fields hold time information, listed in minute, hour, day, month, and the day of the week. Some of these fields have a * character, which represents every. Thus, if we look at the periodic monthly listing, we can see that it is set to run at minute thirty, hour five, on the first day of every month. Always remember that time is in the twenty-four hour clock format. You can also see that this command is set to be run as root. This is the basic set up for every crontab file, although there is one thing different about this one. Field number six, where we specified the username, only exists in the system /etc/crontab file. This field should be omitted for individual user crontab files. The cron utility cannot read shell start up files, therefore absolute paths need to be used in the crontab. The final field defines the action to be performed. This field should be the pathname and arguments to a valid command or script. If you would like a list of activities to be performed, you can write a shell script to execute them. Then define this shell script in your crontab. Installing a <filename>crontab</filename> To install your freshly written crontab, just use the crontab utility. The most common usage is: &prompt.root; crontab crontab There is also an option to list installed crontab files, just pass the to crontab and look over the output. Tom Rhodes Contributed by Using rc under FreeBSD 5.X rc under FreeBSD 5.X FreeBSD has recently integrated the NetBSD rc.d system for system initialization. Users will notice the files listed in the /etc/rc.d directory. Many of these files are for basic services which can be started with the , , , and options. For instance, &man.sshd.8; can be restarted with the following command : &prompt.root; /etc/rc.d/sshd restart The procedure is similar for other services. Of course, services are usually started automatically as specified in &man.rc.conf.5;. For example, enabling the Network Address Translation daemon at startup is as simple as adding the following line to /etc/rc.conf: natd_enable="YES" If a line is already present, then simply change the to . The rc scripts will automatically load any other dependent services during the next reboot, as described below. As of this writing, the files located in rc.d are: DAEMON devdb kerberos nfsclient rwho LOGIN devfs keyserv nfsd savecore NETWORKING dhclient kldxref nfslocking securelevel SERVERS diskless ldconfig nfsserver sendmail abi dmesg local nisdomain serial accounting dumpon localdaemons ntpd sppp addswap fsck lomac ntpdate sshd adjkerntz hostname lpd othermta swap1 amd inetd motd pccard syscons apm initdiskless mountcritlocal pcvt sysctl apmd initrandom mountcritremote ppp-user syslogd archdep ip6fw mountd pppoed timed atm1 ipfilter moused pwcheck ttys atm2.sh ipfs mroute6d quota usbd atm3.sh ipfw mrouted random vinum bgfsck ipmon msgs rarpd virecover bootparams ipnat named rcconf.sh ypbind ccd ipsec netif root yppasswdd cleanvar ipxrouted network1 route6d ypserv cleartmp isdnd network2 routed ypset cron jail network3 rpcbind ypupdated devd kadmind network_ipv6 rtadvd ypxfrd Most of these are self-explanatory. For instance sshd is used to for the &man.sshd.8; daemon. Other files contribute to system initialization. For instance, consider the bgfsck file. When this script is executed, it will print out the following message: Starting background file system checks in 60 seconds. Therefore this file is used for background file system checks, which are done only during system initialization. Many system services depend on other services to function properly. For example, NIS and other RPC-based services may fail to start until after the rpcbind (portmapper) service has started. To resolve this issue, information about dependencies and other meta-data is included in the comments at the top of each startup script. The &man.rcorder.8; script is then used to parse these comments during system initialization to determine the order in which system services should be invoked to satisfy the dependencies. The following words may be included at the top of each startup file : PROVIDE: Name of service REQUIRE: Name of services which may be required for this service to function BEFORE: What service should be run before this service KEYWORD: FreeBSD or NetBSD. This is used for *BSD dependent features. Using this method an administrator can easily control system services without the hassle of runlevels like some other &unix; operating systems. Marc Fonvieille Contributed by Setting Up Network Interface Cards Network card configuration Nowadays we can not think about a computer without thinking about a network connection. Adding and configuring a network card is a common task for any FreeBSD administrator. Locating the Correct Driver Network card configuration Locating the driver Before you begin, you should know the model of the card you have, the chip it uses, and whether it is a PCI or ISA card. FreeBSD supports a wide variety of both PCI and ISA cards. Check the Hardware Compatibility List for your release to see if your card is supported. Once you are sure your card is supported, you need to determine the proper driver for the card. The file /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/LINT will give you the list of network interfaces drivers with some information about the supported chipsets/cards. If you have doubts about which driver is the correct one, read the manual page of the driver. The manual page will give you more information about the supported hardware and even the possible problems that could occur. If you own a common card, most of the time you will not have to look very hard for a driver. Drivers for common network cards are present in the GENERIC kernel, so your card should show up during boot, like so: dc0: <82c169 PNIC 10/100BaseTX> port 0xa000-0xa0ff mem 0xd3800000-0xd38 000ff irq 15 at device 11.0 on pci0 dc0: Ethernet address: 00:a0:cc:da:da:da miibus0: <MII bus> on dc0 ukphy0: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> on miibus0 ukphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto dc1: <82c169 PNIC 10/100BaseTX> port 0x9800-0x98ff mem 0xd3000000-0xd30 000ff irq 11 at device 12.0 on pci0 dc1: Ethernet address: 00:a0:cc:da:da:db miibus1: <MII bus> on dc1 ukphy1: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> on miibus1 ukphy1: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto In this example, we see that two cards using the &man.dc.4; driver are present on the system. To use your network card, you will need to load the proper driver. This may be accomplished in one of two ways. The easiest way is to simply load a kernel module for your network card with &man.kldload.8;. A module is not available for all network card drivers (ISA cards and cards using the &man.ed.4; driver, for example). Alternatively, you may statically compile the support for your card into your kernel. Check /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/LINT and the manual page of the driver to know what to add in your kernel configuration file. For more information about recompiling your kernel, please see . If your card was detected at boot by your kernel (GENERIC) you do not have to build a new kernel. Configuring the Network Card Network card configuration configuration Once the right driver is loaded for the network card, the card needs to be configured. As with many other things, the network card may have been configured at installation time by sysinstall. To display the configuration for the network interfaces on your system, enter the following command: &prompt.user; ifconfig dc0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 inet 192.168.1.3 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255 ether 00:a0:cc:da:da:da media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>) status: active dc1: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 inet 10.0.0.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255 ether 00:a0:cc:da:da:db media: Ethernet 10baseT/UTP status: no carrier lp0: flags=8810<POINTOPOINT,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 tun0: flags=8010<POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 Old versions of FreeBSD may require the option following &man.ifconfig.8;, for more details about the correct syntax of &man.ifconfig.8;, please refer to the manual page. Note also that entries concerning IPv6 (inet6 etc.) were omitted in this example. In this example, the following devices were displayed: dc0: The first Ethernet interface dc1: The second Ethernet interface lp0: The parallel port interface lo0: The loopback device tun0: The tunnel device used by ppp FreeBSD uses the driver name followed by the order in which one the card is detected at the kernel boot to name the network card. For example sis2 would be the third network card on the system using the &man.sis.4; driver. In this example, the dc0 device is up and running. The key indicators are: UP means that the card is configured and ready. The card has an Internet (inet) address (in this case 192.168.1.3). It has a valid subnet mask (netmask; 0xffffff00 is the same as 255.255.255.0). It has a valid broadcast address (in this case, 192.168.1.255). The MAC address of the card (ether) is 00:a0:cc:da:da:da The physical media selection is on autoselection mode (media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)). We see that dc1 was configured to run with 10baseT/UTP media. For more information on available media types for a driver, please refer to its manual page. The status of the link (status) is active, i.e. the carrier is detected. For dc1, we see status: no carrier. This is normal when an ethernet cable is not plugged into the card. If the &man.ifconfig.8; output had shown something similar to: dc0: flags=8843<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 ether 00:a0:cc:da:da:da it would indicate the card has not been configured. To configure your card, you need root privileges. The network card configuration can be done from the command line with &man.ifconfig.8; but you would have to do it after each reboot of the system. The file /etc/rc.conf is where to add the network card's configuration. Open /etc/rc.conf in your favorite editor. You need to add a line for each network card present on the system, for example in our case, we added these lines: ifconfig_dc0="inet 192.168.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.0" ifconfig_dc1="inet 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 media 10baseT/UTP" You have to replace dc0, dc1, and so on, with the correct device for your cards, and the addresses with the proper ones. You should read the card driver and &man.ifconfig.8; manual pages for more details about the allowed options and also &man.rc.conf.5; manual page for more information on the syntax of /etc/rc.conf. If you configured the network during installation, some lines about the network card(s) may be already present. Double check /etc/rc.conf before adding any lines. You will also have to edit the file /etc/hosts to add the names and the IP addresses of various machines of the LAN, if they are not already there. For more information please refer to &man.hosts.5; and to /usr/share/examples/etc/hosts. Testing and Troubleshooting Once you have made the necessary changes in /etc/rc.conf, you should reboot your system. This will allow the change(s) to the interface(s) to be applied, and verify that the system restarts without any configuration errors. Once the system has been rebooted, you should test the network interfaces. Testing the Ethernet Card Network card configuration Testing the card To verify that an Ethernet card is configured correctly, you have to try two things. First, ping the interface itself, and then ping another machine on the LAN. First test the local interface: &prompt.user; ping -c5 192.168.1.3 PING 192.168.1.3 (192.168.1.3): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.082 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.074 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.076 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.108 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.076 ms --- 192.168.1.3 ping statistics --- 5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.074/0.083/0.108/0.013 ms Now we have to ping another machine on the LAN: &prompt.user; ping -c5 192.168.1.2 PING 192.168.1.2 (192.168.1.2): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.726 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.766 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.700 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.747 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.704 ms --- 192.168.1.2 ping statistics --- 5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.700/0.729/0.766/0.025 ms You could also use the machine name instead of 192.168.1.2 if you have set up the /etc/hosts file. Troubleshooting Network card configuration Troubleshooting Troubleshooting hardware and software configurations is always a pain, and a pain which can be alleviated by checking the simple things first. Is your network cable plugged in? Have you properly configured the network services? Did you configure the firewall correctly? Is the card you are using supported by FreeBSD? Always check the hardware notes before sending off a bug report. Update your version of FreeBSD to the latest STABLE version. Check the mailing list archives, or perhaps search the Internet. If the card works, yet performance is poor, it would be worthwhile to read over the &man.tuning.7; manual page. You can also check the network configuration as incorrect network settings can cause slow connections. Some users experience one or two device timeouts, which is normal for some cards. If they continue, or are bothersome, you may wish to be sure the device is not conflicting with another device. Double check the cable connections. Perhaps you may just need to get another card. At times, users see a few watchdog timeout errors. The first thing to do here is to check your network cable. Many cards require a PCI slot which supports Bus Mastering. On some old motherboards, only one PCI slot allows it (usually slot 0). Check the network card and the motherboard documentation to determine if that may be the problem. No route to host messages occur if the system is unable to route a packet to the destination host. This can happen if no default route is specified, or if a cable is unplugged. Check the output of netstat -rn and make sure there is a valid route to the host you are trying to reach. If there is not, read on to . ping: sendto: Permission denied error messages are often caused by a misconfigured firewall. If ipfw is enabled in the kernel but no rules have been defined, then the default policy is to deny all traffic, even ping requests! Read on to for more information. Virtual Hosts virtual hosts IP aliases A very common use of FreeBSD is virtual site hosting, where one server appears to the network as many servers. This is achieved by assigning multiple network addresses to a single interface. A given network interface has one real address, and may have any number of alias addresses. These aliases are normally added by placing alias entries in /etc/rc.conf. An alias entry for the interface fxp0 looks like: ifconfig_fxp0_alias0="inet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" Note that alias entries must start with alias0 and proceed upwards in order, (for example, _alias1, _alias2, and so on). The configuration process will stop at the first missing number. The calculation of alias netmasks is important, but fortunately quite simple. For a given interface, there must be one address which correctly represents the network's netmask. Any other addresses which fall within this network must have a netmask of all 1s. For example, consider the case where the fxp0 interface is connected to two networks, the 10.1.1.0 network with a netmask of 255.255.255.0 and the 202.0.75.16 network with a netmask of 255.255.255.240. We want the system to appear at 10.1.1.1 through 10.1.1.5 and at 202.0.75.17 through 202.0.75.20. The following entries configure the adapter correctly for this arrangement: ifconfig_fxp0="inet 10.1.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0" ifconfig_fxp0_alias0="inet 10.1.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.255" ifconfig_fxp0_alias1="inet 10.1.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.255" ifconfig_fxp0_alias2="inet 10.1.1.4 netmask 255.255.255.255" ifconfig_fxp0_alias3="inet 10.1.1.5 netmask 255.255.255.255" ifconfig_fxp0_alias4="inet 202.0.75.17 netmask 255.255.255.240" ifconfig_fxp0_alias5="inet 202.0.75.18 netmask 255.255.255.255" ifconfig_fxp0_alias6="inet 202.0.75.19 netmask 255.255.255.255" ifconfig_fxp0_alias7="inet 202.0.75.20 netmask 255.255.255.255" Configuration Files <filename>/etc</filename> Layout There are a number of directories in which configuration information is kept. These include: /etc Generic system configuration information; data here is system-specific. /etc/defaults Default versions of system configuration files. /etc/mail Extra &man.sendmail.8; configuration, other MTA configuration files. /etc/ppp Configuration for both user- and kernel-ppp programs. /etc/namedb Default location for &man.named.8; data. Normally named.conf and zone files are stored here. /usr/local/etc Configuration files for installed applications. May contain per-application subdirectories. /usr/local/etc/rc.d Start/stop scripts for installed applications. /var/db Automatically generated system-specific database files, such as the package database, the locate database, and so on Hostnames hostname DNS <filename>/etc/resolv.conf</filename> resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf dictates how FreeBSD's resolver accesses the Internet Domain Name System (DNS). The most common entries to resolv.conf are: nameserver The IP address of a name server the resolver should query. The servers are queried in the order listed with a maximum of three. search Search list for hostname lookup. This is normally determined by the domain of the local hostname. domain The local domain name. A typical resolv.conf: search example.com nameserver 147.11.1.11 nameserver 147.11.100.30 Only one of the search and domain options should be used. If you are using DHCP, &man.dhclient.8; usually rewrites resolv.conf with information received from the DHCP server. <filename>/etc/hosts</filename> hosts /etc/hosts is a simple text database reminiscent of the old Internet. It works in conjunction with DNS and NIS providing name to IP address mappings. Local computers connected via a LAN can be placed in here for simplistic naming purposes instead of setting up a &man.named.8; server. Additionally, /etc/hosts can be used to provide a local record of Internet names, reducing the need to query externally for commonly accessed names. # $FreeBSD$ # # Host Database # This file should contain the addresses and aliases # for local hosts that share this file. # In the presence of the domain name service or NIS, this file may # not be consulted at all; see /etc/nsswitch.conf for the resolution order. # # ::1 localhost localhost.my.domain myname.my.domain 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.my.domain myname.my.domain # # Imaginary network. #10.0.0.2 myname.my.domain myname #10.0.0.3 myfriend.my.domain myfriend # # According to RFC 1918, you can use the following IP networks for # private nets which will never be connected to the Internet: # # 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 # 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 # 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 # # In case you want to be able to connect to the Internet, you need # real official assigned numbers. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not try # to invent your own network numbers but instead get one from your # network provider (if any) or from the Internet Registry (ftp to # rs.internic.net, directory `/templates'). # /etc/hosts takes on the simple format of: [Internet address] [official hostname] [alias1] [alias2] ... For example: 10.0.0.1 myRealHostname.example.com myRealHostname foobar1 foobar2 Consult &man.hosts.5; for more information. Log File Configuration log files <filename>syslog.conf</filename> syslog.conf syslog.conf is the configuration file for the &man.syslogd.8; program. It indicates which types of syslog messages are logged to particular log files. # $FreeBSD$ # # Spaces ARE valid field separators in this file. However, # other *nix-like systems still insist on using tabs as field # separators. If you are sharing this file between systems, you # may want to use only tabs as field separators here. # Consult the syslog.conf(5) manual page. *.err;kern.debug;auth.notice;mail.crit /dev/console *.notice;kern.debug;lpr.info;mail.crit;news.err /var/log/messages security.* /var/log/security mail.info /var/log/maillog lpr.info /var/log/lpd-errs cron.* /var/log/cron *.err root *.notice;news.err root *.alert root *.emerg * # uncomment this to log all writes to /dev/console to /var/log/console.log #console.info /var/log/console.log # uncomment this to enable logging of all log messages to /var/log/all.log #*.* /var/log/all.log # uncomment this to enable logging to a remote log host named loghost #*.* @loghost # uncomment these if you're running inn # news.crit /var/log/news/news.crit # news.err /var/log/news/news.err # news.notice /var/log/news/news.notice !startslip *.* /var/log/slip.log !ppp *.* /var/log/ppp.log Consult the &man.syslog.conf.5; manual page for more information. <filename>newsyslog.conf</filename> newsyslog.conf newsyslog.conf is the configuration file for &man.newsyslog.8;, a program that is normally scheduled to run by &man.cron.8;. &man.newsyslog.8; determines when log files require archiving or rearranging. logfile is moved to logfile.0, logfile.0 is moved to logfile.1, and so on. Alternatively, the log files may be archived in &man.gzip.1; format causing them to be named: logfile.0.gz, logfile.1.gz, and so on. newsyslog.conf indicates which log files are to be managed, how many are to be kept, and when they are to be touched. Log files can be rearranged and/or archived when they have either reached a certain size, or at a certain periodic time/date. # configuration file for newsyslog # $FreeBSD$ # # filename [owner:group] mode count size when [ZB] [/pid_file] [sig_num] /var/log/cron 600 3 100 * Z /var/log/amd.log 644 7 100 * Z /var/log/kerberos.log 644 7 100 * Z /var/log/lpd-errs 644 7 100 * Z /var/log/maillog 644 7 * @T00 Z /var/log/sendmail.st 644 10 * 168 B /var/log/messages 644 5 100 * Z /var/log/all.log 600 7 * @T00 Z /var/log/slip.log 600 3 100 * Z /var/log/ppp.log 600 3 100 * Z /var/log/security 600 10 100 * Z /var/log/wtmp 644 3 * @01T05 B /var/log/daily.log 640 7 * @T00 Z /var/log/weekly.log 640 5 1 $W6D0 Z /var/log/monthly.log 640 12 * $M1D0 Z /var/log/console.log 640 5 100 * Z Consult the &man.newsyslog.8; manual page for more information. <filename>sysctl.conf</filename> sysctl.conf sysctl sysctl.conf looks much like rc.conf. Values are set in a variable=value form. The specified values are set after the system goes into multi-user mode. Not all variables are settable in this mode. A sample sysctl.conf turning off logging of fatal signal exits and letting Linux programs know they are really running under FreeBSD: kern.logsigexit=0 # Do not log fatal signal exits (e.g. sig 11) compat.linux.osname=FreeBSD compat.linux.osrelease=4.3-STABLE Tuning with sysctl sysctl tuning with sysctl &man.sysctl.8; is an interface that allows you to make changes to a running FreeBSD system. This includes many advanced options of the TCP/IP stack and virtual memory system that can dramatically improve performance for an experienced system administrator. Over five hundred system variables can be read and set using &man.sysctl.8;. At its core, &man.sysctl.8; serves two functions: to read and to modify system settings. To view all readable variables: &prompt.user; sysctl -a To read a particular variable, for example, kern.maxproc: &prompt.user; sysctl kern.maxproc kern.maxproc: 1044 To set a particular variable, use the intuitive variable=value syntax: &prompt.root; sysctl kern.maxfiles=5000 kern.maxfiles: 2088 -> 5000 Settings of sysctl variables are usually either strings, numbers, or booleans (a boolean being 1 for yes or a 0 for no). Tom Rhodes Contributed by &man.sysctl.8; read only In some cases it may be desirable to modify read-only &man.sysctl.8; values. While this is not recommended, it is also sometimes unavoidable. For instance on some laptop models the &man.cardbus.4; device will not probe memory ranges, and fail with errors which look similar to: cbb0: Could not map register memory device_probe_and_attach: cbb0 attach returned 12 Cases like the one above usually require the modification of some default &man.sysctl.8; settings which are set read only. To overcome these situations a user can put &man.sysctl.8; OIDs in their local /boot/loader.conf.local. Default settings are located in the /boot/defaults/loader.conf file. Fixing the problem mentioned above would require a user to set in the aforementioned file. Now &man.cardbus.4; will work properly. Tuning Disks Sysctl Variables <varname>vfs.vmiodirenable</varname> vfs.vmiodirenable The vfs.vmiodirenable sysctl variable may be set to either 0 (off) or 1 (on); it is 1 by default. This variable controls how directories are cached by the system. Most directories are small, using just a single fragment (typically 1 K) in the file system and less (typically 512 bytes) in the buffer cache. However, when operating in the default mode the buffer cache will only cache a fixed number of directories even if you have a huge amount of memory. Turning on this sysctl allows the buffer cache to use the VM Page Cache to cache the directories, making all the memory available for caching directories. However, the minimum in-core memory used to cache a directory is the physical page size (typically 4 K) rather than 512 bytes. We recommend turning this option on if you are running any services which manipulate large numbers of files. Such services can include web caches, large mail systems, and news systems. Turning on this option will generally not reduce performance even with the wasted memory but you should experiment to find out. <varname>vfs.write_behind</varname> vfs.write_behind The vfs.write_behind sysctl variable defaults to 1 (on). This tells the file system to issue media writes as full clusters are collected, which typically occurs when writing large sequential files. The idea is to avoid saturating the buffer cache with dirty buffers when it would not benefit I/O performance. However, this may stall processes and under certain circumstances you may wish to turn it off. <varname>vfs.hirunningspace</varname> vfs.hirunningspace The vfs.hirunningspace sysctl variable determines how much outstanding write I/O may be queued to disk controllers system-wide at any given instance. The default is usually sufficient but on machines with lots of disks you may want to bump it up to four or five megabytes. Note that setting too high a value (exceeding the buffer cache's write threshold) can lead to extremely bad clustering performance. Do not set this value arbitrarily high! Higher write values may add latency to reads occurring at the same time. There are various other buffer-cache and VM page cache related sysctls. We do not recommend modifying these values. As of FreeBSD 4.3, the VM system does an extremely good job of automatically tuning itself. <varname>vm.swap_idle_enabled</varname> vm.swap_idle_enabled The vm.swap_idle_enabled sysctl variable is useful in large multi-user systems where you have lots of users entering and leaving the system and lots of idle processes. Such systems tend to generate a great deal of continuous pressure on free memory reserves. Turning this feature on and tweaking the swapout hysteresis (in idle seconds) via vm.swap_idle_threshold1 and vm.swap_idle_threshold2 allows you to depress the priority of memory pages associated with idle processes more quickly then the normal pageout algorithm. This gives a helping hand to the pageout daemon. Do not turn this option on unless you need it, because the tradeoff you are making is essentially pre-page memory sooner rather than later; thus eating more swap and disk bandwidth. In a small system this option will have a determinable effect but in a large system that is already doing moderate paging this option allows the VM system to stage whole processes into and out of memory easily. <varname>hw.ata.wc</varname> hw.ata.wc FreeBSD 4.3 flirted with turning off IDE write caching. This reduced write bandwidth to IDE disks but was considered necessary due to serious data consistency issues introduced by hard drive vendors. The problem is that IDE drives lie about when a write completes. With IDE write caching turned on, IDE hard drives not only write data to disk out of order, but will sometimes delay writing some blocks indefinitely when under heavy disk loads. A crash or power failure may cause serious file system corruption. FreeBSD's default was changed to be safe. Unfortunately, the result was such a huge performance loss that we changed write caching back to on by default after the release. You should check the default on your system by observing the hw.ata.wc sysctl variable. If IDE write caching is turned off, you can turn it back on by setting the kernel variable back to 1. This must be done from the boot loader at boot time. Attempting to do it after the kernel boots will have no effect. For more information, please see &man.ata.4;. <option>SCSI_DELAY</option> (<varname>kern.cam.scsi_delay</varname>) kern.cam.scsi_delay The kernel config may be used to reduce system boot times. The defaults are fairly high and can be responsible for 15+ seconds of delay in the boot process. Reducing it to 5 seconds usually works (especially with modern drives). Newer versions of FreeBSD (5.0+) should use the kern.cam.scsi_delay boot time tunable. The tunable, and kernel config option accept values in terms of milliseconds and not seconds. Soft Updates Soft Updates tunefs The &man.tunefs.8; program can be used to fine-tune a file system. This program has many different options, but for now we are only concerned with toggling Soft Updates on and off, which is done by: &prompt.root; tunefs -n enable /filesystem &prompt.root; tunefs -n disable /filesystem A filesystem cannot be modified with &man.tunefs.8; while it is mounted. A good time to enable Soft Updates is before any partitions have been mounted, in single-user mode. As of FreeBSD 4.5, it is possible to enable Soft Updates at filesystem creation time, through use of the -U option to &man.newfs.8;. Soft Updates drastically improves meta-data performance, mainly file creation and deletion, through the use of a memory cache. We recommend to use Soft Updates on all of your file systems. There are two downsides to Soft Updates that you should be aware of: First, Soft Updates guarantees filesystem consistency in the case of a crash but could very easily be several seconds (even a minute!) behind updating the physical disk. If your system crashes you may lose more work than otherwise. Secondly, Soft Updates delays the freeing of filesystem blocks. If you have a filesystem (such as the root filesystem) which is almost full, performing a major update, such as make installworld, can cause the filesystem to run out of space and the update to fail. More details about Soft Updates Soft Updates Details There are two traditional approaches to writing a file systems meta-data back to disk. (Meta-data updates are updates to non-content data like inodes or directories.) Historically, the default behavior was to write out meta-data updates synchronously. If a directory had been changed, the system waited until the change was actually written to disk. The file data buffers (file contents) were passed through the buffer cache and backed up to disk later on asynchronously. The advantage of this implementation is that it operates safely. If there is a failure during an update, the meta-data are always in a consistent state. A file is either created completely or not at all. If the data blocks of a file did not find their way out of the buffer cache onto the disk by the time of the crash, &man.fsck.8; is able to recognize this and repair the filesystem by setting the file length to 0. Additionally, the implementation is clear and simple. The disadvantage is that meta-data changes are slow. An rm -r, for instance, touches all the files in a directory sequentially, but each directory change (deletion of a file) will be written synchronously to the disk. This includes updates to the directory itself, to the inode table, and possibly to indirect blocks allocated by the file. Similar considerations apply for unrolling large hierarchies (tar -x). The second case is asynchronous meta-data updates. This is the default for Linux/ext2fs and mount -o async for *BSD ufs. All meta-data updates are simply being passed through the buffer cache too, that is, they will be intermixed with the updates of the file content data. The advantage of this implementation is there is no need to wait until each meta-data update has been written to disk, so all operations which cause huge amounts of meta-data updates work much faster than in the synchronous case. Also, the implementation is still clear and simple, so there is a low risk for bugs creeping into the code. The disadvantage is that there is no guarantee at all for a consistent state of the filesystem. If there is a failure during an operation that updated large amounts of meta-data (like a power failure, or someone pressing the reset button), the filesystem will be left in an unpredictable state. There is no opportunity to examine the state of the filesystem when the system comes up again; the data blocks of a file could already have been written to the disk while the updates of the inode table or the associated directory were not. It is actually impossible to implement a fsck which is able to clean up the resulting chaos (because the necessary information is not available on the disk). If the filesystem has been damaged beyond repair, the only choice is to use &man.newfs.8; on it and restore it from backup. The usual solution for this problem was to implement dirty region logging, which is also referred to as journaling, although that term is not used consistently and is occasionally applied to other forms of transaction logging as well. Meta-data updates are still written synchronously, but only into a small region of the disk. Later on they will be moved to their proper location. Because the logging area is a small, contiguous region on the disk, there are no long distances for the disk heads to move, even during heavy operations, so these operations are quicker than synchronous updates. Additionally the complexity of the implementation is fairly limited, so the risk of bugs being present is low. A disadvantage is that all meta-data are written twice (once into the logging region and once to the proper location) so for normal work, a performance pessimization might result. On the other hand, in case of a crash, all pending meta-data operations can be quickly either rolled-back or completed from the logging area after the system comes up again, resulting in a fast filesystem startup. Kirk McKusick, the developer of Berkeley FFS, solved this problem with Soft Updates: all pending meta-data updates are kept in memory and written out to disk in a sorted sequence (ordered meta-data updates). This has the effect that, in case of heavy meta-data operations, later updates to an item catch the earlier ones if the earlier ones are still in memory and have not already been written to disk. So all operations on, say, a directory are generally performed in memory before the update is written to disk (the data blocks are sorted according to their position so that they will not be on the disk ahead of their meta-data). If the system crashes, this causes an implicit log rewind: all operations which did not find their way to the disk appear as if they had never happened. A consistent filesystem state is maintained that appears to be the one of 30 to 60 seconds earlier. The algorithm used guarantees that all resources in use are marked as such in their appropriate bitmaps: blocks and inodes. After a crash, the only resource allocation error that occurs is that resources are marked as used which are actually free. &man.fsck.8; recognizes this situation, and frees the resources that are no longer used. It is safe to ignore the dirty state of the filesystem after a crash by forcibly mounting it with mount -f. In order to free resources that may be unused, &man.fsck.8; needs to be run at a later time. This is the idea behind the background fsck: at system startup time, only a snapshot of the filesystem is recorded. The fsck can be run later on. All file systems can then be mounted dirty, so the system startup proceeds in multiuser mode. Then, background fscks will be scheduled for all file systems where this is required, to free resources that may be unused. (File systems that do not use Soft Updates still need the usual foreground fsck though.) The advantage is that meta-data operations are nearly as fast as asynchronous updates (i.e. faster than with logging, which has to write the meta-data twice). The disadvantages are the complexity of the code (implying a higher risk for bugs in an area that is highly sensitive regarding loss of user data), and a higher memory consumption. Additionally there are some idiosyncrasies one has to get used to. After a crash, the state of the filesystem appears to be somewhat older. In situations where the standard synchronous approach would have caused some zero-length files to remain after the fsck, these files do not exist at all with a Soft Updates filesystem because neither the meta-data nor the file contents have ever been written to disk. Disk space is not released until the updates have been written to disk, which may take place some time after running rm. This may cause problems when installing large amounts of data on a filesystem that does not have enough free space to hold all the files twice. Tuning Kernel Limits tuning kernel limits File/Process Limits <varname>kern.maxfiles</varname> kern.maxfiles kern.maxfiles can be raised or lowered based upon your system requirements. This variable indicates the maximum number of file descriptors on your system. When the file descriptor table is full, file: table is full will show up repeatedly in the system message buffer, which can be viewed with the dmesg command. Each open file, socket, or fifo uses one file descriptor. A large-scale production server may easily require many thousands of file descriptors, depending on the kind and number of services running concurrently. kern.maxfile's default value is dictated by the option in your kernel configuration file. kern.maxfiles grows proportionally to the value of . When compiling a custom kernel, it is a good idea to set this kernel configuration option according to the uses of your system. From this number, the kernel is given most of its pre-defined limits. Even though a production machine may not actually have 256 users connected as once, the resources needed may be similar to a high-scale web server. As of FreeBSD 4.5, setting to 0 in your kernel configuration file will choose a reasonable default value based on the amount of RAM present in your system. <varname>kern.ipc.somaxconn</varname> kern.ipc.somaxconn The kern.ipc.somaxconn sysctl variable limits the size of the listen queue for accepting new TCP connections. The default value of 128 is typically too low for robust handling of new connections in a heavily loaded web server environment. For such environments, it is recommended to increase this value to 1024 or higher. The service daemon may itself limit the listen queue size (e.g. &man.sendmail.8;, or Apache) but will often have a directive in it's configuration file to adjust the queue size. Large listen queues also do a better job of avoiding Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Network Limits The kernel configuration option dictates the amount of network Mbufs available to the system. A heavily-trafficked server with a low number of Mbufs will hinder FreeBSD's ability. Each cluster represents approximately 2 K of memory, so a value of 1024 represents 2 megabytes of kernel memory reserved for network buffers. A simple calculation can be done to figure out how many are needed. If you have a web server which maxes out at 1000 simultaneous connections, and each connection eats a 16 K receive and 16 K send buffer, you need approximately 32 MB worth of network buffers to cover the web server. A good rule of thumb is to multiply by 2, so 2x32 MB / 2 KB = 64 MB / 2 kB = 32768. We recommend values between 4096 and 32768 for machines with greater amounts of memory. Under no circumstances should you specify an arbitrarily high value for this parameter as it could lead to a boot time crash. The option to &man.netstat.1; may be used to observe network cluster use. kern.ipc.nmbclusters loader tunable should be used to tune this at boot time. Only older versions of FreeBSD will require you to use the kernel &man.config.8; option. For busy servers that make extensive use of the &man.sendfile.2; system call, it may be necessary to increase the number of &man.sendfile.2; buffers via the kernel configuration option or by setting its value in /boot/loader.conf (see &man.loader.8; for details). A common indicator that this parameter needs to be adjusted is when processes are seen in the sfbufa state. The sysctl variable kern.ipc.nsfbufs is a read-only glimpse at the kernel configured variable. This parameter nominally scales with kern.maxusers, however it may be necessary to tune accordingly. Even though a socket has been marked as non-blocking, calling &man.sendfile.2; on the non-blocking socket may result in the &man.sendfile.2; call blocking until enough struct sf_buf's are made available. <varname>net.inet.ip.portrange.*</varname> net.inet.ip.portrange.* The net.inet.ip.portrange.* sysctl variables control the port number ranges automatically bound to TCP and UDP sockets. There are three ranges: a low range, a default range, and a high range. Most network programs use the default range which is controlled by the net.inet.ip.portrange.first and net.inet.ip.portrange.last, which default to 1024 and 5000, respectively. Bound port ranges are used for outgoing connections, and it is possible to run the system out of ports under certain circumstances. This most commonly occurs when you are running a heavily loaded web proxy. The port range is not an issue when running servers which handle mainly incoming connections, such as a normal web server, or has a limited number of outgoing connections, such as a mail relay. For situations where you may run yourself out of ports, it is recommended to increase net.inet.ip.portrange.last modestly. A value of 10000, 20000 or 30000 may be reasonable. You should also consider firewall effects when changing the port range. Some firewalls may block large ranges of ports (usually low-numbered ports) and expect systems to use higher ranges of ports for outgoing connections — for this reason it is recommended that net.inet.ip.portrange.first be lowered. TCP Bandwidth Delay Product TCP Bandwidth Delay Product Limiting net.inet.tcp.inflight_enable The TCP Bandwidth Delay Product Limiting is similar to TCP/Vegas in NetBSD. It can be enabled by setting net.inet.tcp.inflight_enable sysctl variable to 1. The system will attempt to calculate the bandwidth delay product for each connection and limit the amount of data queued to the network to just the amount required to maintain optimum throughput. This feature is useful if you are serving data over modems, Gigabit Ethernet, or even high speed WAN links (or any other link with a high bandwidth delay product), especially if you are also using window scaling or have configured a large send window. If you enable this option, you should also be sure to set net.inet.tcp.inflight_debug to 0 (disable debugging), and for production use setting net.inet.tcp.inflight_min to at least 6144 may be beneficial. However, note that setting high minimums may effectively disable bandwidth limiting depending on the link. The limiting feature reduces the amount of data built up in intermediate route and switch packet queues as well as reduces the amount of data built up in the local host's interface queue. With fewer packets queued up, interactive connections, especially over slow modems, will also be able to operate with lower Round Trip Times. However, note that this feature only effects data transmission (uploading / server side). It has no effect on data reception (downloading). Adjusting net.inet.tcp.inflight_stab is not recommended. This parameter defaults to 20, representing 2 maximal packets added to the bandwidth delay product window calculation. The additional window is required to stabilize the algorithm and improve responsiveness to changing conditions, but it can also result in higher ping times over slow links (though still much lower than you would get without the inflight algorithm). In such cases, you may wish to try reducing this parameter to 15, 10, or 5; and may also have to reduce net.inet.tcp.inflight_min (for example, to 3500) to get the desired effect. Reducing these parameters should be done as a last resort only. Adding Swap Space No matter how well you plan, sometimes a system does not run as you expect. If you find you need more swap space, it is simple enough to add. You have three ways to increase swap space: adding a new hard drive, enabling swap over NFS, and creating a swap file on an existing partition. Swap on a New Hard Drive The best way to add swap, of course, is to use this as an excuse to add another hard drive. You can always use another hard drive, after all. If you can do this, go reread the discussion of swap space from the Initial Configuration section of the Handbook for some suggestions on how to best arrange your swap. Swapping over NFS Swapping over NFS is only recommended if you do not have a local hard disk to swap to. Swapping over NFS is slow and inefficient in versions of FreeBSD prior to 4.X. It is reasonably fast and efficient in 4.0-RELEASE and newer. Even with newer versions of FreeBSD, NFS swapping will be limited by the available network bandwidth and puts an additional burden on the NFS server. Swapfiles You can create a file of a specified size to use as a swap file. In our example here we will use a 64MB file called /usr/swap0. You can use any name you want, of course. Creating a Swapfile on FreeBSD 4.X Be certain that your kernel configuration includes the vnode driver. It is not in recent versions of GENERIC. pseudo-device vn 1 #Vnode driver (turns a file into a device) create a vn-device: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV vn0 create a swapfile (/usr/swap0): &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/usr/swap0 bs=1024k count=64 set proper permissions on (/usr/swap0): &prompt.root; chmod 0600 /usr/swap0 enable the swap file in /etc/rc.conf: swapfile="/usr/swap0" # Set to name of swapfile if aux swapfile desired. Reboot the machine or to enable the swap file immediately, type: &prompt.root; vnconfig -e /dev/vn0b /usr/swap0 swap Creating a Swapfile on FreeBSD 5.X Be certain that your kernel configuration includes the memory disk driver (&man.md.4;). It is default in GENERIC kernel. device md # Memory "disks" create a swapfile (/usr/swap0): &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/usr/swap0 bs=1024k count=64 set proper permissions on (/usr/swap0): &prompt.root; chmod 0600 /usr/swap0 enable the swap file in /etc/rc.conf: swapfile="/usr/swap0" # Set to name of swapfile if aux swapfile desired. Reboot the machine or to enable the swap file immediately, type: &prompt.root; mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /usr/swap0 -u 0 && swapon /dev/md0 Hiten Pandya Written by Tom Rhodes Power and Resource Management It is very important to utilize hardware resources in an efficient manner. Before ACPI was introduced, it was very difficult and inflexible for operating systems to manage the power usage and thermal properties of a system. The hardware was either controlled by some sort of BIOS embedded interface, i.e.: Plug and Play BIOS (PNPBIOS), Advanced Power Management (APM) and so on. Power and Resource Management is one of the key components of a modern operating system. For example, you would want an operating system to monitor system limits (and possibly take an action), in case your system temperature increased unexpectedly. In this section of the FreeBSD Handbook, we will provide comprehensive information about ACPI. References will be provided for further reading, at the end. Please be aware that ACPI is only available on FreeBSD 5.X and above. What is ACPI? Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is a standard written by an alliance of vendors to provide a standard interface for hardware resources and power management (hence the name). It is a key element in Operating System-directed configuration and Power Management, i.e.: it provides more control and flexibility to the operating system (OS). Modern systems stretched the limits of the current Plug and Play interfaces (such as APM, which is used in FreeBSD 4.X), prior to the introduction of ACPI. ACPI is the direct successor to APM (Advanced Power Management). Shortcomings of Advanced Power Management (APM) The Advanced Power Management (APM) facility control's the power usage of a system based on its activity. The APM BIOS is supplied by the (system) vendor and it is specific to the hardware platform. An APM driver in the OS mediates access to the APM Software Interface, which allows management of power levels. There are four major problems in APM. Firstly, power management is done by the (vendor-specific) BIOS, and the OS does not have any knowledge of it. One example of this, is when the user sets idle-time values for a hard drive in the APM BIOS, that when exceeded, it (BIOS) would spin down the hard drive, without the consent of the OS. Secondly, the APM logic is embedded in the BIOS, and it operates outside the scope of the OS. This means users can only fix problems in their APM BIOS by flashing a new one into the ROM; which, is a very dangerous procedure, and if it fails, it could leave the system in an unrecoverable state. Thirdly, APM is a vendor-specific technology, which, means that there is a lot or parity (duplication of efforts) and bugs found in one vendor's BIOS, may not be solved in others. Last but not the least, the APM BIOS did not have enough room to implement a sophisticated power policy, or one that can adapt very well to the purpose of the machine. Plug and Play BIOS (PNPBIOS) was unreliable in many situations. PNPBIOS is 16-bit technology, so the OS has to use 16-bit emulation in order to interface with PNPBIOS methods. The FreeBSD APM driver is documented in the &man.apm.4; manual page. Configuring <acronym>ACPI</acronym> The acpi.ko driver is loaded by default at start up by the &man.loader.8; and should not be compiled into the kernel. The reasoning behind this is that modules are easier to work with, say if switching to another acpi.ko without doing a kernel rebuild. This has the advantage of making testing easier. Another reason is that starting ACPI after a system has been brought up is not too useful, and in some cases can be fatal. In doubt, just disable ACPI all together. This driver should not and can not be unloaded because the system bus uses it for various hardware interactions. ACPI can be disabled with the &man.acpiconf.8; utility. In fact most of the interaction with ACPI can be done via &man.acpiconf.8;. Basically this means, if anything about ACPI is in the &man.dmesg.8; output, then most likely it is already running. ACPI and APM cannot coexist and should be used separately. The last one to load will terminate if the driver notices the other running. In the simplest form, ACPI can be used to put the system into a sleep mode with &man.acpiconf.8;, the flag, and a 1-5 option. Most users will only need 1. Option 5 will do a soft-off which is the same action as: &prompt.root; halt -p The other options are available. Check out the &man.acpiconf.8; manual page for more information. Debugging <acronym>ACPI</acronym> Almost everything in ACPI is transparent, until it does not work. That is usually when you as a user will know there is something not working properly. diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks/chapter.sgml index 2fb4a95cde..638e15e5a4 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks/chapter.sgml @@ -1,3123 +1,3123 @@ Storage Synopsis This chapter covers the use of disks in FreeBSD. This includes memory-backed disks, network-attached disks, and standard SCSI/IDE storage devices. After reading this chapter, you will know: The terminology FreeBSD uses to describe the organization of data on a physical disk (partitions and slices). How to mount and unmount file systems. How to add additional hard disks to your system. How to setup virtual file systems, such as memory disks. How to use quotas to limit disk space usage. How to encrypt disks to secure them against attackers. How to create and burn CDs and DVDs on FreeBSD. The various storage media options for backups. How to use backup programs available under FreeBSD. How to backup to floppy disks. What snapshots are and how to use them efficiently. Device Names The following is a list of physical storage devices supported in FreeBSD, and the device names associated with them. Physical Disk Naming Conventions Drive type Drive device name IDE hard drives ad IDE CDROM drives acd SCSI hard drives and USB Mass storage devices da SCSI CDROM drives cd Assorted non-standard CDROM drives mcd for Mitsumi CD-ROM, scd for Sony CD-ROM, matcd for Matsushita/Panasonic CD-ROM The &man.matcd.4; driver has been removed in FreeBSD 4.X branch since October 5th, 2002 and does not exist in FreeBSD 5.0 and later. Floppy drives fd SCSI tape drives sa IDE tape drives ast Flash drives fla for DiskOnChip Flash device RAID drives aacd for Adaptec AdvancedRAID, mlxd and mlyd for Mylex, amrd for AMI MegaRAID, idad for Compaq Smart RAID, twed for 3Ware RAID.
David O'Brien Originally contributed by Adding Disks disks adding Lets say we want to add a new SCSI disk to a machine that currently only has a single drive. First turn off the computer and install the drive in the computer following the instructions of the computer, controller, and drive manufacturer. Due to the wide variations of procedures to do this, the details are beyond the scope of this document. Login as user root. After you have installed the drive, inspect /var/run/dmesg.boot to ensure the new disk was found. Continuing with our example, the newly added drive will be da1 and we want to mount it on /1 (if you are adding an IDE drive, the device name will be wd1 in pre-4.0 systems, or ad1 in most 4.X systems). partitions slices fdisk Because FreeBSD runs on IBM-PC compatible computers, it must take into account the PC BIOS partitions. These are different from the traditional BSD partitions. A PC disk has up to four BIOS partition entries. If the disk is going to be truly dedicated to FreeBSD, you can use the dedicated mode. Otherwise, FreeBSD will have to live within one of the PC BIOS partitions. FreeBSD calls the PC BIOS partitions slices so as not to confuse them with traditional BSD partitions. You may also use slices on a disk that is dedicated to FreeBSD, but used in a computer that also has another operating system installed. This is to not confuse the fdisk utility of the other operating system. In the slice case the drive will be added as /dev/da1s1e. This is read as: SCSI disk, unit number 1 (second SCSI disk), slice 1 (PC BIOS partition 1), and e BSD partition. In the dedicated case, the drive will be added simply as /dev/da1e. Using &man.sysinstall.8; sysinstall adding disks su Navigating <application>Sysinstall</application> You may use /stand/sysinstall to partition and label a new disk using its easy to use menus. Either login as user root or use the su command. Run /stand/sysinstall and enter the Configure menu. Within the FreeBSD Configuration Menu, scroll down and select the Fdisk option. <application>fdisk</application> Partition Editor Once inside fdisk, we can type A to use the entire disk for FreeBSD. When asked if you want to remain cooperative with any future possible operating systems, answer YES. Write the changes to the disk using W. Now exit the FDISK editor by typing q. Next you will be asked about the Master Boot Record. Since you are adding a disk to an already running system, choose None. Disk Label Editor BSD partitions Next, you need to exit sysinstall and start it again. Follow the directions above, although this time choose the Label option. This will enter the Disk Label Editor. This is where you will create the traditional BSD partitions. A disk can have up to eight partitions, labeled a-h. A few of the partition labels have special uses. The a partition is used for the root partition (/). Thus only your system disk (e.g, the disk you boot from) should have an a partition. The b partition is used for swap partitions, and you may have many disks with swap partitions. The c partition addresses the entire disk in dedicated mode, or the entire FreeBSD slice in slice mode. The other partitions are for general use. sysinstall's Label editor favors the e partition for non-root, non-swap partitions. Within the Label editor, create a single file system by typing C. When prompted if this will be a FS (file system) or swap, choose FS and type in a mount point (e.g, /mnt). When adding a disk in post-install mode, sysinstall will not create entries in /etc/fstab for you, so the mount point you specify is not important. You are now ready to write the new label to the disk and create a file system on it. Do this by typing W. Ignore any errors from sysinstall that it could not mount the new partition. Exit the Label Editor and sysinstall completely. Finish The last step is to edit /etc/fstab to add an entry for your new disk. Using Command Line Utilities Using Slices This setup will allow your disk to work correctly with other operating systems that might be installed on your computer and will not confuse other operating systems' fdisk utilities. It is recommended to use this method for new disk installs. Only use dedicated mode if you have a good reason to do so! &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 bs=1k count=1 &prompt.root; fdisk -BI da1 #Initialize your new disk &prompt.root; disklabel -B -w -r da1s1 auto #Label it. &prompt.root; disklabel -e da1s1 # Edit the disklabel just created and add any partitions. &prompt.root; mkdir -p /1 &prompt.root; newfs /dev/da1s1e # Repeat this for every partition you created. &prompt.root; mount /dev/da1s1e /1 # Mount the partition(s) &prompt.root; vi /etc/fstab # Add the appropriate entry/entries to your /etc/fstab. If you have an IDE disk, substitute ad for da. On pre-4.X systems use wd. Dedicated OS/2 If you will not be sharing the new drive with another operating system, you may use the dedicated mode. Remember this mode can confuse Microsoft operating systems; however, no damage will be done by them. IBM's OS/2 however, will appropriate any partition it finds which it does not understand. &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 bs=1k count=1 &prompt.root; disklabel -Brw da1 auto &prompt.root; disklabel -e da1 # create the `e' partition &prompt.root; newfs -d0 /dev/da1e &prompt.root; mkdir -p /1 &prompt.root; vi /etc/fstab # add an entry for /dev/da1e &prompt.root; mount /1 An alternate method is: &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 count=2 &prompt.root; disklabel /dev/da1 | disklabel -BrR da1 /dev/stdin &prompt.root; newfs /dev/da1e &prompt.root; mkdir -p /1 &prompt.root; vi /etc/fstab # add an entry for /dev/da1e &prompt.root; mount /1 RAID Software RAID Christopher Shumway Original work by Jim Brown Revised by RAIDSoftware RAIDCCD Concatenated Disk Driver (CCD) Configuration When choosing a mass storage solution the most important factors to consider are speed, reliability, and cost. It is rare to have all three in balance; normally a fast, reliable mass storage device is expensive, and to cut back on cost either speed or reliability must be sacrificed. In designing the system described below, cost was chosen as the most important factor, followed by speed, then reliability. Data transfer speed for this system is ultimately constrained by the network. And while reliability is very important, the CCD drive described below serves online data that is already fully backed up on CD-R's and can easily be replaced. Defining your own requirements is the first step in choosing a mass storage solution. If your requirements prefer speed or reliability over cost, your solution will differ from the system described in this section. Installing the Hardware In addition to the IDE system disk, three Western Digital 30GB, 5400 RPM IDE disks form the core of the CCD disk described below providing approximately 90GB of online storage. Ideally, each IDE disk would have its own IDE controller and cable, but to minimize cost, additional IDE controllers were not used. Instead the disks were configured with jumpers so that each IDE controller has one master, and one slave. Upon reboot, the system BIOS was configured to automatically detect the disks attached. More importantly, FreeBSD detected them on reboot: ad0: 19574MB <WDC WD205BA> [39770/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33 ad1: 29333MB <WDC WD307AA> [59598/16/63] at ata0-slave UDMA33 ad2: 29333MB <WDC WD307AA> [59598/16/63] at ata1-master UDMA33 ad3: 29333MB <WDC WD307AA> [59598/16/63] at ata1-slave UDMA33 If FreeBSD does not detect all the disks, ensure that you have jumpered them correctly. Most IDE drives also have a Cable Select jumper. This is not the jumper for the master/slave relationship. Consult the drive documentation for help in identifying the correct jumper. Next, consider how to attach them as part of the file system. You should research both &man.vinum.8; () and &man.ccd.4;. In this particular configuration, &man.ccd.4; was chosen. Setting up the CCD The driver &man.ccd.4; allows you to take several identical disks and concatenate them into one logical file system. In order to use &man.ccd.4;, you need a kernel with &man.ccd.4; support built in. Add this line to your kernel configuration file, rebuild, and reinstall the kernel: pseudo-device ccd 4 On 5.X systems, you have to use instead the following line: device ccd In FreeBSD 5.X, it is not necessary to specify a number of &man.ccd.4; devices, as the &man.ccd.4; device driver is now self-cloning — new device instances will automatically be created on demand. The &man.ccd.4; support can also be loaded as a kernel loadable module in FreeBSD 3.0 or later. To set up &man.ccd.4;, you must first use &man.disklabel.8; to label the disks: disklabel -r -w ad1 auto disklabel -r -w ad2 auto disklabel -r -w ad3 auto This creates a disklabel for ad1c, ad2c and ad3c that spans the entire disk. The next step is to change the disk label type. You can use &man.disklabel.8; to edit the disks: disklabel -e ad1 disklabel -e ad2 disklabel -e ad3 This opens up the current disk label on each disk with the editor specified by the EDITOR environment variable, typically &man.vi.1;. An unmodified disk label will look something like this: 8 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] c: 60074784 0 unused 0 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 59597) Add a new e partition for &man.ccd.4; to use. This can usually be copied from the c partition, but the must be 4.2BSD. The disk label should now look something like this: 8 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] c: 60074784 0 unused 0 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 59597) e: 60074784 0 4.2BSD 0 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 59597) Building the File System The device node for ccd0c may not exist yet, so to create it, perform the following commands: cd /dev sh MAKEDEV ccd0 In FreeBSD 5.0, &man.devfs.5; will automatically manage device nodes in /dev, so use of MAKEDEV is not necessary. Now that you have all of the disks labeled, you must build the &man.ccd.4;. To do that, use &man.ccdconfig.8;, with options similar to the following: ccdconfig ccd0 32 0 /dev/ad1e /dev/ad2e /dev/ad3e The use and meaning of each option is shown below: The first argument is the device to configure, in this case, /dev/ccd0c. The /dev/ portion is optional. The interleave for the file system. The interleave defines the size of a stripe in disk blocks, each normally 512 bytes. So, an interleave of 32 would be 16,384 bytes. Flags for &man.ccdconfig.8;. If you want to enable drive mirroring, you can specify a flag here. This configuration does not provide mirroring for &man.ccd.4;, so it is set at 0 (zero). The final arguments to &man.ccdconfig.8; are the devices to place into the array. Use the complete pathname for each device. After running &man.ccdconfig.8; the &man.ccd.4; is configured. A file system can be installed. Refer to &man.newfs.8; for options, or simply run: newfs /dev/ccd0c Making it all Automatic Generally, you will want to mount the &man.ccd.4; upon each reboot. To do this, you must configure it first. Write out your current configuration to /etc/ccd.conf using the following command: ccdconfig -g > /etc/ccd.conf During reboot, the script /etc/rc runs ccdconfig -C if /etc/ccd.conf exists. This automatically configures the &man.ccd.4; so it can be mounted. If you are booting into single user mode, before you can &man.mount.8; the &man.ccd.4;, you need to issue the following command to configure the array: ccdconfig -C To automatically mount the &man.ccd.4;, place an entry for the &man.ccd.4; in /etc/fstab so it will be mounted at boot time: /dev/ccd0c /media ufs rw 2 2 The Vinum Volume Manager RAIDSoftware RAID Vinum The Vinum Volume Manager is a block device driver which implements virtual disk drives. It isolates disk hardware from the block device interface and maps data in ways which result in an increase in flexibility, performance and reliability compared to the traditional slice view of disk storage. &man.vinum.8; implements the RAID-0, RAID-1 and RAID-5 models, both individually and in combination. See for more information about &man.vinum.8;. Hardware RAID RAID Hardware FreeBSD also supports a variety of hardware RAID controllers. These devices control a RAID subsystem without the need for FreeBSD specific software to manage the array. Using an on-card BIOS, the card controls most of the disk operations itself. The following is a brief setup description using a Promise IDE RAID controller. When this card is installed and the system is started up, it displays a prompt requesting information. Follow the instructions to enter the card's setup screen. From here, you have the ability to combine all the attached drives. After doing so, the disk(s) will look like a single drive to FreeBSD. Other RAID levels can be set up accordingly. Rebuilding ATA RAID1 Arrays FreeBSD allows you to hot-replace a failed disk in an array. This requires that you catch it before you reboot. You will probably see something like the following in /var/log/messages or in the &man.dmesg.8; output: ad6 on monster1 suffered a hard error. ad6: READ command timeout tag=0 serv=0 - resetting ad6: trying fallback to PIO mode ata3: resetting devices .. done ad6: hard error reading fsbn 1116119 of 0-7 (ad6 bn 1116119; cn 1107 tn 4 sn 11) status=59 error=40 ar0: WARNING - mirror lost Using &man.atacontrol.8;, check for further information: &prompt.root; atacontrol list ATA channel 0: Master: no device present Slave: acd0 <HL-DT-ST CD-ROM GCR-8520B/1.00> ATA/ATAPI rev 0 ATA channel 1: Master: no device present Slave: no device present ATA channel 2: Master: ad4 <MAXTOR 6L080J4/A93.0500> ATA/ATAPI rev 5 Slave: no device present ATA channel 3: Master: ad6 <MAXTOR 6L080J4/A93.0500> ATA/ATAPI rev 5 Slave: no device present &prompt.root; atacontrol status ar0 ar0: ATA RAID1 subdisks: ad4 ad6 status: DEGRADED You will first need to detach the disk from the array so that you can safely remove it: &prompt.root; atacontrol detach 3 Replace the disk. Reattach the disk as a spare: &prompt.root; atacontrol attach 3 Master: ad6 <MAXTOR 6L080J4/A93.0500> ATA/ATAPI rev 5 Slave: no device present Rebuild the array: &prompt.root; atacontrol rebuild ar0 The rebuild command hangs until complete. However, it is possible to open another terminal (using Alt Fn) and check on the progress by issuing the following command: &prompt.root; dmesg | tail -10 [output removed] ad6: removed from configuration ad6: deleted from ar0 disk1 ad6: inserted into ar0 disk1 as spare &prompt.root; atacontrol status ar0 ar0: ATA RAID1 subdisks: ad4 ad6 status: REBUILDING 0% completed Wait until this operation completes. Mike Meyer Contributed by Creating and Using Optical Media (CDs & DVDs) CDROMs creating Introduction CDs have a number of features that differentiate them from conventional disks. Initially, they were not writable by the user. They are designed so that they can be read continuously without delays to move the head between tracks. They are also much easier to transport between systems than similarly sized media were at the time. CDs do have tracks, but this refers to a section of data to be read continuously and not a physical property of the disk. To produce a CD on FreeBSD, you prepare the data files that are going to make up the tracks on the CD, then write the tracks to the CD. ISO 9660 file systems ISO 9660 The ISO 9660 file system was designed to deal with these differences. It unfortunately codifies file system limits that were common then. Fortunately, it provides an extension mechanism that allows properly written CDs to exceed those limits while still working with systems that do not support those extensions. sysutils/mkisofs The sysutils/mkisofs program is used to produce a data file containing an ISO 9660 file system. It has options that support various extensions, and is described below. You can install it with the sysutils/mkisofs port. CD burner ATAPI Which tool to use to burn the CD depends on whether your CD burner is ATAPI or something else. ATAPI CD burners use the burncd program that is part of the base system. SCSI and USB CD burners should use cdrecord from the sysutils/cdrtools port. burncd has a limited number of supported drives. To find out if a drive is supported, see CD-R/RW supported drives. mkisofs sysutils/mkisofs produces an ISO 9660 file system that is an image of a directory tree in the Unix file system name space. The simplest usage is: &prompt.root; mkisofs -o imagefile.iso /path/to/tree file systems ISO 9660 This command will create an imagefile.iso containing an ISO 9660 file system that is a copy of the tree at /path/to/tree. In the process, it will map the file names to names that fit the limitations of the standard ISO 9660 file system, and will exclude files that have names uncharacteristic of ISO file systems. file systems HFS file systems Joliet A number of options are available to overcome those restrictions. In particular, enables the Rock Ridge extensions common to Unix systems, enables Joliet extensions used by Microsoft systems, and can be used to create HFS file systems used by MacOS. For CDs that are going to be used only on FreeBSD systems, can be used to disable all filename restrictions. When used with , it produces a file system image that is identical to the FreeBSD tree you started from, though it may violate the ISO 9660 standard in a number of ways. CDROMs creating bootable The last option of general use is . This is used to specify the location of the boot image for use in producing an El Torito bootable CD. This option takes an argument which is the path to a boot image from the top of the tree being written to the CD. So, given that /tmp/myboot holds a bootable FreeBSD system with the boot image in /tmp/myboot/boot/cdboot, you could produce the image of an ISO 9660 file system in /tmp/bootable.iso like so: &prompt.root; mkisofs -U -R -b boot/cdboot -o /tmp/bootable.iso /tmp/myboot Having done that, if you have vn (FreeBSD 4.X), or md (FreeBSD 5.X) configured in your kernel, you can mount the file system with: &prompt.root; vnconfig -e vn0c /tmp/bootable.iso &prompt.root; mount -t cd9660 /dev/vn0c /mnt for FreeBSD 4.X, and for FreeBSD 5.X: &prompt.root; mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /tmp/bootable.iso -u 0 &prompt.root; mount -t cd9660 /dev/md0 /mnt At which point you can verify that /mnt and /tmp/myboot are identical. There are many other options you can use with sysutils/mkisofs to fine-tune its behavior. In particular: modifications to an ISO 9660 layout and the creation of Joliet and HFS discs. See the &man.mkisofs.8; manual page for details. burncd CDROMs burning If you have an ATAPI CD burner, you can use the burncd command to burn an ISO image onto a CD. burncd is part of the base system, installed as /usr/sbin/burncd. Usage is very simple, as it has few options: &prompt.root; burncd -f cddevice data imagefile.iso fixate Will burn a copy of imagefile.iso on cddevice. The default device is /dev/acd0c. See &man.burncd.8; for options to set the write speed, eject the CD after burning, and write audio data. cdrecord If you do not have an ATAPI CD burner, you will have to use cdrecord to burn your CDs. cdrecord is not part of the base system; you must install it from either the port at sysutils/cdrtools or the appropriate package. Changes to the base system can cause binary versions of this program to fail, possibly resulting in a coaster. You should therefore either upgrade the port when you upgrade your system, or if you are tracking -STABLE, upgrade the port when a new version becomes available. While cdrecord has many options, basic usage is even simpler than burncd. Burning an ISO 9660 image is done with: &prompt.root; cdrecord dev=device imagefile.iso The tricky part of using cdrecord is finding the to use. To find the proper setting, use the flag of cdrecord, which might produce results like this: CDROMs burning &prompt.root; cdrecord -scanbus Cdrecord 1.9 (i386-unknown-freebsd4.2) Copyright (C) 1995-2000 Jörg Schilling Using libscg version 'schily-0.1' scsibus0: 0,0,0 0) 'SEAGATE ' 'ST39236LW ' '0004' Disk 0,1,0 1) 'SEAGATE ' 'ST39173W ' '5958' Disk 0,2,0 2) * 0,3,0 3) 'iomega ' 'jaz 1GB ' 'J.86' Removable Disk 0,4,0 4) 'NEC ' 'CD-ROM DRIVE:466' '1.26' Removable CD-ROM 0,5,0 5) * 0,6,0 6) * 0,7,0 7) * scsibus1: 1,0,0 100) * 1,1,0 101) * 1,2,0 102) * 1,3,0 103) * 1,4,0 104) * 1,5,0 105) 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW4260 ' '1.0q' Removable CD-ROM 1,6,0 106) 'ARTEC ' 'AM12S ' '1.06' Scanner 1,7,0 107) * This lists the appropriate value for the devices on the list. Locate your CD burner, and use the three numbers separated by commas as the value for . In this case, the CRW device is 1,5,0, so the appropriate input would be . There are easier ways to specify this value; see &man.cdrecord.1; for details. That is also the place to look for information on writing audio tracks, controlling the speed, and other things. Duplicating Audio CDs You can duplicate an audio CD by extracting the audio data from the CD to a series of files, and then writing these files to a blank CD. The process is slightly different for ATAPI and SCSI drives. SCSI drives Use cdda2wav to extract the audio. &prompt.user; cdda2wav -v255 -D2,0 -B -Owav Use cdrecord to write the .wav files. &prompt.user; cdrecord -v dev=2,0 -dao -useinfo *.wav Make sure that 2.0 is set appropriately, as described in . ATAPI drives The ATAPI CD driver makes each track available as /dev/acddtnn, where d is the drive number, and nn is the track number written with two decimal digits, prefixed with zero as needed. So the first track on the first disk is /dev/acd0t01, the second is /dev/acd0t02, the third is /dev/acd0t03, and so on. Make sure the appropriate files exist in /dev. &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV acd0t99 In FreeBSD 5.0, &man.devfs.5; will automatically create and manage entries in /dev for you, so it is not necessary to use MAKEDEV. Extract each track using &man.dd.1;. You must also use a specific block size when extracting the files. &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/acd0t01 of=track1.cdr bs=2352 &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/acd0t02 of=track2.cdr bs=2352 ... Burn the extracted files to disk using burncd. You must specify that these are audio files, and that burncd should fixate the disk when finished. &prompt.root; burncd -f /dev/acd0c audio track1.cdr track2.cdr ... fixate Duplicating Data CDs You can copy a data CD to a image file that is functionally equivalent to the image file created with sysutils/mkisofs, and you can use it to duplicate any data CD. The example given here assumes that your CDROM device is acd0. Substitute your correct CDROM device. A c must be appended to the end of the device name to indicate the entire partition or, in the case of CDROMs, the entire disc. &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/acd0c of=file.iso bs=2048 Now that you have an image, you can burn it to CD as described above. Using Data CDs Now that you have created a standard data CDROM, you probably want to mount it and read the data on it. By default, &man.mount.8; assumes that a file system is of type ufs. If you try something like: &prompt.root; mount /dev/cd0c /mnt you will get a complaint about Incorrect super block, and no mount. The CDROM is not a UFS file system, so attempts to mount it as such will fail. You just need to tell &man.mount.8; that the file system is of type ISO9660, and everything will work. You do this by specifying the option &man.mount.8;. For example, if you want to mount the CDROM device, /dev/cd0c, under /mnt, you would execute: &prompt.root; mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0c /mnt Note that your device name (/dev/cd0c in this example) could be different, depending on the interface your CDROM uses. Also, the option just executes &man.mount.cd9660.8;. The above example could be shortened to: &prompt.root; mount_cd9660 /dev/cd0c /mnt You can generally use data CDROMs from any vendor in this way. Disks with certain ISO 9660 extensions might behave oddly, however. For example, Joliet disks store all filenames in two-byte Unicode characters. The FreeBSD kernel does not speak Unicode (yet!), so non-English characters show up as question marks. (If you are running FreeBSD 4.3 or later, the CD9660 driver includes hooks to load an appropriate Unicode conversion table on the fly. Modules for some of the common encodings are available via the sysutils/cd9660_unicode port.) Occasionally, you might get Device not configured when trying to mount a CDROM. This usually means that the CDROM drive thinks that there is no disk in the tray, or that the drive is not visible on the bus. It can take a couple of seconds for a CDROM drive to realize that it has been fed, so be patient. Sometimes, a SCSI CDROM may be missed because it didn't have enough time to answer the bus reset. If you have a SCSI CDROM please add the following option to your kernel configuration and rebuild your kernel. options SCSI_DELAY=15000 This tells your SCSI bus to pause 15 seconds during boot, to give your CDROM drive every possible chance to answer the bus reset. Burning Raw Data CDs You can choose to burn a file directly to CD, without creating an ISO 9660 file system. Some people do this for backup purposes. This runs more quickly than burning a standard CD: &prompt.root; burncd -f /dev/acd1c -s 12 data archive.tar.gz fixate In order to retrieve the data burned to such a CD, you must read data from the raw device node: &prompt.root; tar xzvf /dev/acd1c You cannot mount this disk as you would a normal CDROM. Such a CDROM cannot be read under any operating system except FreeBSD. If you want to be able to mount the CD, or share data with another operating system, you must use sysutils/mkisofs as described above. Julio Merino Original work by Martin Karlsson Rewritten by Creating and Using Floppy Disks Storing data on floppy disks is sometimes useful, for example when one does not have any other removable storage media or when one needs to transfer small amounts of data to another computer. This section will explain how to use floppy disks in FreeBSD. It will primarily cover formatting and usage of 3.5inch DOS floppies, but the concepts are similar for other floppy disk formats. Formatting floppies The device Floppy disks are accessed through entries in /dev, just like other devices. To access the raw floppy disk in 4.X and earlier releases, one uses /dev/fdN, where N stands for the drive number, usually 0, or /dev/fdNX, where X stands for a letter. In 5.0 or newer releases, simply use /dev/fdN. The disk size in 4.X and earlier releases There are also /dev/fdN.size devices, where size is a floppy disk size in kilobytes. These entries are used at low-level format time to determine the disk size. 1440kB is the size that will be used in the following examples Sometimes the entries under /dev will have to be (re)created. To do that, issue: &prompt.root; cd /dev && ./MAKEDEV "fd*" The disk size in 5.0 and newer releases In 5.0, &man.devfs.5; will automatically manage device nodes in /dev, so use of MAKEDEV is not necessary. The desired disk size is passed to &man.fdformat.1; through the -f flag. Supported sizes are listed in &man.fdcontrol.8;, but be advised that 1440kB is what works best. Formatting A floppy disk needs to be low-level formated before it can be used. This is usually done by the vendor, but formatting is a good way to check media integrity. Although it is possible to force larger (or smaller) disk sizes, 1440kB is what most floppy disks are designed for. To low-level format the floppy disk you need to use &man.fdformat.1;. This utility expects the device name as an argument. Make note of any error messages, as these can help determine if the disk is good or bad. Formatting in 4.X and earlier releases Use the /dev/fdN.size devices to format the floppy. Insert a new 3.5inch floppy disk in your drive and issue: &prompt.root; /usr/sbin/fdformat /dev/fd0.1440 Formatting in 5.0 and newer releases Use the /dev/fdN devices to format the floppy. Insert a new 3.5inch floppy disk in your drive and issue: &prompt.root; /usr/sbin/fdformat -f 1440 /dev/fd0 The disklabel After low-level formatting the disk, you will need to place a disklabel on it. This disklabel will be destroyed later, but it is needed by the system to determine the size of the disk and its geometry later. The new disklabel will take over the whole disk, and will contain all the proper information about the geometry of the floppy. The geometry values for the disklabel are listed in /etc/disktab. You can run now &man.disklabel.8; like so: &prompt.root; /sbin/disklabel -B -r -w /dev/fd0 fd1440 The file system Now the floppy is ready to be high-level formated. This will place a new file system on it, which will let FreeBSD read and write to the disk. After creating the new file system, the disklabel is destroyed, so if you want to reformat the disk, you will have to recreate the disklabel. The floppy's file system can be either UFS or FAT. FAT is generally a better choice for floppies. To put a new file system on the floppy, issue: &prompt.root; /sbin/newfs_msdos /dev/fd0 The disk is now ready for use. Using the floppy To use the floppy, mount it with &man.mount.msdos.8; (in 4.X and earlier releases) or &man.mount.msdosfs.8; (in 5.0 or newer releases). One can also use mtools from the ports collection. Creating and Using Data Tapes tape media The major tape media are the 4mm, 8mm, QIC, mini-cartridge and DLT. 4mm (DDS: Digital Data Storage) tape media DDS (4mm) tapes tape media QIC tapes 4mm tapes are replacing QIC as the workstation backup media of choice. This trend accelerated greatly when Conner purchased Archive, a leading manufacturer of QIC drives, and then stopped production of QIC drives. 4mm drives are small and quiet but do not have the reputation for reliability that is enjoyed by 8mm drives. The cartridges are less expensive and smaller (3 x 2 x 0.5 inches, 76 x 51 x 12 mm) than 8mm cartridges. 4mm, like 8mm, has comparatively short head life for the same reason, both use helical scan. Data throughput on these drives starts ~150 kB/s, peaking at ~500 kB/s. Data capacity starts at 1.3 GB and ends at 2.0 GB. Hardware compression, available with most of these drives, approximately doubles the capacity. Multi-drive tape library units can have 6 drives in a single cabinet with automatic tape changing. Library capacities reach 240 GB. The DDS-3 standard now supports tape capacities up to 12 GB (or 24 GB compressed). 4mm drives, like 8mm drives, use helical-scan. All the benefits and drawbacks of helical-scan apply to both 4mm and 8mm drives. Tapes should be retired from use after 2,000 passes or 100 full backups. 8mm (Exabyte) tape media Exabyte (8mm) tapes 8mm tapes are the most common SCSI tape drives; they are the best choice of exchanging tapes. Nearly every site has an Exabyte 2 GB 8mm tape drive. 8mm drives are reliable, convenient and quiet. Cartridges are inexpensive and small (4.8 x 3.3 x 0.6 inches; 122 x 84 x 15 mm). One downside of 8mm tape is relatively short head and tape life due to the high rate of relative motion of the tape across the heads. Data throughput ranges from ~250 kB/s to ~500 kB/s. Data sizes start at 300 MB and go up to 7 GB. Hardware compression, available with most of these drives, approximately doubles the capacity. These drives are available as single units or multi-drive tape libraries with 6 drives and 120 tapes in a single cabinet. Tapes are changed automatically by the unit. Library capacities reach 840+ GB. The Exabyte Mammoth model supports 12 GB on one tape (24 GB with compression) and costs approximately twice as much as conventional tape drives. Data is recorded onto the tape using helical-scan, the heads are positioned at an angle to the media (approximately 6 degrees). The tape wraps around 270 degrees of the spool that holds the heads. The spool spins while the tape slides over the spool. The result is a high density of data and closely packed tracks that angle across the tape from one edge to the other. QIC tape media QIC-150 QIC-150 tapes and drives are, perhaps, the most common tape drive and media around. QIC tape drives are the least expensive serious backup drives. The downside is the cost of media. QIC tapes are expensive compared to 8mm or 4mm tapes, up to 5 times the price per GB data storage. But, if your needs can be satisfied with a half-dozen tapes, QIC may be the correct choice. QIC is the most common tape drive. Every site has a QIC drive of some density or another. Therein lies the rub, QIC has a large number of densities on physically similar (sometimes identical) tapes. QIC drives are not quiet. These drives audibly seek before they begin to record data and are clearly audible whenever reading, writing or seeking. QIC tapes measure (6 x 4 x 0.7 inches; 15.2 x 10.2 x 1.7 mm). Mini-cartridges, which also use 1/4" wide tape are discussed separately. Tape libraries and changers are not available. Data throughput ranges from ~150 kB/s to ~500 kB/s. Data capacity ranges from 40 MB to 15 GB. Hardware compression is available on many of the newer QIC drives. QIC drives are less frequently installed; they are being supplanted by DAT drives. Data is recorded onto the tape in tracks. The tracks run along the long axis of the tape media from one end to the other. The number of tracks, and therefore the width of a track, varies with the tape's capacity. Most if not all newer drives provide backward-compatibility at least for reading (but often also for writing). QIC has a good reputation regarding the safety of the data (the mechanics are simpler and more robust than for helical scan drives). Tapes should be retired from use after 5,000 backups. XXX* Mini-Cartridge DLT tape media DLT DLT has the fastest data transfer rate of all the drive types listed here. The 1/2" (12.5mm) tape is contained in a single spool cartridge (4 x 4 x 1 inches; 100 x 100 x 25 mm). The cartridge has a swinging gate along one entire side of the cartridge. The drive mechanism opens this gate to extract the tape leader. The tape leader has an oval hole in it which the drive uses to hook the tape. The take-up spool is located inside the tape drive. All the other tape cartridges listed here (9 track tapes are the only exception) have both the supply and take-up spools located inside the tape cartridge itself. Data throughput is approximately 1.5 MB/s, three times the throughput of 4mm, 8mm, or QIC tape drives. Data capacities range from 10 GB to 20 GB for a single drive. Drives are available in both multi-tape changers and multi-tape, multi-drive tape libraries containing from 5 to 900 tapes over 1 to 20 drives, providing from 50 GB to 9 TB of storage. With compression, DLT Type IV format supports up to 70 GB capacity. Data is recorded onto the tape in tracks parallel to the direction of travel (just like QIC tapes). Two tracks are written at once. Read/write head lifetimes are relatively long; once the tape stops moving, there is no relative motion between the heads and the tape. AIT tape media AIT AIT is a new format from Sony, and can hold up to 50 GB (with compression) per tape. The tapes contain memory chips which retain an index of the tape's contents. This index can be rapidly read by the tape drive to determine the position of files on the tape, instead of the several minutes that would be required for other tapes. Software such as SAMS:Alexandria can operate forty or more AIT tape libraries, communicating directly with the tape's memory chip to display the contents on screen, determine what files were backed up to which tape, locate the correct tape, load it, and restore the data from the tape. Libraries like this cost in the region of $20,000, pricing them a little out of the hobbyist market. Using a New Tape for the First Time The first time that you try to read or write a new, completely blank tape, the operation will fail. The console messages should be similar to: sa0(ncr1:4:0): NOT READY asc:4,1 sa0(ncr1:4:0): Logical unit is in process of becoming ready The tape does not contain an Identifier Block (block number 0). All QIC tape drives since the adoption of QIC-525 standard write an Identifier Block to the tape. There are two solutions: mt fsf 1 causes the tape drive to write an Identifier Block to the tape. Use the front panel button to eject the tape. Re-insert the tape and dump data to the tape. dump will report DUMP: End of tape detected and the console will show: HARDWARE FAILURE info:280 asc:80,96. rewind the tape using: mt rewind. Subsequent tape operations are successful. Backups to Floppies Can I Use floppies for Backing Up My Data? backup floppies floppy disks Floppy disks are not really a suitable media for making backups as: The media is unreliable, especially over long periods of time. Backing up and restoring is very slow. They have a very limited capacity (the days of backing up an entire hard disk onto a dozen or so floppies has long since passed). However, if you have no other method of backing up your data then floppy disks are better than no backup at all. If you do have to use floppy disks then ensure that you use good quality ones. Floppies that have been lying around the office for a couple of years are a bad choice. Ideally use new ones from a reputable manufacturer. So How Do I Backup My Data to Floppies? The best way to backup to floppy disk is to use &man.tar.1; with the (multi volume) option, which allows backups to span multiple floppies. To backup all the files in the current directory and sub-directory use this (as root): &prompt.root; tar Mcvf /dev/fd0 * When the first floppy is full &man.tar.1; will prompt you to insert the next volume (because &man.tar.1; is media independent it refers to volumes; in this context it means floppy disk). Prepare volume #2 for /dev/fd0 and hit return: This is repeated (with the volume number incrementing) until all the specified files have been archived. Can I Compress My Backups? tar gzip compression Unfortunately, &man.tar.1; will not allow the option to be used for multi-volume archives. You could, of course, &man.gzip.1; all the files, &man.tar.1; them to the floppies, then &man.gunzip.1; the files again! How Do I Restore My Backups? To restore the entire archive use: &prompt.root; tar Mxvf /dev/fd0 There are two ways that you can use to restore only specific files. First, you can start with the first floppy and use: &prompt.root; tar Mxvf /dev/fd0 filename The utility &man.tar.1; will prompt you to insert subsequent floppies until it finds the required file. Alternatively, if you know which floppy the file is on then you can simply insert that floppy and use the same command as above. Note that if the first file on the floppy is a continuation from the previous one then &man.tar.1; will warn you that it cannot restore it, even if you have not asked it to! Backup Basics backup software and basics The three major backup programs are &man.dump.8;, &man.tar.1;, and &man.cpio.1;. Dump and Restore backup software dump / restore dump restore The traditional Unix backup programs are dump and restore. They operate on the drive as a collection of disk blocks, below the abstractions of files, links and directories that are created by the file systems. dump backs up an entire file system on a device. It is unable to backup only part of a file system or a directory tree that spans more than one file system. dump does not write files and directories to tape, but rather writes the raw data blocks that comprise files and directories. If you use dump on your root directory, you would not back up /home, /usr or many other directories since these are typically mount points for other file systems or symbolic links into those file systems. dump has quirks that remain from its early days in Version 6 of AT&T Unix (circa 1975). The default parameters are suitable for 9-track tapes (6250 bpi), not the high-density media available today (up to 62,182 ftpi). These defaults must be overridden on the command line to utilize the capacity of current tape drives. .rhosts It is also possible to backup data across the network to a tape drive attached to another computer with rdump and rrestore. Both programs rely upon rcmd and ruserok to access the remote tape drive. Therefore, the user performing the backup must be listed in the .rhosts file on the remote computer. The arguments to rdump and rrestore must be suitable to use on the remote computer. When rdumping from a FreeBSD computer to an Exabyte tape drive connected to a Sun called komodo, use: &prompt.root; /sbin/rdump 0dsbfu 54000 13000 126 komodo:/dev/nsa8 /dev/da0a 2>&1 Beware: there are security implications to allowing .rhosts authentication. Evaluate your situation carefully. It is also possible to use dump and restore in a more secure fashion over ssh. Using <command>dump</command> over <application>ssh</application> &prompt.root; /sbin/dump -0uan -f - /usr | gzip -2 | ssh1 -c blowfish \ targetuser@targetmachine.example.com dd of=/mybigfiles/dump-usr-l0.gz <command>tar</command> backup software tar &man.tar.1; also dates back to Version 6 of AT&T Unix (circa 1975). tar operates in cooperation with the file system; tar writes files and directories to tape. tar does not support the full range of options that are available from &man.cpio.1;, but tar does not require the unusual command pipeline that cpio uses. tar Most versions of tar do not support backups across the network. The GNU version of tar, which FreeBSD utilizes, supports remote devices using the same syntax as rdump. To tar to an Exabyte tape drive connected to a Sun called komodo, use: &prompt.root; /usr/bin/tar cf komodo:/dev/nsa8 . 2>&1 For versions without remote device support, you can use a pipeline and rsh to send the data to a remote tape drive. &prompt.root; tar cf - . | rsh hostname dd of=tape-device obs=20b If you are worried about the security of backing up over a network you should use the ssh command instead of rsh. <command>cpio</command> backup software cpio &man.cpio.1; is the original Unix file interchange tape program for magnetic media. cpio has options (among many others) to perform byte-swapping, write a number of different archive formats, and pipe the data to other programs. This last feature makes cpio an excellent choice for installation media. cpio does not know how to walk the directory tree and a list of files must be provided through stdin. cpio cpio does not support backups across the network. You can use a pipeline and rsh to send the data to a remote tape drive. &prompt.root; for f in directory_list; do find $f >> backup.list done &prompt.root; cpio -v -o --format=newc < backup.list | ssh user@host "cat > backup_device" Where directory_list is the list of directories you want to back up, user@host is the user/hostname combination that will be performing the backups, and backup_device is where the backups should be written to (e.g., /dev/nsa0). <command>pax</command> backup software pax pax POSIX IEEE &man.pax.1; is IEEE/POSIX's answer to tar and cpio. Over the years the various versions of tar and cpio have gotten slightly incompatible. So rather than fight it out to fully standardize them, POSIX created a new archive utility. pax attempts to read and write many of the various cpio and tar formats, plus new formats of its own. Its command set more resembles cpio than tar. <application>Amanda</application> backup software Amanda Amanda Amanda (Advanced Maryland Network Disk Archiver) is a client/server backup system, rather than a single program. An Amanda server will backup to a single tape drive any number of computers that have Amanda clients and a network connection to the Amanda server. A common problem at sites with a number of large disks is that the length of time required to backup to data directly to tape exceeds the amount of time available for the task. Amanda solves this problem. Amanda can use a holding disk to backup several file systems at the same time. Amanda creates archive sets: a group of tapes used over a period of time to create full backups of all the file systems listed in Amanda's configuration file. The archive set also contains nightly incremental (or differential) backups of all the file systems. Restoring a damaged file system requires the most recent full backup and the incremental backups. The configuration file provides fine control of backups and the network traffic that Amanda generates. Amanda will use any of the above backup programs to write the data to tape. Amanda is available as either a port or a package, it is not installed by default. Do Nothing Do nothing is not a computer program, but it is the most widely used backup strategy. There are no initial costs. There is no backup schedule to follow. Just say no. If something happens to your data, grin and bear it! If your time and your data is worth little to nothing, then Do nothing is the most suitable backup program for your computer. But beware, Unix is a useful tool, you may find that within six months you have a collection of files that are valuable to you. Do nothing is the correct backup method for /usr/obj and other directory trees that can be exactly recreated by your computer. An example is the files that comprise the HTML or PostScript version of this Handbook. These document formats have been created from SGML input files. Creating backups of the HTML or PostScript files is not necessary. The SGML files are backed up regularly. Which Backup Program Is Best? LISA &man.dump.8; Period. Elizabeth D. Zwicky torture tested all the backup programs discussed here. The clear choice for preserving all your data and all the peculiarities of Unix file systems is dump. Elizabeth created file systems containing a large variety of unusual conditions (and some not so unusual ones) and tested each program by doing a backup and restore of those file systems. The peculiarities included: files with holes, files with holes and a block of nulls, files with funny characters in their names, unreadable and unwritable files, devices, files that change size during the backup, files that are created/deleted during the backup and more. She presented the results at LISA V in Oct. 1991. See torture-testing Backup and Archive Programs. Emergency Restore Procedure Before the Disaster There are only four steps that you need to perform in preparation for any disaster that may occur. disklabel First, print the disklabel from each of your disks (e.g. disklabel da0 | lpr), your file system table (/etc/fstab) and all boot messages, two copies of each. fix-it floppies Second, determine that the boot and fix-it floppies (boot.flp and fixit.flp) have all your devices. The easiest way to check is to reboot your machine with the boot floppy in the floppy drive and check the boot messages. If all your devices are listed and functional, skip on to step three. Otherwise, you have to create two custom bootable floppies which have a kernel that can mount all of your disks and access your tape drive. These floppies must contain: fdisk, disklabel, newfs, mount, and whichever backup program you use. These programs must be statically linked. If you use dump, the floppy must contain restore. Third, create backup tapes regularly. Any changes that you make after your last backup may be irretrievably lost. Write-protect the backup tapes. Fourth, test the floppies (either boot.flp and fixit.flp or the two custom bootable floppies you made in step two.) and backup tapes. Make notes of the procedure. Store these notes with the bootable floppy, the printouts and the backup tapes. You will be so distraught when restoring that the notes may prevent you from destroying your backup tapes (How? In place of tar xvf /dev/sa0, you might accidentally type tar cvf /dev/sa0 and over-write your backup tape). For an added measure of security, make bootable floppies and two backup tapes each time. Store one of each at a remote location. A remote location is NOT the basement of the same office building. A number of firms in the World Trade Center learned this lesson the hard way. A remote location should be physically separated from your computers and disk drives by a significant distance. A Script for Creating a Bootable Floppy /mnt/sbin/init gzip -c -best /sbin/fsck > /mnt/sbin/fsck gzip -c -best /sbin/mount > /mnt/sbin/mount gzip -c -best /sbin/halt > /mnt/sbin/halt gzip -c -best /sbin/restore > /mnt/sbin/restore gzip -c -best /bin/sh > /mnt/bin/sh gzip -c -best /bin/sync > /mnt/bin/sync cp /root/.profile /mnt/root cp -f /dev/MAKEDEV /mnt/dev chmod 755 /mnt/dev/MAKEDEV chmod 500 /mnt/sbin/init chmod 555 /mnt/sbin/fsck /mnt/sbin/mount /mnt/sbin/halt chmod 555 /mnt/bin/sh /mnt/bin/sync chmod 6555 /mnt/sbin/restore # # create the devices nodes # cd /mnt/dev ./MAKEDEV std ./MAKEDEV da0 ./MAKEDEV da1 ./MAKEDEV da2 ./MAKEDEV sa0 ./MAKEDEV pty0 cd / # # create minimum file system table # cat > /mnt/etc/fstab < /mnt/etc/passwd < /mnt/etc/master.passwd < After the Disaster The key question is: did your hardware survive? You have been doing regular backups so there is no need to worry about the software. If the hardware has been damaged. First, replace those parts that have been damaged. If your hardware is okay, check your floppies. If you are using a custom boot floppy, boot single-user (type -s at the boot: prompt). Skip the following paragraph. If you are using the boot.flp and fixit.flp floppies, keep reading. Insert the boot.flp floppy in the first floppy drive and boot the computer. The original install menu will be displayed on the screen. Select the Fixit--Repair mode with CDROM or floppy. option. Insert the fixit.flp when prompted. restore and the other programs that you need are located in /mnt2/stand. Recover each file system separately. mount root partition disklabel newfs Try to mount (e.g. mount /dev/da0a /mnt) the root partition of your first disk. If the disklabel was damaged, use disklabel to re-partition and label the disk to match the label that you printed and saved. Use newfs to re-create the file systems. Re-mount the root partition of the floppy read-write (mount -u -o rw /mnt). Use your backup program and backup tapes to recover the data for this file system (e.g. restore vrf /dev/sa0). Unmount the file system (e.g. umount /mnt). Repeat for each file system that was damaged. Once your system is running, backup your data onto new tapes. Whatever caused the crash or data loss may strike again. Another hour spent now may save you from further distress later. * I did not prepare for the Disaster, What Now? ]]> Marc Fonvieille Reorganized and enhanced by Network, Memory, and File-Backed File Systems virtual disks disks virtual Aside from the disks you physically insert into your computer: floppies, CDs, hard drives, and so forth; other forms of disks are understood by FreeBSD - the virtual disks. NFS Coda disks memory These include network file systems such as the Network File System and Coda, memory-based file systems and file-backed file systems. According to the FreeBSD version you run, you will have to use different tools for creation and use of file-backed and memory-based file systems. The FreeBSD 4.X users will have to use &man.MAKEDEV.8; to create the required devices. FreeBSD 5.0 and later use &man.devfs.5; to allocate device nodes transparently for the user. File-Backed File System under FreeBSD 4.X disks file-backed (4.X) The utility &man.vnconfig.8; configures and enables vnode pseudo-disk devices. A vnode is a representation of a file, and is the focus of file activity. This means that &man.vnconfig.8; uses files to create and operate a file system. One possible use is the mounting of floppy or CD images kept in files. To use &man.vnconfig.8;, you need &man.vn.4; support in your kernel configuration file: pseudo-device vn To mount an existing file system image: Using vnconfig to mount an Existing File System Image under FreeBSD 4.X &prompt.root; vnconfig vn0 diskimage &prompt.root; mount /dev/vn0c /mnt To create a new file system image with &man.vnconfig.8;: Creating a New File-Backed Disk with <command>vnconfig</command> &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=newimage bs=1k count=5k 5120+0 records in 5120+0 records out &prompt.root; vnconfig -s labels -c vn0 newimage &prompt.root; disklabel -r -w vn0 auto &prompt.root; newfs vn0c Warning: 2048 sector(s) in last cylinder unallocated /dev/vn0c: 10240 sectors in 3 cylinders of 1 tracks, 4096 sectors 5.0MB in 1 cyl groups (16 c/g, 32.00MB/g, 1280 i/g) super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at: 32 &prompt.root; mount /dev/vn0c /mnt &prompt.root; df /mnt Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/vn0c 4927 1 4532 0% /mnt File-Backed File System under FreeBSD 5.X disks file-backed (5.X) The utility &man.mdconfig.8; is used to configure and enable memory disks, &man.md.4;, under FreeBSD 5.X. To use &man.mdconfig.8;, you have to load &man.md.4; module or to add the support in your kernel configuration file: device md The &man.mdconfig.8; command supports three kinds of memory backed virtual disks: memory disks allocated with &man.malloc.9;, memory disks using a file or swapspace as backingstore. One possible use is the mounting of floppy or CD images kept in files. To mount an existing file system image: Using <command>mdconfig</command> to mount an Existing File System Image under FreeBSD 5.X &prompt.root; mdconfig -a -t vnode -f diskimage -u 0 &prompt.root; mount /dev/md0c /mnt To create a new file system image with &man.mdconfig.8;: Creating a New File-Backed Disk with <command>mdconfig</command> &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=newimage bs=1k count=5k 5120+0 records in 5120+0 records out &prompt.root; mdconfig -a -t vnode -f newimage -u 0 &prompt.root; disklabel -r -w md0 auto &prompt.root; newfs md0c /dev/md0c: 5.0MB (10240 sectors) block size 16384, fragment size 2048 using 4 cylinder groups of 1.27MB, 81 blks, 256 inodes. super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at: 32, 2624, 5216, 7808 &prompt.root; mount /dev/md0c /mnt &prompt.root; df /mnt Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/md0c 4846 2 4458 0% /mnt If you do not specify the unit number with the option, &man.mdconfig.8; will use the &man.md.4; automatic allocation to select an unused device. The name of the allocated unit will be output on stdout like md4. For more details about &man.mdconfig.8;, please refer to the manual page. The utility &man.mdconfig.8; is very useful, however it asks many command lines to create a file-backed file system. FreeBSD 5.0 also comes with a tool called &man.mdmfs.8;, this program configures a &man.md.4; disk using &man.mdconfig.8;, puts a UFS file system on it using &man.newfs.8;, and mounts it using &man.mount.8;. For example, if you want to create and mount the same file system image as above, simply type the following: &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero of=newimage bs=1k count=5k 5120+0 records in 5120+0 records in 5120+0 records out &prompt.root; mdmfs -F newimage -s 5m md0 /mnt &prompt.root; df /mnt Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/md0 4846 2 4458 0% /mnt If you use the option without unit number, &man.mdmfs.8; will use &man.md.4; auto-unit feature to automatically select an unused device. For more details about &man.mdmfs.8;, please refer to the manual page. Memory-Based File System under FreeBSD 4.X disks memory file system (4.X) The &man.md.4; driver is a simple, efficient means to create memory file systems under FreeBSD 4.X. &man.malloc.9; is used to allocate the memory. Simply take a file system you have prepared with, for example, &man.vnconfig.8;, and: md Memory Disk under FreeBSD 4.X &prompt.root; dd if=newimage of=/dev/md0 5120+0 records in 5120+0 records out &prompt.root; mount /dev/md0c /mnt &prompt.root; df /mnt Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/md0c 4927 1 4532 0% /mnt For more details, please refer to &man.md.4; manual page. Memory-Based File System under FreeBSD 5.X disks memory file system (5.X) The same tools are used for memory-based and file-backed file systems: &man.mdconfig.8; or &man.mdmfs.8;. The storage for memory-based file system is allocated with &man.malloc.9;. Creating a New Memory-Based Disk with <command>mdconfig</command> &prompt.root; mdconfig -a -t malloc -s 5m -u 1 &prompt.root; newfs -U md1 /dev/md1: 5.0MB (10240 sectors) block size 16384, fragment size 2048 using 4 cylinder groups of 1.27MB, 81 blks, 256 inodes. with soft updates super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at: 32, 2624, 5216, 7808 &prompt.root; mount /dev/md1 /mnt &prompt.root; df /mnt Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/md1 4846 2 4458 0% /mnt Creating a New Memory-Based Disk with <command>mdmfs</command> &prompt.root; mdmfs -M -s 5m md2 /mnt &prompt.root; df /mnt Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/md2 4846 2 4458 0% /mnt Instead of using a &man.malloc.9; backed file system, it is possible to use swap, for that just replace with in the command line of &man.mdconfig.8;. The &man.mdmfs.8; utility by default (without ) creates a swap-based disk. For more details, please refer to &man.mdconfig.8; and &man.mdmfs.8; manual pages. Detaching a Memory Disk from the System disks detaching a memory disk When a memory-based or file-based file system is not used, you should release all resources to the system. The first thing to do is to unmount the file system, then use &man.mdconfig.8; to detach the disk from the system and release the resources. For example to detach and free all resources used by /dev/md4: &prompt.root; mdconfig -d -u 4 It is possible to list information about configured &man.md.4; devices in using the command mdconfig -l. For FreeBSD 4.X, &man.vnconfig.8; is used to detach the device. For example to detach and free all resources used by /dev/vn4: &prompt.root; vnconfig -u vn4 Tom Rhodes Contributed by File System Snapshots file systems snapshots FreeBSD 5.0 offers a new feature in conjunction with Soft Updates: File system snapshots. Snapshots allow a user to create images of specified file systems, and treat them as a file. Snapshot files must be created in the file system that the action is performed on, and a user may create no more than 20 snapshots per file system. Active snapshots are recorded in the superblock so they are persistent across unmount and remount operations along with system reboots. When a snapshot is no longer required, it can be removed with the standard &man.rm.1; command. Snapshots may be removed in any order, however all the used space may not be acquired because another snapshot will possibly claim some of the released blocks. During initial creation, the flag (see the &man.chflags.1; manual page) is set to ensure that even root cannot write to the snapshot. The &man.unlink.1; command makes an exception for snapshot files since it allows them to be removed with the flag set, so it is not necessary to clear the flag before removing a snapshot file. Snapshots are created with the &man.mount.8; command. To place a snapshot of /var in the file /var/snapshot/snap use the following command: &prompt.root; mount -u -o snapshot /var/snapshot/snap /var Once a snapshot has been created, they have several uses: Some administrators will use a snapshot file for backup purposes, because the snapshot can be transfered to CDs or tape. File integrity, &man.fsck.8; may be ran on the snapshot. Assuming that the file system was clean when it was mounted, you should always get a clean (and unchanging) result. This is essentially what the background &man.fsck.8; process does. Run the &man.dump.8; utility on the snapshot. A dump will be returned that is consistent with the file system and the timestamp of the snapshot. &man.dump.8; can also take a snapshot, create a dump image and then remove the snapshot in one command using the flag. &man.mount.8; the snapshot as a frozen image of the file system. To &man.mount.8; the snapshot /var/snapshot/snap run: &prompt.root; mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /var/snapshot/snap -u 4 &prompt.root; mount -r /dev/md4 /mnt You can now walk the hierarchy of your frozen /var file system mounted at /mnt. Everything will be in the same state it was during the snapshot creation time. The only exception is that any earlier snapshots will appear as zero length files. When the use of a snapshot has delimited, it can be unmounted with: &prompt.root; umount /mnt &prompt.root; mdconfig -d -u 4 For more information about and file system snapshots, including technical papers, you can visit Marshall Kirk McKusick's website at http://www.mckusick.com. File System Quotas accounting disk space disk quotas Quotas are an optional feature of the operating system that allow you to limit the amount of disk space and/or the number of files a user or members of a group may allocate on a per-file system basis. This is used most often on timesharing systems where it is desirable to limit the amount of resources any one user or group of users may allocate. This will prevent one user or group of users from consuming all of the available disk space. Configuring Your System to Enable Disk Quotas Before attempting to use disk quotas, it is necessary to make sure that quotas are configured in your kernel. This is done by adding the following line to your kernel configuration file: options QUOTA The stock GENERIC kernel does not have this enabled by default, so you will have to configure, build and install a custom kernel in order to use disk quotas. Please refer to for more information on kernel configuration. Next you will need to enable disk quotas in /etc/rc.conf. This is done by adding the line: enable_quotas="YES" disk quotas checking For finer control over your quota startup, there is an additional configuration variable available. Normally on bootup, the quota integrity of each file system is checked by the &man.quotacheck.8; program. The &man.quotacheck.8; facility insures that the data in the quota database properly reflects the data on the file system. This is a very time consuming process that will significantly affect the time your system takes to boot. If you would like to skip this step, a variable in /etc/rc.conf is made available for the purpose: check_quotas="NO" If you are running FreeBSD prior to 3.2-RELEASE, the configuration is simpler, and consists of only one variable. Set the following in your /etc/rc.conf: check_quotas="YES" Finally you will need to edit /etc/fstab to enable disk quotas on a per-file system basis. This is where you can either enable user or group quotas or both for all of your file systems. To enable per-user quotas on a file system, add the option to the options field in the /etc/fstab entry for the file system you want to enable quotas on. For example: /dev/da1s2g /home ufs rw,userquota 1 2 Similarly, to enable group quotas, use the option instead of . To enable both user and group quotas, change the entry as follows: /dev/da1s2g /home ufs rw,userquota,groupquota 1 2 By default, the quota files are stored in the root directory of the file system with the names quota.user and quota.group for user and group quotas respectively. See &man.fstab.5; for more information. Even though the &man.fstab.5; manual page says that you can specify an alternate location for the quota files, this is not recommended because the various quota utilities do not seem to handle this properly. At this point you should reboot your system with your new kernel. /etc/rc will automatically run the appropriate commands to create the initial quota files for all of the quotas you enabled in /etc/fstab, so there is no need to manually create any zero length quota files. In the normal course of operations you should not be required to run the &man.quotacheck.8;, &man.quotaon.8;, or &man.quotaoff.8; commands manually. However, you may want to read their manual pages just to be familiar with their operation. Setting Quota Limits disk quotas limits Once you have configured your system to enable quotas, verify that they really are enabled. An easy way to do this is to run: &prompt.root; quota -v You should see a one line summary of disk usage and current quota limits for each file system that quotas are enabled on. You are now ready to start assigning quota limits with the &man.edquota.8; command. You have several options on how to enforce limits on the amount of disk space a user or group may allocate, and how many files they may create. You may limit allocations based on disk space (block quotas) or number of files (inode quotas) or a combination of both. Each of these limits are further broken down into two categories: hard and soft limits. hard limit A hard limit may not be exceeded. Once a user reaches his hard limit he may not make any further allocations on the file system in question. For example, if the user has a hard limit of 500 blocks on a file system and is currently using 490 blocks, the user can only allocate an additional 10 blocks. Attempting to allocate an additional 11 blocks will fail. soft limit Soft limits, on the other hand, can be exceeded for a limited amount of time. This period of time is known as the grace period, which is one week by default. If a user stays over his or her soft limit longer than the grace period, the soft limit will turn into a hard limit and no further allocations will be allowed. When the user drops back below the soft limit, the grace period will be reset. The following is an example of what you might see when you run the &man.edquota.8; command. When the &man.edquota.8; command is invoked, you are placed into the editor specified by the EDITOR environment variable, or in the vi editor if the EDITOR variable is not set, to allow you to edit the quota limits. &prompt.root; edquota -u test Quotas for user test: /usr: blocks in use: 65, limits (soft = 50, hard = 75) inodes in use: 7, limits (soft = 50, hard = 60) /usr/var: blocks in use: 0, limits (soft = 50, hard = 75) inodes in use: 0, limits (soft = 50, hard = 60) You will normally see two lines for each file system that has quotas enabled. One line for the block limits, and one line for inode limits. Simply change the value you want updated to modify the quota limit. For example, to raise this user's block limit from a soft limit of 50 and a hard limit of 75 to a soft limit of 500 and a hard limit of 600, change: /usr: blocks in use: 65, limits (soft = 50, hard = 75) to: /usr: blocks in use: 65, limits (soft = 500, hard = 600) The new quota limits will be in place when you exit the editor. Sometimes it is desirable to set quota limits on a range of UIDs. This can be done by use of the option on the &man.edquota.8; command. First, assign the desired quota limit to a user, and then run edquota -p protouser startuid-enduid. For example, if user test has the desired quota limits, the following command can be used to duplicate those quota limits for UIDs 10,000 through 19,999: &prompt.root; edquota -p test 10000-19999 For more information see &man.edquota.8; manual page. Checking Quota Limits and Disk Usage disk quotas checking You can use either the &man.quota.1; or the &man.repquota.8; commands to check quota limits and disk usage. The &man.quota.1; command can be used to check individual user or group quotas and disk usage. A user may only examine his own quota, and the quota of a group he is a member of. Only the super-user may view all user and group quotas. The &man.repquota.8; command can be used to get a summary of all quotas and disk usage for file systems with quotas enabled. The following is some sample output from the quota -v command for a user that has quota limits on two file systems. Disk quotas for user test (uid 1002): Filesystem blocks quota limit grace files quota limit grace /usr 65* 50 75 5days 7 50 60 /usr/var 0 50 75 0 50 60 grace period On the /usr file system in the above example, this user is currently 15 blocks over the soft limit of 50 blocks and has 5 days of the grace period left. Note the asterisk * which indicates that the user is currently over his quota limit. Normally file systems that the user is not using any disk space on will not show up in the output from the &man.quota.1; command, even if he has a quota limit assigned for that file system. The option will display those file systems, such as the /usr/var file system in the above example. Quotas over NFS NFS Quotas are enforced by the quota subsystem on the NFS server. The &man.rpc.rquotad.8; daemon makes quota information available to the &man.quota.1; command on NFS clients, allowing users on those machines to see their quota statistics. Enable rpc.rquotad in /etc/inetd.conf like so: rquotad/1 dgram rpc/udp wait root /usr/libexec/rpc.rquotad rpc.rquotad Now restart inetd: &prompt.root; kill -HUP `cat /var/run/inetd.pid` Lucky Green Contributed by
shamrock@cypherpunks.to
 Encrypting Disk Partitions disks encrypting FreeBSD offers excellent online protections against - unautharized data access. File permissions and Mandatory + unauthorized data access. File permissions and Mandatory Access Control (MAC) (see ) help prevent unauthorized third-parties from accessing data while the operating system is active and the computer is powered up. However, the permissions enforced by the operating system are irrelevant if an attacker has physical access to a computer and can simply move the computer's hard drive to another system to copy and analyze the sensitive data. Regardless of how an attacker may have come into possession of a hard drive or powered-down computer, GEOM Based Disk Encryption (gbde) can protect the data on the computer's file systems against even highly-motivated attackers with significant resources. Unlike cumbersome encryption methods that encrypt only individual files, gbde transparently encrypts entire file systems. No cleartext ever touches the hard drive's platter. Enabling gbde in the Kernel Become root Configuring gbde requires super-user privileges. &prompt.user; su - Password: Verify the operating system version &man.gbde.4; requires FreeBSD 5.0 or higher. &prompt.root; uname -r 5.0-RELEASE Add &man.gbde.4; support to the kernel configuration file Using your favorite text editor, add the following line to your kernel configuration file: options GEOM_BDE Configure, recompile, and install the FreeBSD kernel. This process is described in . Reboot into the new kernel. Preparing the Encrypted Hard Drive The following example assumes that you are adding a new hard drive to your system that will hold a single encrypted partition. This partition will be mounted as /private. gbde can also be used to encrypt /home and /var/mail, but this requires more complex instructions which exceed the scope of this introduction. Add the new hard drive Install the new drive to the system as explained in . For the purposes of this example, a new hard drive partition has been added as /dev/ad4s1c. The /dev/ad0s1* devices represent existing standard FreeBSD partitions on the example system. &prompt.root; ls /dev/ad* /dev/ad0 /dev/ad0s1b /dev/ad0s1e /dev/ad4s1 /dev/ad0s1 /dev/ad0s1c /dev/ad0s1f /dev/ad4s1c /dev/ad0s1a /dev/ad0s1d /dev/ad4 Create a directory to hold GBDE lock files &prompt.root; mkdir /etc/gbde The gbde lock file contains information that gbde requires to access encrypted partitions. Without access to the lock file, gbde will not be able to decrypt the data contained in the encrypted partition without significant manual intervention which is not supported by the software. Each encrypted partition uses a separate lock file. Initialize the gbde partition A gbde partition must be initialized before it can be used. This initialization needs to be performed only once: &prompt.root; gbde init /dev/ad4s1c -i -L /etc/gbde/ad4s1c &man.gbde.8; will open your editor, permitting you to set various configuration options in a template. For use with UFS1 or UFS2, set the sector_size to 2048: $FreeBSD: src/sbin/gbde/template.txt,v 1.1 2002/10/20 11:16:13 phk Exp $ # # Sector size is the smallest unit of data which can be read or written. # Making it too small decreases performance and decreases available space. # Making it too large may prevent filesystems from working. 512 is the # minimum and always safe. For UFS, use the fragment size # sector_size = 2048 [...] &man.gbde.8; will ask you twice to type the passphrase that should be used to secure the data. The passphrase must be the same both times. gbde's ability to protect your data depends entirely on the quality of the passphrase that you choose. For tips on how to select a secure passphrase that is easy to remember, see the Diceware Passphrase website. The gbde init command creates a lock file for your gbde partition that in this example is stored as /etc/gbde/ad4s1c. gbde lock files must be backed up together with the contents of any encrypted partitions. While deleting a lock file alone cannot prevent a determined attacker from decrypting a gbde partition, without the lock file, the legitimate owner will be unable to access the data on the encrypted partition without a significant amount of work that is totally unsupported by &man.gbde.8; and its designer. Attach the encrypted partition to the kernel &prompt.root; gbde attach /dev/ad4s1c -l /etc/gbde/ad4s1c You will be asked to provide the passphrase that you selected during the initialization of the encrypted partition. The new encrypted device will show up in /dev as /dev/device_name.bde: &prompt.root; ls /dev/ad* /dev/ad0 /dev/ad0s1b /dev/ad0s1e /dev/ad4s1 /dev/ad0s1 /dev/ad0s1c /dev/ad0s1f /dev/ad4s1c /dev/ad0s1a /dev/ad0s1d /dev/ad4 /dev/ad4s1c.bde Create a file system on the encrypted device Once the encrypted device has been attached to the kernel, you can create a file system on the device. To create a file system on the encrypted device, use &man.newfs.8;. Since it is much faster to initialize a new UFS2 file system than it is to initialize the old UFS1 file system, using &man.newfs.8; with the option is recommended. The option is the default with &os; 5.1-RELEASE and later. &prompt.root; newfs -U -O2 /dev/ad4s1c.bde The &man.newfs.8; command must be performed on an attached gbde partition which is identified by a *.bde extension to the device name. Mount the encrypted partition Create a mount point for the encrypted file system. &prompt.root; mkdir /private Mount the encrypted file system. &prompt.root; mount /dev/ad4s1c.bde /private Verify that the encrypted file system is available The encrypted file system should now be visible to &man.df.1; and be available for use. &prompt.user; df -H Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ad0s1a 1037M 72M 883M 8% / /devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev /dev/ad0s1f 8.1G 55K 7.5G 0% /home /dev/ad0s1e 1037M 1.1M 953M 0% /tmp /dev/ad0s1d 6.1G 1.9G 3.7G 35% /usr /dev/ad4s1c.bde 150G 4.1K 138G 0% /private Mounting Existing Encrypted File Systems After each boot, any encrypted file systems must be re-attached to the kernel, checked for errors, and mounted, before the file systems can be used. The required commands must be executed as user root. Attach the gbde partition to the kernel &prompt.root; gbde attach /dev/ad4s1c -l /etc/gbde/ad4s1c You will be asked to provide the passphrase that you selected during initialization of the encrypted gbde partition. Check the file system for errors Since encrypted file systems cannot yet be listed in /etc/fstab for automatic mounting, the file systems must be checked for errors by running &man.fsck.8; manually before mounting. &prompt.root; fsck -p -t ffs /dev/ad4s1c.bde Mount the encrypted file system &prompt.root; mount /dev/ad4s1c.bde /private The encrypted file system is now available for use. Automatically Mounting Encrypted Partitions It is possible to create a script to automatically attach, check, and mount an encrypted partition, but for security reasons the script should not contain the &man.gbde.8; password. Instead, it is recommended that such scripts be run manually while providing the password via the console or &man.ssh.1;. Cryptographic Protections Employed by gbde &man.gbde.8; encrypts the sector payload using 128-bit AES in CBC mode. Each sector on the disk is encrypted with a different AES key. For more information on gbde's cryptographic design, including how the sector keys are derived from the user-supplied passphrase, see &man.gbde.4;. Compatibility Issues &man.sysinstall.8; is incompatible with gbde-encrypted devices. All *.bde devices must be detached from the kernel before starting &man.sysinstall.8; or it will crash during its initial probing for devices. To detach the encrypted device used in our example, use the following command: &prompt.root; gbde detach /dev/ad4s1c diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install/chapter.sgml index 94d5da995e..240d24b8a4 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install/chapter.sgml @@ -1,5872 +1,5872 @@ Jim Mock Restructured, reorganized, and parts rewritten by Randy Pratt The sysinstall walkthrough, screenshots, and general copy by Installing FreeBSD Synopsis installation FreeBSD is provided with a text-based, easy to use installation program called sysinstall. This is the default installation program for FreeBSD, although vendors are free to provide their own installation suite if they wish. This chapter describes how to use sysinstall to install FreeBSD. After reading this chapter, you will know: How to create the FreeBSD installation disks. How FreeBSD refers to, and subdivides, your hard disks. How to start sysinstall. The questions sysinstall will ask you, what they mean, and how to answer them. Before reading this chapter, you should: Read the supported hardware list that shipped with the version of FreeBSD you are installing, and verify that your hardware is supported. In general, these installation instructions are written for i386 (PC compatible) architecture computers. Where applicable, instructions specific to other platforms (for example, Alpha) will be listed. Pre-installation Tasks Inventory Your Computer Before installing FreeBSD you should attempt to inventory the components in your computer. The FreeBSD installation routines will show you the components (hard disks, network cards, CDROM drives, and so forth) with their model number and manufacturer. FreeBSD will also attempt to determine the correct configuration for these devices, which includes information about IRQ and IO port usage. Due to the vagaries of PC hardware this process is not always completely successful, and you may need to correct FreeBSD's determination of your configuration. If you already have another operating system installed, such as Windows or Linux, it is a good idea to use the facilities provided by those operating systems to see how your hardware is already configured. If you are really not sure what settings an expansion card is using, you may find it printed on the card itself. Popular IRQ numbers are 3, 5, and 7, and IO port addresses are normally written as hexadecimal numbers, such as 0x330. We recommend you print or write down this information before installing FreeBSD. It may help to use a table, like this: Sample Device Inventory Device Name IRQ IO port(s) Notes First hard disk N/A N/A 4 GB, made by Seagate, first IDE master CDROM N/A N/A First IDE slave Second hard disk N/A N/A 2GB, made by IBM, second IDE master First IDE controller 14 0x1f0 Network card N/A N/A Intel 10/100 Modem N/A N/A 3Com 56K faxmodem, on COM1 …
Backup Your Data If the computer you will be installing FreeBSD on contains valuable data then ensure you have it backed up, and that you have tested the backups before installing FreeBSD. The FreeBSD installation routine will prompt you several times before writing any data to your disk, but once that process has started it cannot be undone. Decide Where to Install FreeBSD If you want FreeBSD to use all your disk, then there is nothing more to concern yourself with at this point — you can skip to the next section. However, if you need FreeBSD to co-exist with other operating systems then you need to have a rough understanding of how data is laid out on the disk, and how this affects you. Disk Layouts for the i386 A PC disk can be divided into discrete chunks. These chunks are called partitions. By design, the PC only supports four partitions per disk. These partitions are called primary partitions. To work around this limitation and allow more than four partitions, a new partition type was created, the extended partition. A disk may contain only one extended partition. Special partitions, called logical partitions, can be created inside this extended partition. Each partition has a partition ID, which is a number used to identify the type of data on the partition. FreeBSD partitions have the partition ID 165. In general, each operating system that you use will identify partitions in a particular way. For example, DOS, and its descendants, like Windows, assign each primary and logical partition a drive letter, starting with C:. FreeBSD must be installed into a primary partition. FreeBSD can keep all its data, including any files that you create, on this one partition. However, if you have multiple disks, then you can create a FreeBSD partition on all, or some, of them. When you install FreeBSD, you must have one partition available. This might be a blank partition that you have prepared, or it might be an existing partition that contains data that you no longer care about. If you are already using all the partitions on all your disks, then you will have to free one of them for FreeBSD using the tools provided by the other operating systems you use (e.g., fdisk on DOS or Windows). If you have a spare partition then you can use that. However, you may need to shrink one or more of your existing partitions first. A minimal installation of FreeBSD takes as little as 100 MB of disk space. However, that is a very minimal install, leaving almost no space for your own files. A more realistic minimum is 250 MB without a graphical environment, and 350 MB or more if you want a graphical user interface. If you intend to install a lot of third party software as well, then you will need more space. You can use a commercial tool such as Partition Magic to resize your partitions to make space for FreeBSD. The tools directory on the CDROM contains two free software tools which can carry out this task, FIPS and PResizer. Documentation for both of these is in the same directory. Incorrect use of these tools can delete the data on your disk. Be sure that you have recent, working backups before using them. Using an existing partition unchanged Suppose that you have a computer with a single 4 GB disk that already has a version of Windows installed, and you have split the disk into two drive letters, C: and D:, each of which is 2 GB in size. You have 1 GB of data on C:, and 0.5 GB of data on D:. This means that your disk has two partitions on it, one per drive letter. You can copy all your existing data from D: to C:, which will free up the second partition, ready for FreeBSD. Shrinking an existing partition Suppose that you have a computer with a single 4 GB disk, that already has a version of Windows installed. When you installed Windows you created one large partition, giving you a C: drive that is 4 GB in size. You are currently using 1.5 GB of space, and want FreeBSD to have 2 GB of space. In order to install FreeBSD you will need to either: Backup your Windows data, and then reinstall Windows, asking for a 2 GB partition at install time. Use one of the tools such as Partition Magic, described above, to shrink your Windows partition. Disk Layouts for the Alpha Alpha You will need a dedicated disk for FreeBSD on the Alpha. It is not possible to share a disk with another operating system at this time. Depending on the specific Alpha machine you have, this disk can either be a SCSI disk or an IDE disk, as long as your machine is capable of booting from it. Following the conventions of the Digital / Compaq manuals all SRM input is shown in uppercase. SRM is case insensitive. To find the names and types of disks in your machine, use the SHOW DEVICE command from the SRM console prompt: >>>show device dka0.0.0.4.0 DKA0 TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-57 3476 dkc0.0.0.1009.0 DKC0 RZ1BB-BS 0658 dkc100.1.0.1009.0 DKC100 SEAGATE ST34501W 0015 dva0.0.0.0.1 DVA0 ewa0.0.0.3.0 EWA0 00-00-F8-75-6D-01 pkc0.7.0.1009.0 PKC0 SCSI Bus ID 7 5.27 pqa0.0.0.4.0 PQA0 PCI EIDE pqb0.0.1.4.0 PQB0 PCI EIDE This example is from a Digital Personal Workstation 433au and shows three disks attached to the machine. The first is a CDROM drive called DKA0 and the other two are disks and are called DKC0 and DKC100 respectively. Disks with names of the form DKx are SCSI disks. For example DKA100 refers to a SCSI with SCSI target ID 1 on the first SCSI bus (A), whereas DKC300 refers to a SCSI disk with SCSI ID 3 on the third SCSI bus (C). Devicename PKx refers to the SCSI host bus adapter. As seen in the SHOW DEVICE output SCSI CDROM drives are treated as any other SCSI hard disk drive. IDE disks have names similar to DQx, while PQx is the associated IDE controller. Collect Your Network Configuration Details If you intend to connect to a network as part of your FreeBSD installation (for example, if you will be installing from an FTP site, or an NFS server), then you need to know your network configuration. You will be prompted for this information during the installation so that FreeBSD can connect to the network to complete the install. Connecting to an Ethernet Network, or Cable/DSL Modem If you connect to an Ethernet network, or you have an Internet connection via cable or DSL, then you will need the following information: IP address. IP address of the default gateway. Hostname. DNS server IP addresses. If you do not know this information, then ask your system administrator or service provider. They may say that this information is assigned automatically, using DHCP. If so, make a note of this. Connecting Using a Modem If you dial up to an ISP using a regular modem then you can still install FreeBSD over the Internet, it will just take a very long time. You will need to know: The phone number to dial for your ISP. The COM: port your modem is connected to. The username and password for your ISP account. Check for FreeBSD Errata Although the FreeBSD project strives to ensure that each release of FreeBSD is as stable as possible, bugs do occasionally creep into the process. On very rare occasions those bugs affect the installation process. As these problems are discovered and fixed they are noted in the FreeBSD Errata, posted on the FreeBSD web site. You should check the errata before installing to make sure that there are no late-breaking problems which you should be aware of. Information about all the releases, including the errata for each release, can be found on the release information section of the FreeBSD web site. Obtain the FreeBSD installation files The FreeBSD installation process can install FreeBSD from files located in the any of the following places: Local media A CDROM A DOS partition on the same computer A tape Floppy disks Network An FTP site, going through a firewall, or using an HTTP proxy, as necessary An NFS server A dedicated parallel or serial connection If you have purchased FreeBSD on CD or DVD then you already have everything you need, and should proceed to the next section (Preparing the Boot Media). If you have not obtained the FreeBSD installation files you should skip ahead to which explains how to prepare to install FreeBSD from any of the above. After reading that section, you should come back here, and read on to . Prepare the Boot Media The FreeBSD installation process is started by booting your computer into the FreeBSD installer—it is not a program you run within another operating system. Your computer normally boots using the operating system installed on your hard disk, but it can also be configured to use a bootable floppy disk. It may also be able to boot from a disk in the CDROM drive. If you have FreeBSD on CDROM or DVD (either one you purchased, or you prepared yourself), and your computer allows you to boot from the CDROM or DVD (typically a BIOS option called Boot Order or similar) then you can skip this section. The FreeBSD CDROM and DVD images are bootable and can be used to install FreeBSD without any other special preparation. To create boot floppy images, follow these steps: Acquire the Boot Floppy Images The boot disks are available on your installation media in the floppies/ directory, and can also be downloaded from the floppies directory for the i386 architecture and from this floppies directory for the Alpha architecture. The floppy images have a .flp extension. The floppies/ directory contains a number of different images, and the ones you will need to use depends on the version of FreeBSD you are installing, and in some cases, the hardware you are installing to. In most cases you will just need two files, kern.flp and mfsroot.flp. Additional device drivers may be necessary for some systems. These drivers are provided on the drivers.flp image. Check README.TXT in the same directory for the most up to date information about these floppy images. Your FTP program must use binary mode to download these disk images. Some web browsers have been known to use text (or ASCII) mode, which will be apparent if you cannot boot from the disks. Prepare the Floppy Disks You must prepare one floppy disk per image file you had to download. It is imperative that these disks are free from defects. The easiest way to test this is to format the disks for yourself. Do not trust pre-formatted floppies. If you try to install FreeBSD and the installation program crashes, freezes, or otherwise misbehaves, one of the first things to suspect is the floppies. Try writing the floppy image files to some other disks and try again. Write the Image Files to the Floppy Disks The .flp files are not regular files you copy to the disk. Instead, they are images of the complete contents of the disk. This means that you cannot use commands like DOS' copy to write the files. Instead, you must use specific tools to write the images directly to the disk. DOS If you are creating the floppies on a computer running DOS/Windows, then we provide a tool to do this called fdimage. If you are using the floppies from the CDROM, and your CDROM is the E: drive, then you would run this: E:\> tools\fdimage floppies\kern.flp A: Repeat this command for each .flp file, replacing the floppy disk each time, being sure to label the disks with the name of the file that you copied to them. Adjust the command line as necessary, depending on where you have placed the .flp files. If you do not have the CDROM, then fdimage can be downloaded from the tools directory on the FreeBSD FTP site. If you are writing the floppies on a Unix system (such as another FreeBSD system) you can use the &man.dd.1; command to write the image files directly to disk. On FreeBSD, you would run: &prompt.root; dd if=kern.flp of=/dev/fd0 On FreeBSD, /dev/fd0 refers to the first floppy disk (the A: drive). /dev/fd1 would be the B: drive, and so on. Other Unix variants might have different names for the floppy disk devices, and you will need to check the documentation for the system as necessary. You are now ready to start installing FreeBSD. Starting the Installation By default, the installation will not make any changes to your disk(s) until you see the following message: Last Chance: Are you SURE you want continue the installation? If you're running this on a disk with data you wish to save then WE STRONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO MAKE PROPER BACKUPS before proceeding! We can take no responsibility for lost disk contents! The install can be exited at any time prior to the final warning without changing the contents of the hard drive. If you are concerned that you have configured something incorrectly you can just turn the computer off before this point, and no damage will be done. Booting Booting for the i386 Start with your computer turned off. Turn on the computer. As it starts it should display an option to enter the system set up menu, or BIOS, commonly reached by keys like F2, F10, Del, or Alt S . Use whichever keystroke is indicated on screen. In some cases your computer may display a graphic while it starts. Typically, pressing Esc will dismiss the graphic and allow you to see the necessary messages. Find the setting that controls which devices the system boots from. This is commonly shown as a list of devices, such as Floppy, CDROM, First Hard Disk, and so on. If you needed to prepare boot floppies, then make sure that the floppy disk is selected. If you are booting from the CDROM then make sure that that is selected instead. In case of doubt, you should consult the manual that came with your computer, and/or its motherboard. Make the change, then save and exit. The computer should now restart. If you needed to prepare boot floppies, as described in then one of them will be the first boot disc, probably the one containing kern.flp. Put this disc in your floppy drive. If you are booting from CDROM, then you will need to turn on the computer, and insert the CDROM at the first opportunity. If your computer starts up as normal, and loads your existing operating system then either: The disks were not inserted early enough in the boot process. Leave them in, and try restarting your computer. The BIOS changes earlier did not work correctly. You should redo that step until you get the right option. FreeBSD will start to boot. If you are booting from CDROM you will see a display similar to this (version information omitted): Verifying DMI Pool Data ........ Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM : 1. FD 2.88MB System Type-(00) Uncompressing ... done BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.01 Console: internal video/keyboard BIOS drive A: is disk0 BIOS drive B: is disk1 BIOS drive C: is disk2 BIOS drive C: is disk3 BIOS 639kB/261120kB available memory FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, Revision 0.8 /kernel text=0x277391 data=0x3268c+0x332a8 | | Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt. Booting [kernel] in 9 seconds... _ If you are booting from floppy disc, you will see a display similar to this (version information omitted): Verifying DMI Pool Data ........ BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.01 Console: internal video/keyboard BIOS drive A: is disk0 BIOS drive C: is disk1 BIOS 639kB/261120kB available memory FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, Revision 0.8 /kernel text=0x277391 data=0x3268c+0x332a8 | Please insert MFS root floppy and press enter: Follow these instructions by removing the kern.flp disc, insert the mfsroot.flp disc, and press Enter. Irrespective of whether you booted from floppy or CDROM, the boot process will then get to this point: Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt. Booting [kernel] in 9 seconds... _ Either wait ten seconds, or press Enter. This will then launch the kernel configuration menu. Booting for the Alpha Alpha Start with your computer turned off. Turn on the computer and wait for a boot monitor prompt. If you needed to prepare boot floppies, as described in then one of them will be the first boot disc, probably the one containing kern.flp. Put this disc in your floppy drive and type the following command to boot the disk (substituting the name of your floppy drive if necessary): >>>BOOT DVA0 -FLAGS '' -FILE '' If you are booting from CDROM, insert the CDROM into the drive and type the following command to start the installation (substituting the name of the appropriate CDROM drive if necessary): >>>BOOT DKA0 -FLAGS '' -FILE '' FreeBSD will start to boot. If you are booting from a floppy disc, at some point you will see the message: Please insert MFS root floppy and press enter: Follow these instructions by removing the kern.flp disc, insert the mfsroot.flp disc, and press Enter. Irrespective of whether you booted from floppy or CDROM, the boot process will then get to this point: Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt. Booting [kernel] in 9 seconds... _ Either wait ten seconds, or press Enter. This will then launch the kernel configuration menu. Kernel Configuration From FreeBSD versions 5.0 and later, userconfig has been depreciated in favor of the new &man.device.hints.5; method. For more information on &man.device.hints.5; please visit The kernel is the core of the operating system. It is responsible for many things, including access to all the devices you may have on your system, such as hard disks, network cards, sound cards, and so on. Each piece of hardware supported by the FreeBSD kernel has a driver associated with it. Each driver has a two or three letter name, such as sa for the SCSI sequential access driver, or sio for the Serial I/O driver (which manages COM ports). When the kernel starts, each driver checks the system to see whether or not the hardware it supports exists on your system. If it does, then the driver configures the hardware and makes it available to the rest of the kernel. This checking is commonly referred to as device probing. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to do this in a safe way. Some hardware drivers do not co-exist well, and probing for one piece of hardware can sometimes leave another in an inconsistent state. This is a basic limitation of the PC design. Many older devices are called ISA devices—as opposed to PCI devices. The ISA specification requires each device to have some information hard coded into it, typically the Interrupt Request Line number (IRQ) and IO port address that the driver uses. This information is commonly set by using physical jumpers on the card, or by using a DOS based utility. This was often a source of problems, because it was not possible to have two devices that shared the same IRQ or port address. Newer devices follow the PCI specification, which does not require this, as the devices are supposed to cooperate with the BIOS, and be told which IRQ and IO port addresses to use. If you have any ISA devices in your computer then FreeBSD's driver for that device will need to be configured with the IRQ and port address that you have set the card to. This is why carrying out an inventory of your hardware (see ) can be useful. Unfortunately, the default IRQs and memory ports used by some drivers clash. This is because some ISA devices are shipped with IRQs or memory ports that clash. The defaults in FreeBSD's drivers are deliberately set to mirror the manufacturer's defaults, so that, out of the box, as many devices as possible will work. This is almost never an issue when running FreeBSD day-to-day. Your computer will not normally contain two pieces of hardware that clash, because one of them would not work (irrespective of the operating system you are using). It becomes an issue when you are installing FreeBSD for the first time because the kernel used to carry out the install has to contain as many drivers as possible, so that many different hardware configurations can be supported. This means that some of those drivers will have conflicting configurations. The devices are probed in a strict order, and if you own a device that is probed late in the process, but conflicted with an earlier probe, then your hardware might not function or be probed correctly when you install FreeBSD. Because of this, the first thing you have the opportunity to do when installing FreeBSD is look at the list of drivers that are configured into the kernel, and either disable some of them, if you do not own that device, or confirm (and alter) the driver's configuration if you do own the device but the defaults are wrong. This probably sounds much more complicated than it actually is. shows the first kernel configuration menu. We recommend that you choose the Start kernel configuration in full-screen visual mode option, as it presents the easiest interface for the new user.
Kernel Configuration Menu &txt.install.userconfig;
The kernel configuration screen () is then divided into four sections. A collapsible list of all the drivers that are currently marked as active, subdivided into groups such as Storage, and Network. Each driver is shown as a description, its two or three letter driver name, and the IRQ and memory port used by that driver. In addition, if an active driver conflicts with another active driver then CONF is shown next to the driver name. This section also shows the total number of conflicting drivers that are currently active. Drivers that have been marked inactive. They remain in the kernel, but they will not probe for their device when the kernel starts. These are subdivided into groups in the same way as the active driver list. More detail about the currently selected driver, including its IRQ and memory port address. Information about the keystrokes that are valid at this point in time.
The Kernel Device Configuration Visual Interface &txt.install.userconfig2;
At this point there will always be conflicts listed. Do not worry about this, it is to be expected; all the drivers are enabled, and as has already been explained, some of them will conflict with one another. You now have to work through the list of drivers, resolving the conflicts. Resolving Driver Conflicts Press X. This will completely expand the list of drivers, so you can see all of them. You will need to use the arrow keys to scroll back and forth through the active driver list. shows the result of pressing X.
Expanded Driver List
Disable all the drivers for devices that you do not have. To disable a driver, highlight it with the arrow keys and press Del. The driver will be moved to the Inactive Drivers list. If you inadvertently disable a device that you need then press Tab to switch to the Inactive Drivers list, select the driver that you disabled, and press Enter to move it back to the active list. Do not disable sc0. This controls the screen, and you will need this unless you are installing over a serial cable. Only disable atkbd0 if you are using a USB keyboard. If you have a normal keyboard then you must keep atkbd0. If there are no conflicts listed then you can skip this step. Otherwise, the remaining conflicts need to be examined. If they do not have the indication of an allowed conflict in the message area, then either the IRQ/address for device probe will need to be changed, or the IRQ/address on the hardware will need to be changed. To change the driver's configuration for IRQ and IO port address, select the device and press Enter. The cursor will move to the third section of the screen, and you can change the values. You should enter the values for IRQ and port address that you discovered when you made your hardware inventory. Press Q to finish editing the device's configuration and return to the active driver list. If you are not sure what these figures should be then you can try using -1. Some FreeBSD drivers can safely probe the hardware to discover what the correct value should be, and a value of -1 configures them to do this. The procedure for changing the address on the hardware varies from device to device. For some devices you may need to physically remove the card from your computer and adjust jumper settings or DIP switches. Other cards may have come with a DOS floppy that contains the programs used to reconfigure the card. In any case, you should refer to the documentation that came with the device. This will obviously entail restarting your computer, so you will need to boot back into the FreeBSD installation routine when you have reconfigured the card. When all the conflicts have been resolved the screen will look similar to .
Driver Configuration With No Conflicts
As you can see, the active driver list is now much smaller, with only drivers for the hardware that actually exists being listed. You can now save these changes, and move on to the next step of the install. Press Q to quit the device configuration interface. This message will appear: Save these parameters before exiting? ([Y]es/[N]o/[C]ancel) Answer Y to save the parameters to memory (it will be saved to disk if you finish the install) and the probing will start. After displaying the probe results in white on black text sysinstall will start and display its main menu ().
Sysinstall Main Menu
Reviewing the Device Probe Results The last few hundred lines that have been displayed on screen are stored and can be reviewed. To review the buffer, press Scroll Lock. This turns on scrolling in the display. You can then use the arrow keys, or PageUp and PageDown to view the results. Press Scroll Lock again to stop scrolling. Do this now, to review the text that scrolled off the screen when the kernel was carrying out the device probes. You will see text similar to , although the precise text will differ depending on the devices that you have in your computer.
Typical Device Probe Results avail memory = 253050880 (247120K bytes) Preloaded elf kernel "kernel" at 0xc0817000. Preloaded mfs_root "/mfsroot" at 0xc0817084. md0: Preloaded image </mfsroot> 4423680 bytes at 0xc03ddcd4 md1: Malloc disk Using $PIR table, 4 entries at 0xc00fde60 npx0: <math processor> on motherboard npx0: INT 16 interface pcib0: <Host to PCI bridge> on motherboard pci0: <PCI bus> on pcib0 pcib1:<VIA 82C598MVP (Apollo MVP3) PCI-PCI (AGP) bridge> at device 1.0 on pci0 pci1: <PCI bus> on pcib1 pci1: <Matrox MGA G200 AGP graphics accelerator> at 0.0 irq 11 isab0: <VIA 82C586 PCI-ISA bridge> at device 7.0 on pci0 isa0: <iSA bus> on isab0 atapci0: <VIA 82C586 ATA33 controller> port 0xe000-0xe00f at device 7.1 on pci0 ata0: at 0x1f0 irq 14 on atapci0 ata1: at 0x170 irq 15 on atapci0 uhci0 <VIA 83C572 USB controller> port 0xe400-0xe41f irq 10 at device 7.2 on pci 0 usb0: <VIA 83572 USB controller> on uhci0 usb0: USB revision 1.0 uhub0: VIA UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr1 uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered pci0: <unknown card> (vendor=0x1106, dev=0x3040) at 7.3 dc0: <ADMtek AN985 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe800-0xe8ff mem 0xdb000000-0xeb0003ff ir q 11 at device 8.0 on pci0 dc0: Ethernet address: 00:04:5a:74:6b:b5 miibus0: <MII bus> on dc0 ukphy0: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> on miibus0 ukphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto ed0: <NE2000 PCI Ethernet (RealTek 8029)> port 0xec00-0xec1f irq 9 at device 10. 0 on pci0 ed0 address 52:54:05:de:73:1b, type NE2000 (16 bit) isa0: too many dependant configs (8) isa0: unexpected small tag 14 orm0: <Option ROM> at iomem 0xc0000-0xc7fff on isa0 fdc0: <NEC 72065B or clone> at port 0x3f0-0x3f5,0x3f7 irq 6 drq2 on isa0 fdc0: FIFO enabled, 8 bytes threshold fd0: <1440-KB 3.5" drive> on fdc0 drive 0 atkbdc0: <Keyboard controller (i8042)> at port 0x60,0x64 on isa0 atkbd0: <AT Keyboard> flags 0x1 irq1 on atkbdc0 kbd0 at atkbd0 psm0: <PS/2 Mouse> irq 12 on atkbdc0 psm0: model Generic PS/@ mouse, device ID 0 vga0: <Generic ISA VGA> at port 0x3c0-0x3df iomem 0xa0000-0xbffff on isa0 sc0: <System console> at flags 0x100 on isa0 sc0: VGA <16 virtual consoles, flags=0x300> sio0 at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on isa0 sio0: type 16550A sio1 at port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on isa0 sio1: type 16550A ppc0: <Parallel port> at port 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa0 pppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP/EPP/PS2/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode ppc0: FIFO with 16/16/15 bytes threshold plip0: <PLIP network interface> on ppbus0 ad0: 8063MB <IBM-DHEA-38451> [16383/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33 acd0: CD-RW <LITE-ON LTR-1210B> at ata1-slave PIO4 Mounting root from ufs:/dev/md0c /stand/sysinstall running as init on vty0
Check the probe results carefully to make sure that FreeBSD found all the devices you expected. If a device was not found, then it will not be listed. If the device's driver required configuring with the IRQ and port address then you should check that you entered them correctly. If you need to make changes to the UserConfig device probing, its easy to exit the sysinstall program and start over again. Its also a good way to become more familiar with the process.
Select Sysinstall Exit
Use the arrow keys to select Exit Install from the Main Install Screen menu. The following message will display: User Confirmation Requested Are you sure you wish to exit? The system will reboot (be sure to remove any floppies from the drives). [ Yes ] No The install program will start again if the CDROM is left in the drive and [Yes] is selected. If you are booting from floppies it will be necessary to remove the mfsroot.flp floppy and replace it with kern.flp before rebooting. Introducing Sysinstall The sysinstall utility is the installation application provided by the FreeBSD Project. It is console based and is divided into a number of menus and screens that you can use to configure and control the installation process. The sysinstall menu system is controlled by the arrow keys, Enter, Space, and other keys. A detailed description of these keys, and what they do, is contained in sysinstall's usage information. To review this information, ensure that the Usage entry is highlighted and that the [Select] button is selected, as shown in , then press Enter. The instructions for using the menu system will be displayed. After reviewing them, press Enter to return to the Main Menu.
Selecting Usage From Sysinstall Main Menu
Selecting The Documentation Menu From the Main Menu, select Doc with the arrow keys and press Enter.
Selecting Documentation Menu
This will display the Documentation Menu.
Sysinstall Documentation Menu
It is important to read the documents provided. To view a document, select it with the arrow keys and press Enter. When finished reading a document, pressing Enter will return to the Documentation Menu. To return to the Main Installation Menu, select Exit with the arrow keys and press Enter. Selecting The Keymap Menu To change the keyboard mapping, use the arrow keys to select Keymap from the menu and press Enter.
Sysinstall Main Menu
A different keyboard mapping may be chosen by selecting the menu item using up/down arrow keys and pressing Space. Pressing Space again will unselect the item. When finished, choose the &gui.ok; using the arrow keys and press Enter. Only a partial list is shown in this screen representation. Selecting &gui.cancel; will use the default keymap and return to the Main Install Menu.
Sysinstall Keymap Menu
Installation Options Screen Select Options and press Enter.
Sysinstall Main Menu
Sysinstall Options
The default values are usually fine for most users and do not need to be changed. The release name will vary according to the version being installed. The description of the selected item will appear at the bottom of the screen highlighted in blue. Notice that one of the options is Use Defaults to reset all values to startup defaults. Press F1 to read the help screen about the various options. Pressing Q will return to the Main Install menu. Begin A Standard Installation The Standard installation is the option recommended for those new to Unix or FreeBSD. Use the arrow keys to select Standard and then press Enter to start the installation.
Begin Standard Installation
Allocating Disk Space Your first task is to allocate disk space for FreeBSD, and label that space so that sysinstall can prepare it. In order to do this you need to know how FreeBSD expects to find information on the disk. BIOS Drive Numbering Before you install and configure FreeBSD on your system, there is an important subject that you should be aware of, especially if you have multiple hard drives. DOS Microsoft Windows In a PC running a BIOS-dependent operating system such as MS-DOS or Microsoft Windows, the BIOS is able to abstract the normal disk drive order, and the operating system goes along with the change. This allows the user to boot from a disk drive other than the so-called primary master. This is especially convenient for some users who have found that the simplest and cheapest way to keep a system backup is to buy an identical second hard drive, and perform routine copies of the first drive to the second drive using Ghost or XCOPY . Then, if the first drive fails, or is attacked by a virus, or is scribbled upon by an operating system defect, he can easily recover by instructing the BIOS to logically swap the drives. It is like switching the cables on the drives, but without having to open the case. SCSI BIOS More expensive systems with SCSI controllers often include BIOS extensions which allow the SCSI drives to be re-ordered in a similar fashion for up to seven drives. A user who is accustomed to taking advantage of these features may become surprised when the results with FreeBSD are not as expected. FreeBSD does not use the BIOS, and does not know the logical BIOS drive mapping. This can lead to very perplexing situations, especially when drives are physically identical in geometry, and have also been made as data clones of one another. When using FreeBSD, always restore the BIOS to natural drive numbering before installing FreeBSD, and then leave it that way. If you need to switch drives around, then do so, but do it the hard way, and open the case and move the jumpers and cables. An Illustration from the Files of Bill and Fred's Exceptional Adventures: Bill breaks-down an older Wintel box to make another FreeBSD box for Fred. Bill installs a single SCSI drive as SCSI unit zero and installs FreeBSD on it. Fred begins using the system, but after several days notices that the older SCSI drive is reporting numerous soft errors and reports this fact to Bill. After several more days, Bill decides it is time to address the situation, so he grabs an identical SCSI drive from the disk drive archive in the back room. An initial surface scan indicates that this drive is functioning well, so Bill installs this drive as SCSI unit four and makes an image copy from drive zero to drive four. Now that the new drive is installed and functioning nicely, Bill decides that it is a good idea to start using it, so he uses features in the SCSI BIOS to re-order the disk drives so that the system boots from SCSI unit four. FreeBSD boots and runs just fine. Fred continues his work for several days, and soon Bill and Fred decide that it is time for a new adventure -- time to upgrade to a newer version of FreeBSD. Bill removes SCSI unit zero because it was a bit flaky and replaces it with another identical disk drive from the archive. Bill then installs the new version of FreeBSD onto the new SCSI unit zero using Fred's magic Internet FTP floppies. The installation goes well. Fred uses the new version of FreeBSD for a few days, and certifies that it is good enough for use in the engineering department. It is time to copy all of his work from the old version. So Fred mounts SCSI unit four (the latest copy of the older FreeBSD version). Fred is dismayed to find that none of his precious work is present on SCSI unit four. Where did the data go? When Bill made an image copy of the original SCSI unit zero onto SCSI unit four, unit four became the new clone. When Bill re-ordered the SCSI BIOS so that he could boot from SCSI unit four, he was only fooling himself. FreeBSD was still running on SCSI unit zero. Making this kind of BIOS change will cause some or all of the Boot and Loader code to be fetched from the selected BIOS drive, but when the FreeBSD kernel drivers take-over, the BIOS drive numbering will be ignored, and FreeBSD will transition back to normal drive numbering. In the illustration at hand, the system continued to operate on the original SCSI unit zero, and all of Fred's data was there, not on SCSI unit four. The fact that the system appeared to be running on SCSI unit four was simply an artifact of human expectations. We are delighted to mention that no data bytes were killed or harmed in any way by our discovery of this phenomenon. The older SCSI unit zero was retrieved from the bone pile, and all of Fred's work was returned to him, (and now Bill knows that he can count as high as zero). Although SCSI drives were used in this illustration, the concepts apply equally to IDE drives. Disk Organization The smallest unit of organization that FreeBSD uses to find files is the filename. Filenames are case-sensitive, which means that readme.txt and README.TXT are two separate files. FreeBSD does not use the extension (.txt) of a file to determine whether the file is program, or a document, or some other form of data. Files are stored in directories. A directory may contain no files, or it may contain many hundreds of files. A directory can also contain other directories, allowing you to build up a hierarchy of directories within one another. This makes it much easier to organize your data. Files and directories are referenced by giving the file or directory name, followed by a forward slash, /, followed by any other directory names that are necessary. If you have directory foo, which contains directory bar, which contains the file readme.txt, then the full name, or path to the file is foo/bar/readme.txt. Directories and files are stored in a filesystem. Each filesystem contains exactly one directory at the very top level, called the root directory for that filesystem. This root directory can then contain other directories. So far this is probably similar to any other operating system you may have used. There are a few differences; for example, DOS uses \ to separate file and directory names, while MacOS uses :. FreeBSD does not use drive letters, or other drive names in the path. You would not write c:/foo/bar/readme.txt on FreeBSD. Instead, one filesystem is designated the root filesystem. The root filesystem's root directory is referred to as /. Every other filesystem is then mounted under the root filesystem. No matter how many disks you have on your FreeBSD system, every directory appears to be part of the same disk. Suppose you have three filesystems, called A, B, and C. Each filesystem has one root directory, which contains two other directories, called A1, A2 (and likewise B1, B2 and C1, C2). Call A the root filesystem. If you used the ls command to view the contents of this directory you would see two subdirectories, A1 and A2. The directory tree looks like this: / | +--- A1 | `--- A2 A filesystem must be mounted on to a directory in another filesystem. So now suppose that you mount filesystem B on to the directory A1. The root directory of B replaces A1, and the directories in B appear accordingly: / | +--- A1 | | | +--- B1 | | | `--- B2 | `--- A2 Any files that are in the B1 or B2 directories can be reached with the path /A1/B1 or /A1/B2 as necessary. Any files that were in /A1 have been temporarily hidden. They will reappear if B is unmounted from A. If B had been mounted on A2 then the diagram would look like this: / | +--- A1 | `--- A2 | +--- B1 | `--- B2 and the paths would be /A2/B1 and /A2/B2 respectively. Filesystems can be mounted on top of one another. Continuing the last example, the C filesystem could be mounted on top of the B1 directory in the B filesystem, leading to this arrangement: / | +--- A1 | `--- A2 | +--- B1 | | | +--- C1 | | | `--- C2 | `--- B2 Or C could be mounted directly on to the A filesystem, under the A1 directory: / | +--- A1 | | | +--- C1 | | | `--- C2 | `--- A2 | +--- B1 | `--- B2 If you are familiar with DOS, this is similar, although not identical, to the join command. This is not normally something you need to concern yourself with. Typically you create filesystems when installing FreeBSD and decide where to mount them, and then never change them unless you add a new disk. It is entirely possible to have one large root filesystem, and not need to create any others. There are some drawbacks to this approach, and one advantage. Benefits of multiple filesystems Different filesystems can have different mount options. For example, with careful planning, the root filesystem can be mounted read-only, making it impossible for you to inadvertently delete or edit a critical file. FreeBSD automatically optimizes the layout of files on a filesystem, depending on how the filesystem is being used. So a filesystem that contains many small files that are written frequently will have a different optimization to one that contains fewer, larger files. By having one big filesystem this optimization breaks down. FreeBSD's filesystems are very robust should you lose power. However, a power loss at a critical point could still damage the structure of the filesystem. By splitting your data over multiple filesystems it is more likely that the system will still come up, making it easier for you to restore from backup as necessary. Benefit of a single filesystem Filesystems are a fixed size. If you create a filesystem when you install FreeBSD and give it a specific size, you may later discover that you need to make the partition bigger. This is not easily accomplished without backing up, recreating the filesystems with the size, and then restoring. FreeBSD 4.4 and up have a featured command, the &man.growfs.8;, which will makes it possible to increase the size of a filesystem on the fly, removing this limitation. Filesystems are contained in partitions. This does not have the same meaning as the earlier usage of the term partition in this chapter, because of FreeBSD's Unix heritage. Each partition is identified by a letter, a through to h. Each partition can only contain one filesystem, which means that filesystems are often described by either their typical mount point on the root filesystem, or the letter of the partition they are contained in. FreeBSD also uses disk space for swap space. Swap space provides FreeBSD with virtual memory. This allows your computer to behave as though it has much more memory than it actually does. When FreeBSD runs out of memory it moves some of the data that is not currently being used to the swap space, and moves it back in (moving something else out) when it needs it. Some partitions have certain conventions associated with them. Partition Convention a Normally contains the root filesystem b Normally contains swap space c Normally the same size as the enclosing slice. This allows utilities that need to work on the entire slice (for example, a bad block scanner) to work on the c partition. You would not normally create a filesystem on this partition. d Partition d used to have a special meaning associated with it, although that is now gone. To this day, some tools may operate oddly if told to work on partition d, so sysinstall will not normally create partition d. Each partition-that-contains-a-filesystem is stored in what FreeBSD calls a slice. Slice is FreeBSD's term for what were earlier called partitions, and again, this is because of FreeBSD's Unix background. Slices are numbered, starting at 1, through to 4. slices partitions dangerously dedicated Slice numbers follow the device name, prefixed with an s, starting at 1. So da0s1 is the first slice on the first SCSI drive. There can only be four physical slices on a disk, but you can have logical slices inside physical slices of the appropriate type. These extended slices are numbered starting at 5, so ad0s5 is the first extended slice on the first IDE disk. These devices are used by file systems that expect to occupy a slice. Slices, dangerously dedicated physical drives, and other drives contain partitions, which are represented as letters from a to h. This letter is appended to the device name, so da0a is the a partition on the first da drive, which is dangerously dedicated. ad1s3e is the fifth partition in the third slice of the second IDE disk drive. Finally, each disk on the system is identified. A disk name starts with a code that indicates the type of disk, and then a number, indicating which disk it is. Unlike slices, disk numbering starts at 0. Common codes that you will see are listed in . When referring to a partition FreeBSD requires that you also name the slice and disk that contains the partition, and when referring to a slice you should also refer to the disk name. Do this by listing the disk name, s, the slice number, and then the partition letter. Examples are shown in . shows a conceptual model of the disk layout that should help make things clearer. In order to install FreeBSD you must first configure the disk slices, then create partitions within the slice you will use for FreeBSD, and then create a filesystem (or swap space) in each partition, and decide where that filesystem will be mounted. Disk Device Codes Code Meaning ad ATAPI (IDE) disk da SCSI direct access disk acd ATAPI (IDE) CDROM cd SCSI CDROM fd Floppy disk
Sample Disk, Slice, and Partition Names Name Meaning ad0s1a The first partition (a) on the first slice (s1) on the first IDE disk (ad0). da1s2e The fifth partition (e) on the second slice (s2) on the second SCSI disk (da1). Conceptual Model of a Disk This diagram shows FreeBSD's view of the first IDE disk attached to the system. Assume that the disk is 4 GB in size, and contains two 2 GB slices (DOS partitions). The first slice contains a DOS disk, C:, and the second slice contains a FreeBSD installation. This example FreeBSD installation has three partitions, and a swap partition. The three partitions will each hold a filesystem. Partition a will be used for the root filesystem, e for the /var directory hierarchy, and f for the /usr directory hierarchy. .-----------------. --. | | | | DOS / Windows | | : : > First slice, ad0s1 : : | | | | :=================: ==: --. | | | Partition a, mounted as / | | | > referred to as ad0s2a | | | | | :-----------------: ==: | | | | Partition b, used as swap | | | > referred to as ad0s2b | | | | | :-----------------: ==: | Partition c, no | | | Partition e, used as /var > filesystem, all | | > referred to as ad0s2e | of FreeBSD slice, | | | | ad0s2c :-----------------: ==: | | | | | : : | Partition f, used as /usr | : : > referred to as ad0s2f | : : | | | | | | | | --' | `-----------------' --' Creating Slices using FDisk No changes you make at this point will be written to the disk. If you think you have made a mistake and want to start again you can use the menus to exit sysinstall and try again. If you get confused and can not see how to exit you can always turn your computer off. After choosing to begin a standard installation in sysinstall you will be shown this message: Message In the next menu, you will need to set up a DOS-style ("fdisk") partitioning scheme for your hard disk. If you simply wish to devote all disk space to FreeBSD (overwriting anything else that might be on the disk(s) selected) then use the (A)ll command to select the default partitioning scheme followed by a (Q)uit. If you wish to allocate only free space to FreeBSD, move to a partition marked "unused" and use the (C)reate command. [ OK ] [ Press enter or space ] Press Enter as instructed. You will then be shown a list of all the hard drives that the kernel found when it carried out the device probes. shows an example from a system with two IDE disks. They have been called ad0 and ad2.
Select Drive for FDisk
You might be wondering why ad1 is not listed here. Why has it been missed? Consider what would happen if you had two IDE hard disks, one as the master on the first IDE controller, and one as the master on the second IDE controller. If FreeBSD numbered these as it found them, as ad0 and ad1 then everything would work. But if you then added a third disk, as the slave device on the first IDE controller, it would now be ad1, and the previous ad1 would become ad2. Because device names (such as ad1s1a) are used to find filesystems, you may suddenly discover that some of your filesystems no longer appear correctly, and you would need to change your FreeBSD configuration. To work around this, the kernel can be configured to name IDE disks based on where they are, and not the order in which they were found. With this scheme the master disk on the second IDE controller will always be ad2, even if there are no ad0 or ad1 devices. This configuration is the default for the FreeBSD kernel, which is why this display shows ad0 and ad2. The machine on which this screenshot was taken had IDE disks on both master channels of the IDE controllers, and no disks on the slave channels. You should select the disk on which you want to install FreeBSD, and then press &gui.ok;. FDisk will start, with a display similar to that shown in . The FDisk display is broken into three sections. The first section, covering the first two lines of the display, shows details about the currently selected disk, including its FreeBSD name, the disk geometry, and the total size of the disk. The second section shows the slices that are currently on the disk, where they start and end, how large they are, the name FreeBSD gives them, and their description and sub-type. This example shows two small unused slices, which are artifacts of disk layout schemes on the PC. It also shows one large FAT slice, which almost certainly appears as C: in DOS / Windows, and an extended slice, which may contain other drive letters for DOS / Windows. The third section shows the commands that are available in FDisk.
Typical Fdisk Partitions Before Editing
What you do now will depend on how you want to slice up your disk. If you want to use FreeBSD for the entire disk (which will delete all the other data on this disk when you confirm that you want sysinstall to continue later in the installation process) then you can press A, which corresponds to the Use Entire Disk option. The existing slices will be removed, and replaced with a small area flagged as unused (again, an artifact of PC disk layout), and then one large slice for FreeBSD. If you do this then you should then select the newly created FreeBSD slice using the arrow keys, and press S to mark the slice as being bootable. The screen will then look very similar to . Note the A in the Flags column, which indicates that this slice is active, and will be booted from. If you will be deleting an existing slice to make space for FreeBSD then you should select the slice using the arrow keys, and then press D. You can then press C, and be prompted for size of slice you want to create. Enter the appropriate figure and press Enter. If you have already made space for FreeBSD (perhaps by using a tool such as Partition Magic) then you can press C to create a new slice. Again, you will be prompted for the size of slice you would like to create.
Fdisk Partition Using Entire Disk
When finished, press Q. Your changes will be saved in sysinstall, but will not yet be written to disk. Install a Boot Manager You now have the option to install a boot manager. In general, you should choose to install the FreeBSD boot manager if: You have more than one drive, and have installed FreeBSD onto a drive other than the first one. You have installed FreeBSD alongside another operating system on the same disk, and you want to choose whether to start FreeBSD or the other operating system when you start the computer. Make your choice and press Enter.
Sysinstall Boot Manager Menu
The help screen, reached by pressing F1, discusses the problems that can be encountered when trying to share the hard disk between operating systems. Creating Slices on Another Drive If there is more than one drive, it will return to the Select Drives screen after the boot manager selection. If you wish to install FreeBSD on to more than one disk, then you can select another disk here and repeat the slice process using FDisk.
Exit Select Drive
The Tab key toggles between the last drive selected, &gui.ok;, and &gui.cancel;. Press the Tab once to toggle to the &gui.ok;, then press Enter to continue with the installation. Creating Partitions using <application>Disklabel</application> You must now create some partitions inside each slice that you have just created. Remember that each partition is lettered, from a through to h, and that partitions b, c, and d have conventional meanings that you should adhere to. Certain applications can benefit from particular partition schemes, especially if you are laying out partitions across more than one disk. However, for this, your first FreeBSD installation, you do not need to give too much thought to how you partition the disk. It is more important that you install FreeBSD and start learning how to use it. You can always re-install FreeBSD to change your partition scheme when you are more familiar with the operating system. This scheme features four partitions—one for swap space, and three for filesystems. Partition Layout for First Disk Partition Filesystem Size Description a / 100 MB This is the root filesystem. Every other filesystem will be mounted somewhere under this one. 100 MB is a reasonable size for this filesystem. You will not be storing too much data on it, as a regular FreeBSD install will put about 40 MB of data here. The remaining space is for temporary data, and also leaves expansion space if future versions of FreeBSD need more space in /. b N/A 2-3 x RAM The system's swap space is kept on this partition. Choosing the right amount of swap space can be a bit of an art. A good rule of thumb is that your swap space should be two or three times as much as the available physical memory (RAM). You should also have at least 64 MB of swap, so if you have less than 32 MB of RAM in your computer then set the swap amount to 64 MB. If you have more than one disk then you can put swap space on each disk. FreeBSD will then use each disk for swap, which effectively speeds up the act of swapping. In this case, calculate the total amount of swap you need (e.g., 128 MB), and then divide this by the number of disks you have (e.g., two disks) to give the amount of swap you should put on each disk, in this example, 64 MB of swap per disk. e /var 50 MB The /var directory contains variable length files; log files, and other administrative files. Many of these files are read-from or written-to extensively during FreeBSD's day-to-day running. Putting these files on another filesystem allows FreeBSD to optimise the access of these files without affecting other files in other directories that do not have the same access pattern. f /usr Rest of disk All your other files will typically be stored in /usr, and its subdirectories.
If you will be installing FreeBSD on to more than one disk then you must also create partitions in the other slices that you configured. The easiest way to do this is to create two partitions on each disk, one for the swap space, and one for a filesystem. Partition Layout for Subsequent Disks Partition Filesystem Size Description b N/A See description As already discussed, you can split swap space across each disk. Even though the a partition is free, convention dictates that swap space stays on the b partition. e /diskn Rest of disk The rest of the disk is taken up with one big partition. This could easily be put on the a partition, instead of the e partition. However, convention says that the a partition on a slice is reserved for the filesystem that will be the root (/) filesystem. You do not have to follow this convention, but sysinstall does, so following it yourself makes the installation slightly cleaner. You can choose to mount this filesystem anywhere; this example suggests that you mount them as directories /diskn, where n is a number that changes for each disk. But you can use another scheme if you prefer.
Having chosen your partition layout you can now create it using sysinstall. You will see this message: Message Now, you need to create BSD partitions inside of the fdisk partition(s) just created. If you have a reasonable amount of disk space (200MB or more) and don't have any special requirements, simply use the (A)uto command to allocate space automatically. If you have more specific needs or just don't care for the layout chosen by (A)uto, press F1 for more information on manual layout. [ OK ] [ Press enter or space ] Press Enter to start the FreeBSD partition editor, called Disklabel. shows the display when you first start Disklabel. The display is divided in to three sections. The first few lines show the name of the disk you are currently working on, and the slice that contains the partitions you are creating (at this point Disklabel calls this the Partition name rather than slice name). This display also shows the amount of free space within the slice; that is, space that was set aside in the slice, but that has not yet been assigned to a partition. The middle of the display shows the partitions that have been created, the name of the filesystem that each partition contains, their size, and some options pertaining to the creation of the filesystem. The bottom third of the screen shows the keystrokes that are valid in Disklabel.
Sysinstall Disklabel Editor
Disklabel can automatically create partitions for you and assign them default sizes. Try this now, by Pressing A. You will see a display similar to that shown in . Depending on the size of the disk you are using the defaults may or may not be appropriate. This does not matter, as you do not have to accept the defaults. Beginning with FreeBSD 4.5, the default partitioning assigns the /tmp directory its own partition instead of being part of the / partition. This helps avoid filling the / partition with temporary files.
Sysinstall Disklabel Editor With Auto Defaults
To delete the suggested partitions, and replace them with your own, use the arrow keys to select the first partition, and press D to delete it. Repeat this to delete all the suggested partitions. To create the first partition (a, mounted as /), make sure the disk information at the top of the screen is selected, and press C. A dialog box will appear prompting you for the size of the new partition (as shown in ). You can enter the size as the number of disk blocks you want to use, or, more usefully, as a number followed by either M for megabytes, G for gigabytes, or C for cylinders. Beginning with FreeBSD 5.X, users can select UFS2 using the Custom Newfs (Z) option. Either create labels with Auto Defaults and modify them with the Custom Newfs option, or add during the regular creation period. Do not forget to add for SoftUpdates if you use the Custom Newfs option!
Free Space For Root Partition
The default size shown will create a partition that takes up the rest of the slice. If you are using the partition sizes described earlier, then delete the existing figure using Backspace, and then type in 64M, as shown in . Then press &gui.ok;.
Edit Root Partition Size
Having chosen the partition's size you will then asked whether this partition will contain a filesystem or swap space. The dialog box is shown in . This first partition will contain a filesystem, so check that FS is selected and then press Enter.
Choose The Root Partition Type
Finally, because you are creating a filesystem, you must tell Disklabel where the filesystem is to be mounted. The dialog box is shown in . The root filesystem's mount point is /, so type /, and then press Enter.
Choose The Root Mount Point
The display will then update to show you the newly created partition. You should repeat this procedure for the other partitions. When you create the swap partition you will not be prompted for the filesystem mount point, as swap partitions are never mounted. When you create the final partition, /usr, you can leave the suggested size as is, to use the rest of the slice. Your final FreeBSD DiskLabel Editor screen will appear similar to , although your values chosen may be different. Press Q to finish.
Sysinstall Disklabel Editor
Choosing What To Install Select The Distribution Set Deciding which distribution set to install will depend largely on the intended use of the system and the amount of disk space available. The predefined options range from installing the smallest possible configuration to everything. Those who are new to Unix and/or FreeBSD should almost certainly select one of these canned options. Customizing a distribution set is typically for the more experienced user. Press F1 for more information on the distribution set options and what they contain. When finished reviewing the help, pressing Enter will return to the Select Distributions Menu. If a graphical user interface is desired then a distribution set that is preceded by an X should be chosen. The configuration of XFree86 and selection of a default desktop is part of the post-installation steps. The default version of XFree86 that is installed depends on the version of the FreeBSD that you are installing. For FreeBSD versions prior to 4.6, XFree86 3.X is installed. For FreeBSD 4.6 and later, XFree86 4.X is the default. You should check to see whether your video card is supported at the XFree86 web site. If it is not supported under the default version that FreeBSD will install, you should select a distribution without X for installation. After installation, install and configure the appropriate version of XFree86 using the ports collection. If compiling a custom kernel is anticipated, select an option which includes the source code. For more information on why a custom kernel should be built or how to build a custom kernel see . Obviously, the most versatile system is one that includes everything. If there is adequate disk space, select All as shown in by using the arrow keys and press Enter. If there is a concern about disk space consider using an option that is more suitable for the situation. Other distributions can be added after installation.
Choose Distributions
Installing The Ports Collection After selecting the desired distribution, an opportunity to install the FreeBSD Ports Collection is presented. The ports collection is an easy and convenient way to install software. The ports collection does not contain the source code necessary to compile the software. It is a collection of files which automates the downloading, compiling and installation. discusses how to use the ports collection. The installation program does not check to see if you have adequate space. Select this option only if you have adequate hard disk space. User Confirmation Requested Would you like to install the FreeBSD ports collection? This will give you ready access to over &os.numports; ported software packages, at a cost of around &ports.size; of disk space when "clean" and possibly much more than that if a lot of the distribution tarballs are loaded (unless you have the extra CDs from a FreeBSD CD/DVD distribution available and can mount it on /cdrom, in which case this is far less of a problem). The ports collection is a very valuable resource and well worth having on your /usr partition, so it is advisable to say Yes to this option. For more information on the ports collection & the latest ports, visit: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] with the arrow keys to install the ports collection or [ No ] to skip this option. Press Enter to continue. The Choose Distributions menu will redisplay.
Confirm Distributions
If satisfied with the options, select Exit with the arrow keys, ensure that &gui.ok; is highlighted, and press Enter to continue. Choosing Your Installation Media If Installing from a CDROM, use the arrow keys to highlight Install from a FreeBSD CD/DVD. Ensure that &gui.ok; is highlighted, then press Enter to proceed with the installation. For other methods of installation, select the appropriate option and follow the instructions. Press F1 to display the Online Help for installation media. Press Enter to return to the media selection menu.
Choose Installation Media
FTP Installation Modes installation network FTP There are three FTP installation modes you can choose from: active FTP, passive FTP, or via a HTTP proxy. FTP Active, Install from an FTP server This option will make all FTP transfers use Active mode. This will not work through firewalls, but will often work with older FTP servers that do not support passive mode. If your connection hangs with passive mode (the default), try active! FTP Passive, Install from an FTP server through a firewall FTP Passive mode This option instructs FreeBSD to use Passive mode for all FTP operations. This allows the user to pass through firewalls that do not allow incoming connections on random port addresses. FTP via a HTTP proxy, Install from an FTP server through a http proxy FTP via a HTTP proxy This option instructs FreeBSD to use the HTTP protocol (like a web browser) to connect to a proxy for all FTP operations. The proxy will translate the requests and send them to the FTP server. This allows the user to pass through firewalls that do not allow FTP at all, but offer a HTTP proxy. In this case, you have to specify the proxy in addition to the FTP server. For a proxy FTP server, you should usually give the name of the server you really want as a part of the username, after an @ sign. The proxy server then fakes the real server. For example, assuming you want to install from ftp.FreeBSD.org, using the proxy FTP server foo.example.com, listening on port 1024. In this case, you go to the options menu, set the FTP username to ftp@ftp.FreeBSD.org, and the password to your email address. As your installation media, you specify FTP (or passive FTP, if the proxy supports it), and the URL ftp://foo.example.com:1234/pub/FreeBSD. Since /pub/FreeBSD from ftp.FreeBSD.org is proxied under foo.example.com, you are able to install from that machine (which will fetch the files from ftp.FreeBSD.org as your installation requests them). Committing to the Installation The installation can now proceed if desired. This is also the last chance for aborting the installation to prevent changes to the hard drive. User Confirmation Requested Last Chance! Are you SURE you want to continue the installation? If you're running this on a disk with data you wish to save then WE STRONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO MAKE PROPER BACKUPS before proceeding! We can take no responsibility for lost disk contents! [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] and press Enter to proceed. The installation time will vary according to the distribution chosen, installation media used, and the speed of the computer. There will be a series of messages displayed indicating the status. The installation is complete when the following message is displayed: Message Congratulations! You now have FreeBSD installed on your system. We will now move on to the final configuration questions. For any option you do not wish to configure, simply select No. If you wish to re-enter this utility after the system is up, you may do so by typing: /stand/sysinstall . [ OK ] [ Press enter to continue ] Press Enter to proceed with post-installation configurations. Selecting [ No ] and pressing Enter will abort the installation so no changes will be made to your system. The following message will appear: Message Installation complete with some errors. You may wish to scroll through the debugging messages on VTY1 with the scroll-lock feature. You can also choose "No" at the next prompt and go back into the installation menus to retry whichever operations have failed. [ OK ] This message is generated because nothing was installed. Pressing Enter will return to the Main Installation Menu to exit the installation. Post-installation Configuration of various options follows the successful installation. An option can be configured by re-entering the configuration options before booting the new FreeBSD system or after installation using /stand/sysinstall and selecting Configure. Network Device Configuration If you previously configured PPP for an FTP install, this screen will not display and can be configured later as described above. For detailed information on Local Area Networks and configuring FreeBSD as a gateway/router refer to the Advanced Networking chapter. User Confirmation Requested Would you like to configure any Ethernet or SLIP/PPP network devices? [ Yes ] No To configure a network device, select [ Yes ] and press Enter. Otherwise, select [ No ] to continue.
Selecting An Ethernet Device
Select the interface to be configured with the arrow keys and press Enter. User Confirmation Requested Do you want to try IPv6 configuration of the interface? Yes [ No ] In this private local area network the current Internet type protocol (IPv4) was sufficient and [ No ] was selected with the arrow keys and Enter pressed. If you want to try the new Internet protocol (IPv6), choose [ Yes ] and press Enter. It will take several seconds to scan for RA servers. User Confirmation Requested Do you want to try DHCP configuration of the interface? Yes [ No ] If DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is not required select [ No ] with the arrow keys and press Enter. Selecting [ Yes ] will execute dhclient, and if successful, will fill in the network configuration information automatically. Refer to for more information. The following Network Configuration screen shows the configuration of the Ethernet device for a system that will act as the gateway for a Local Area Network.
Set Network Configuration For ed0
Use Tab to select the information fields and fill in appropriate information: Host The fully-qualified hostname, e.g. k6-2.example.com in this case. Domain The name of the domain that your machine is in, e.g. example.com for this case. IPv4 Gateway IP address of host forwarding packets to non-local destinations. Fill this in only if the machine is a node on the network. Leave this field blank if the machine is the gateway to the Internet for the network. Name server IP address of your local DNS server. There is no local DNS server on this private local area network so the IP address of the provider's DNS server (208.163.10.2) was used. IPv4 address The IP address to be used for this interface was 192.168.0.1 Netmask The address block being used for this local area network is a Class C block (192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255). The default netmask is for a Class C network (255.255.255.0). Extra options to ifconfig Any interface-specific options to ifconfig you would like to add. There were none in this case. Use Tab to select &gui.ok; when finished and press Enter. User Confirmation Requested Would you like to Bring Up the ed0 interface right now? [ Yes ] No Choosing [ Yes ] and pressing Enter will bring the machine up on the network and be ready for use after leaving the installation. Configure Gateway User Confirmation Requested Do you want this machine to function as a network gateway? [ Yes ] No If the machine will be acting as the gateway for a local area network and forwarding packets between other machines then select [ Yes ] and press Enter. If the machine is a node on a network then select [ No ] and press Enter to continue. Configure Internet Services User Confirmation Requested Do you want to configure inetd and the network services that it provides? Yes [ No ] If [ No ] is selected, various services such telnetd will not be enabled. This means that remote users will not be able to telnet into this machine. Local users will be still be able to access remote machines with telnet. These services can be enabled after installation by editing /etc/inetd.conf with your favorite text editor. See for more information. Select [ Yes ] if you wish to configure these services during install. An additional confirmation will display: User Confirmation Requested The Internet Super Server (inetd) allows a number of simple Internet services to be enabled, including finger, ftp and telnetd. Enabling these services may increase risk of security problems by increasing the exposure of your system. With this in mind, do you wish to enable inetd? [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] to continue. User Confirmation Requested inetd(8) relies on its configuration file, /etc/inetd.conf, to determine which of its Internet services will be available. The default FreeBSD inetd.conf(5) leaves all services disabled by default, so they must be specifically enabled in the configuration file before they will function, even once inetd(8) is enabled. Note that services for IPv6 must be separately enabled from IPv4 services. Select [Yes] now to invoke an editor on /etc/inetd.conf, or [No] to use the current settings. [ Yes ] No Selecting [ Yes ] will allow adding services by deleting the # at the beginning of a line.
Editing <filename>inetd.conf</filename>
After adding the desired services, pressing Esc will display a menu which will allow exiting and saving the changes. Anonymous FTP User Confirmation Requested Do you want to have anonymous FTP access to this machine? Yes [ No ] Deny Anonymous FTP Selecting the default [ No ] and pressing Enter will still allow users who have accounts with passwords to use FTP to access the machine. Allow Anonymous FTP Anyone can access your machine if you elect to allow anonymous FTP connections. The security implications should be considered before enabling this option. For more information about security see . To allow anonymous FTP, use the arrow keys to select [ Yes ] and press Enter. The following screen (or similar) will display:
Default Anonymous FTP Configuration
Pressing F1 will display the help: This screen allows you to configure the anonymous FTP user. The following configuration values are editable: UID: The user ID you wish to assign to the anonymous FTP user. All files uploaded will be owned by this ID. Group: Which group you wish the anonymous FTP user to be in. Comment: String describing this user in /etc/passwd FTP Root Directory: Where files available for anonymous FTP will be kept. Upload subdirectory: Where files uploaded by anonymous FTP users will go. The ftp root directory will be put in /var by default. If you do not have enough room there for the anticipated FTP needs, the /usr directory could be used by setting the FTP Root Directory to /usr/ftp. When you are satisfied with the values, press Enter to continue. User Confirmation Requested Create a welcome message file for anonymous FTP users? [ Yes ] No If you select [ Yes ] and press Enter, an editor will automatically start allowing you to edit the message.
Edit The FTP Welcome Message
This is a text editor called ee. Use the instructions to change the message or change the message later using a text editor of your choice. Note the file name/location at the bottom of the editor screen. Press Esc and a pop-up menu will default to a) leave editor. Press Enter to exit and continue. Configure Network File Services Network File Services (NFS) allows sharing of files across a network. A machine can be configured as a server, a client, or both. Refer to for a more information. NFS Server User Confirmation Requested Do you want to configure this machine as an NFS server? Yes [ No ] If there is no need for a Network File System server or client, select [ No ] and press Enter. If [ Yes ] is chosen, a message will pop-up indicating that the exports file must be created. Message Operating as an NFS server means that you must first configure an /etc/exports file to indicate which hosts are allowed certain kinds of access to your local filesystems. Press [Enter] now to invoke an editor on /etc/exports [ OK ] Press Enter to continue. A text editor will start allowing the exports file to be created and edited.
Editing <filename>exports</filename>
Use the instructions to add the actual exported filesystems now or later using a text editor of your choice. Note the file name/location at the bottom of the editor screen. Press Esc and a pop-up menu will default to a) leave editor. Press Enter to exit and continue. NFS Client User Confirmation Requested Do you want to configure this machine as an NFS client? Yes [ No ] With the arrow keys, select [ Yes ] or [ No ] as appropriate and press Enter. Security Profile A security profile is a set of configuration options that attempts to achieve the desired ratio of security to convenience by enabling and disabling certain programs and other settings. The more severe the security profile, the fewer programs will be enabled by default. This is one of the basic principles of security: do not run anything except what you must. Please note that the security profile is just a default setting. All programs can be enabled and disabled after you have installed FreeBSD by editing or adding the appropriate line(s) to /etc/rc.conf. For more information, please see the &man.rc.conf.5; manual page. The following table describes what each of the security profiles does. The columns are the choices you have for a security profile, and the rows are the program or feature that the profile enables or disables. Possible security profiles Extreme Moderate &man.sendmail.8; NO YES &man.sshd.8; NO YES &man.portmap.8; NO MAYBE The portmapper is enabled if the machine has been configured as an NFS client or server earlier in the installation. NFS server NO YES &man.securelevel.8; YES If you choose a security profile that sets the securelevel to Extreme or High, you must be aware of the implications. Please read the &man.init.8; manual page and pay particular attention to the meanings of the security levels, or you may have significant trouble later! NO
User Confirmation Requested Do you want to select a default security profile for this host (select No for "medium" security)? [ Yes ] No Selecting [ No ] and pressing Enter will set the security profile to medium. Selecting [ Yes ] and pressing Enter will allow selecting a different security profile.
Security Profile Options
Press F1 to display the help. Press Enter to return to selection menu. Use the arrow keys to choose Medium unless your are sure that another level is required for your needs. With &gui.ok; highlighted, press Enter. An appropriate confirmation message will display depending on which security setting was chosen. Message Moderate security settings have been selected. Sendmail and SSHd have been enabled, securelevels are disabled, and NFS server setting have been left intact. PLEASE NOTE that this still does not save you from having to properly secure your system in other ways or exercise due diligence in your administration, this simply picks a standard set of out-of-box defaults to start with. To change any of these settings later, edit /etc/rc.conf [OK] Message Extreme security settings have been selected. Sendmail, SSHd, and NFS services have been disabled, and securelevels have been enabled. PLEASE NOTE that this still does not save you from having to properly secure your system in other ways or exercise due diligence in your administration, this simply picks a more secure set of out-of-box defaults to start with. To change any of these settings later, edit /etc/rc.conf [OK] Press Enter to continue with the post-installation configuration. The security profile is not a silver bullet! Even if you use the extreme setting, you need to keep up with security issues by reading an appropriate mailing list, using good passwords and passphrases, and generally adhering to good security practices. It simply sets up the desired security to convenience ratio out of the box. System Console Settings There are several options available to customize the system console. User Confirmation Requested Would you like to customize your system console settings? [ Yes ] No To view and configure the options, select [ Yes ] and press Enter.
System Console Configuration Options
A commonly used option is the screen saver. Use the arrow keys to select Saver and then press Enter.
Screen Saver Options
Select the desired screen saver using the arrow keys and then press Enter. The System Console Configuration menu will redisplay. The default time interval is 300 seconds. To change the time interval, select Saver again. At the Screen Saver Options menu, select Timeout using the arrow keys and press Enter. A pop-up menu will appear:
Screen Saver Timeout
The value can be changed, then select &gui.ok; and press Enter to return to the System Console Configuration menu.
System Console Configuration Exit
Selecting Exit and pressing Enter will continue with the post-installation configurations. Setting The Time Zone Setting the time zone for your machine will allow it to automatically correct for any regional time changes and perform other time zone related functions properly. The example shown is for a machine located in the Eastern time zone of the United States. Your selections will vary according to your geographical location. User Confirmation Requested Would you like to set this machine's time zone now? [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] and press Enter to set the time zone. User Confirmation Requested Is this machine's CMOS clock set to UTC? If it is set to local time or you don't know, please choose NO here! Yes [ No ] Select [ Yes ] or [ No ] according to how the machine's clock is configured and press Enter.
Select Your Region
The appropriate region is selected using the arrow keys and then press Enter.
Select Your Country
Select the appropriate country using the arrow keys and press Enter.
Select Your Time Zone
The appropriate time zone is selected using the arrow keys and pressing Enter. Confirmation Does the abbreviation 'EDT' look reasonable? [ Yes ] No Confirm the abbreviation for the time zone is correct. If it looks okay, press Enter to continue with the post-installation configuration. Linux Compatibility User Confirmation Requested Would you like to enable Linux binary compatibility? [ Yes ] No Selecting [ Yes ] and pressing Enter will allow running Linux software on FreeBSD. The install will proceed to add the appropriate packages for Linux compatibility. If installing by FTP, the machine will need to be connected to the Internet. Sometimes a remote ftp site will not have all the distributions like the Linux binary compatibility. This can be installed later if necessary. Mouse Settings This option will allow you to cut and paste text in the console and user programs with a 3-button mouse. If using a 2-button mouse, refer to manual page, &man.moused.8;, after installation for details on emulating the 3-button style. This example depicts a non-USB mouse configuration: User Confirmation Requested Does this system have a non-USB mouse attached to it? [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] for a non-USB mouse or [ No ] for a USB mouse and press Enter.
Select Mouse Protocol Type
Use the arrow keys to select Type and press Enter.
Set Mouse Protocol
The mouse used in this example is a PS/2 type, so the default Auto was appropriate. To change protocol, use the arrow keys to select another option. Ensure that &gui.ok; is highlighted and press Enter to exit this menu.
Configure Mouse Port
Use the arrow keys to select Port and press Enter.
Setting The Mouse Port
This system had a PS/2 mouse, so the default PS/2 was appropriate. To change the port, use the arrow keys and then press Enter.
Enable The Mouse Daemon
Last, the mouse daemon is enabled and tested.
Test The Mouse Daemon
The cursor moved around the screen so the mouse daemon is running. Select [ Yes ] to return to the previous menu then select Exit with the arrow keys and press Enter to return to continue with the post-installation configuration. Configure X Server In order to use a graphical user interface such as KDE, GNOME, or others, the X server will need to be configured. In order to run XFree86 as a non root user you will need to have x11/wrapper installed. This is installed by default beginning with FreeBSD 4.7. For earlier versions this can be added from the Package Selection menu. To see whether your video card is supported, check the XFree86 web site. User Confirmation Requested Would you like to configure your X server at this time? [ Yes ] No It is necessary to know your monitor specifications and video card information. Equipment damage can occur if settings are incorrect. If you do not have this information, select [ No ] and perform the configuration after installation when you have the information using /stand/sysinstall, selecting Configure and then XFree86. If you have graphics card and monitor information, select [ Yes ] and press Enter to proceed with configuring the X server.
Select Configuration Method Menu
There are several ways to configure the X server. Use the arrow keys to select one of the methods and press Enter. Be sure to read all instructions carefully. The xf86cfg and xf86cfg -textmode may make the screen go dark and take a few seconds to start. Be patient. The following will illustrate the use of the xf86config configuration tool. The configuration choices you make will depend on the hardware in the system so your choices will probably be different than those shown: Message You have configured and been running the mouse daemon. Choose "/dev/sysmouse" as the mouse port and "SysMouse" or "MouseSystems" as the mouse protocol in the X configuration utility. [ OK ] [ Press enter to continue ] This indicates that the mouse daemon previously configured has been detected. Press Enter to continue. Starting xf86config will display a brief introduction: This program will create a basic XF86Config file, based on menu selections you make. The XF86Config file usually resides in /usr/X11R6/etc/X11 or /etc/X11. A sample XF86Config file is supplied with XFree86; it is configured for a standard VGA card and monitor with 640x480 resolution. This program will ask for a pathname when it is ready to write the file. You can either take the sample XF86Config as a base and edit it for your configuration, or let this program produce a base XF86Config file for your configuration and fine-tune it. Before continuing with this program, make sure you know what video card you have, and preferably also the chipset it uses and the amount of video memory on your video card. SuperProbe may be able to help with this. Press enter to continue, or ctrl-c to abort. Pressing Enter will start the mouse configuration. Be sure to follow the instructions and use Mouse Systems as the mouse protocol and /dev/sysmouse as the mouse port even if using a PS/2 mouse is shown as an illustration. First specify a mouse protocol type. Choose one from the following list: 1. Microsoft compatible (2-button protocol) 2. Mouse Systems (3-button protocol) & FreeBSD moused protocol 3. Bus Mouse 4. PS/2 Mouse 5. Logitech Mouse (serial, old type, Logitech protocol) 6. Logitech MouseMan (Microsoft compatible) 7. MM Series 8. MM HitTablet 9. Microsoft IntelliMouse If you have a two-button mouse, it is most likely of type 1, and if you have a three-button mouse, it can probably support both protocol 1 and 2. There are two main varieties of the latter type: mice with a switch to select the protocol, and mice that default to 1 and require a button to be held at boot-time to select protocol 2. Some mice can be convinced to do 2 by sending a special sequence to the serial port (see the ClearDTR/ClearRTS options). Enter a protocol number: 2 You have selected a Mouse Systems protocol mouse. If your mouse is normally in Microsoft-compatible mode, enabling the ClearDTR and ClearRTS options may cause it to switch to Mouse Systems mode when the server starts. Please answer the following question with either 'y' or 'n'. Do you want to enable ClearDTR and ClearRTS? n You have selected a three-button mouse protocol. It is recommended that you do not enable Emulate3Buttons, unless the third button doesn't work. Please answer the following question with either 'y' or 'n'. Do you want to enable Emulate3Buttons? y Now give the full device name that the mouse is connected to, for example /dev/tty00. Just pressing enter will use the default, /dev/mouse. On FreeBSD, the default is /dev/sysmouse. Mouse device: /dev/sysmouse The keyboard is the next item to be configured. A generic 101-key model is shown for illustration. Any name may be used for the variant or simply press Enter to accept the default value. Please select one of the following keyboard types that is the better description of your keyboard. If nothing really matches, choose 1 (Generic 101-key PC) 1 Generic 101-key PC 2 Generic 102-key (Intl) PC 3 Generic 104-key PC 4 Generic 105-key (Intl) PC 5 Dell 101-key PC 6 Everex STEPnote 7 Keytronic FlexPro 8 Microsoft Natural 9 Northgate OmniKey 101 10 Winbook Model XP5 11 Japanese 106-key 12 PC-98xx Series 13 Brazilian ABNT2 14 HP Internet 15 Logitech iTouch 16 Logitech Cordless Desktop Pro 17 Logitech Internet Keyboard 18 Logitech Internet Navigator Keyboard 19 Compaq Internet 20 Microsoft Natural Pro 21 Genius Comfy KB-16M 22 IBM Rapid Access 23 IBM Rapid Access II 24 Chicony Internet Keyboard 25 Dell Internet Keyboard Enter a number to choose the keyboard. 1 Please select the layout corresponding to your keyboard 1 U.S. English 2 U.S. English w/ ISO9995-3 3 U.S. English w/ deadkeys 4 Albanian 5 Arabic 6 Armenian 7 Azerbaidjani 8 Belarusian 9 Belgian 10 Bengali 11 Brazilian 12 Bulgarian 13 Burmese 14 Canadian 15 Croatian 16 Czech 17 Czech (qwerty) 18 Danish Enter a number to choose the country. Press enter for the next page 1 Please enter a variant name for 'us' layout. Or just press enter for default variant us Please answer the following question with either 'y' or 'n'. Do you want to select additional XKB options (group switcher, group indicator, etc.)? n Next, we proceed to the configuration for the monitor. Do not exceed the ratings of your monitor. Damage could occur. If you have any doubts, do the configuration after you have the information. Now we want to set the specifications of the monitor. The two critical parameters are the vertical refresh rate, which is the rate at which the whole screen is refreshed, and most importantly the horizontal sync rate, which is the rate at which scanlines are displayed. The valid range for horizontal sync and vertical sync should be documented in the manual of your monitor. If in doubt, check the monitor database /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/Monitors to see if your monitor is there. Press enter to continue, or ctrl-c to abort. You must indicate the horizontal sync range of your monitor. You can either select one of the predefined ranges below that correspond to industry- standard monitor types, or give a specific range. It is VERY IMPORTANT that you do not specify a monitor type with a horizontal sync range that is beyond the capabilities of your monitor. If in doubt, choose a conservative setting. hsync in kHz; monitor type with characteristic modes 1 31.5; Standard VGA, 640x480 @ 60 Hz 2 31.5 - 35.1; Super VGA, 800x600 @ 56 Hz 3 31.5, 35.5; 8514 Compatible, 1024x768 @ 87 Hz interlaced (no 800x600) 4 31.5, 35.15, 35.5; Super VGA, 1024x768 @ 87 Hz interlaced, 800x600 @ 56 Hz 5 31.5 - 37.9; Extended Super VGA, 800x600 @ 60 Hz, 640x480 @ 72 Hz 6 31.5 - 48.5; Non-Interlaced SVGA, 1024x768 @ 60 Hz, 800x600 @ 72 Hz 7 31.5 - 57.0; High Frequency SVGA, 1024x768 @ 70 Hz 8 31.5 - 64.3; Monitor that can do 1280x1024 @ 60 Hz 9 31.5 - 79.0; Monitor that can do 1280x1024 @ 74 Hz 10 31.5 - 82.0; Monitor that can do 1280x1024 @ 76 Hz 11 Enter your own horizontal sync range Enter your choice (1-11): 6 You must indicate the vertical sync range of your monitor. You can either select one of the predefined ranges below that correspond to industry- standard monitor types, or give a specific range. For interlaced modes, the number that counts is the high one (e.g. 87 Hz rather than 43 Hz). 1 50-70 2 50-90 3 50-100 4 40-150 5 Enter your own vertical sync range Enter your choice: 2 You must now enter a few identification/description strings, namely an identifier, a vendor name, and a model name. Just pressing enter will fill in default names. The strings are free-form, spaces are allowed. Enter an identifier for your monitor definition: Hitachi The selection of a video card driver from a list is next. If you pass your card on the list, continue to press Enter and the list will repeat. Only an excerpt from the list is shown: Now we must configure video card specific settings. At this point you can choose to make a selection out of a database of video card definitions. Because there can be variation in Ramdacs and clock generators even between cards of the same model, it is not sensible to blindly copy the settings (e.g. a Device section). For this reason, after you make a selection, you will still be asked about the components of the card, with the settings from the chosen database entry presented as a strong hint. The database entries include information about the chipset, what driver to run, the Ramdac and ClockChip, and comments that will be included in the Device section. However, a lot of definitions only hint about what driver to run (based on the chipset the card uses) and are untested. If you can't find your card in the database, there's nothing to worry about. You should only choose a database entry that is exactly the same model as your card; choosing one that looks similar is just a bad idea (e.g. a GemStone Snail 64 may be as different from a GemStone Snail 64+ in terms of hardware as can be). Do you want to look at the card database? y 288 Matrox Millennium G200 8MB mgag200 289 Matrox Millennium G200 SD 16MB mgag200 290 Matrox Millennium G200 SD 4MB mgag200 291 Matrox Millennium G200 SD 8MB mgag200 292 Matrox Millennium G400 mgag400 293 Matrox Millennium II 16MB mga2164w 294 Matrox Millennium II 4MB mga2164w 295 Matrox Millennium II 8MB mga2164w 296 Matrox Mystique mga1064sg 297 Matrox Mystique G200 16MB mgag200 298 Matrox Mystique G200 4MB mgag200 299 Matrox Mystique G200 8MB mgag200 300 Matrox Productiva G100 4MB mgag100 301 Matrox Productiva G100 8MB mgag100 302 MediaGX mediagx 303 MediaVision Proaxcel 128 ET6000 304 Mirage Z-128 ET6000 305 Miro CRYSTAL VRX Verite 1000 Enter a number to choose the corresponding card definition. Press enter for the next page, q to continue configuration. 288 Your selected card definition: Identifier: Matrox Millennium G200 8MB Chipset: mgag200 Driver: mga Do NOT probe clocks or use any Clocks line. Press enter to continue, or ctrl-c to abort. Now you must give information about your video card. This will be used for the "Device" section of your video card in XF86Config. You must indicate how much video memory you have. It is probably a good idea to use the same approximate amount as that detected by the server you intend to use. If you encounter problems that are due to the used server not supporting the amount memory you have (e.g. ATI Mach64 is limited to 1024K with the SVGA server), specify the maximum amount supported by the server. How much video memory do you have on your video card: 1 256K 2 512K 3 1024K 4 2048K 5 4096K 6 Other Enter your choice: 6 Amount of video memory in Kbytes: 8192 You must now enter a few identification/description strings, namely an identifier, a vendor name, and a model name. Just pressing enter will fill in default names (possibly from a card definition). Your card definition is Matrox Millennium G200 8MB. The strings are free-form, spaces are allowed. Enter an identifier for your video card definition: Next, the video modes are set for the resolutions desired. Typically, useful ranges are 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768 but those are a function of video card capability, monitor size, and eye comfort. When selecting a color depth, select the highest mode that your card will support. For each depth, a list of modes (resolutions) is defined. The default resolution that the server will start-up with will be the first listed mode that can be supported by the monitor and card. Currently it is set to: "640x480" "800x600" "1024x768" "1280x1024" for 8-bit "640x480" "800x600" "1024x768" "1280x1024" for 16-bit "640x480" "800x600" "1024x768" "1280x1024" for 24-bit Modes that cannot be supported due to monitor or clock constraints will be automatically skipped by the server. 1 Change the modes for 8-bit (256 colors) 2 Change the modes for 16-bit (32K/64K colors) 3 Change the modes for 24-bit (24-bit color) 4 The modes are OK, continue. Enter your choice: 2 Select modes from the following list: 1 "640x400" 2 "640x480" 3 "800x600" 4 "1024x768" 5 "1280x1024" 6 "320x200" 7 "320x240" 8 "400x300" 9 "1152x864" a "1600x1200" b "1800x1400" c "512x384" Please type the digits corresponding to the modes that you want to select. For example, 432 selects "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480", with a default mode of 1024x768. Which modes? 432 You can have a virtual screen (desktop), which is screen area that is larger than the physical screen and which is panned by moving the mouse to the edge of the screen. If you don't want virtual desktop at a certain resolution, you cannot have modes listed that are larger. Each color depth can have a differently-sized virtual screen Please answer the following question with either 'y' or 'n'. Do you want a virtual screen that is larger than the physical screen? n For each depth, a list of modes (resolutions) is defined. The default resolution that the server will start-up with will be the first listed mode that can be supported by the monitor and card. Currently it is set to: "640x480" "800x600" "1024x768" "1280x1024" for 8-bit "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480" for 16-bit "640x480" "800x600" "1024x768" "1280x1024" for 24-bit Modes that cannot be supported due to monitor or clock constraints will be automatically skipped by the server. 1 Change the modes for 8-bit (256 colors) 2 Change the modes for 16-bit (32K/64K colors) 3 Change the modes for 24-bit (24-bit color) 4 The modes are OK, continue. Enter your choice: 4 Please specify which color depth you want to use by default: 1 1 bit (monochrome) 2 4 bits (16 colors) 3 8 bits (256 colors) 4 16 bits (65536 colors) 5 24 bits (16 million colors) Enter a number to choose the default depth. 4 Finally, the configuration needs to be saved. Be sure to enter /etc/XF86Config as the location for saving the configuration. I am going to write the XF86Config file now. Make sure you don't accidently overwrite a previously configured one. Shall I write it to /etc/X11/XF86Config? y If the configuration fails, you can try the configuration again by selecting [ Yes ] when the following message appears: User Confirmation Requested The XFree86 configuration process seems to have failed. Would you like to try again? [ Yes ] No If you have trouble configuring XFree86, select [ No ] and press Enter and continue with the installation process. After installation you can use xf86cfg -textmode or xf86config to access the command line configuration utilities as root. There is an additional method for configuring XFree86 described in . If you choose not to configure XFree86 at this time the next menu will be for package selection. The default setting which allows the server to be killed is the hotkey sequence CtrlAlt Backspace. This can be executed if something is wrong with the server settings and prevent hardware damage. The default setting that allows video mode switching will permit changing of the mode while running X with the hotkey sequence CtrlAlt+ or CtrlAlt- . After installation, the display can be adjusted for height, width, or centering by using xvidtune after you have XFree86 running with xvidtune. There are warnings that improper settings can damage your equipment. Heed them. If in doubt, do not do it. Instead, use the monitor controls to adjust the display for X Window. There may be some display differences when switching back to text mode, but it is better than damaging equipment. Read the &man.xvidtune.1; manual page before making any adjustments. Following a successful XFree86 configuration, it will proceed to the selection of a default desktop. Select Default X Desktop There are a variety of window managers available. They range from very basic environments to full desktop environments with a large suite of software. Some require only minimal disk space and low memory while others with more features require much more. The best way to determine which is most suitable for you is to try a few different ones. Those are available from the ports collection or as packages and can be added after installation. You can select one of the popular desktops to be installed and configured as the default desktop. This will allow you to start it right after installation.
Select Default Desktop
Use the arrow keys to select a desktop and press Enter. Installation of the selected desktop will proceed. Install Packages The packages are pre-compiled binaries and are a convenient way to install software. Installation of one package is shown for purposes of illustration. Additional packages can also be added at this time if desired. After installation /stand/sysinstall can be used to add additional packages. User Confirmation Requested The FreeBSD package collection is a collection of hundreds of ready-to-run applications, from text editors to games to WEB servers and more. Would you like to browse the collection now? [ Yes ] No Selecting [ Yes ] and pressing Enter will be followed by the Package Selection screens:
Select Package Category
All packages available will be displayed if All is selected or you can select a particular category. Highlight your selection with the arrow keys and press Enter. A menu will display showing all the packages available for the selection made:
Select Packages
The bash shell is shown selected. Select as many as desired by highlighting the package and pressing the Space key. A short description of each package will appear in the lower left corner of the screen. Pressing the Tab key will toggle between the last selected package, &gui.ok;, and &gui.cancel;. When you have finished marking the packages for installation, press Tab once to toggle to the &gui.ok; and press Enter to return to the Package Selection menu. The left and right arrow keys will also toggle between &gui.ok; and &gui.cancel;. This method can also be used to select &gui.ok; and press Enter to return to the Package Selection menu.
Install Packages
Use the arrow keys to select [ Install ] and press Enter. You will then need to confirm that you want to install the packages:
Confirm Package Installation
Selecting &gui.ok; and pressing Enter will start the package installation. Installing messages will appear until completed. Make note if there are any error messages. The final configuration continues after packages are installed. Add Users/Groups You should add at least one user during the installation so that you can use the system without being logged in as root. The root partition is generally small and running applications as root can quickly fill it. A bigger danger is noted below: User Confirmation Requested Would you like to add any initial user accounts to the system? Adding at least one account for yourself at this stage is suggested since working as the "root" user is dangerous (it is easy to do things which adversely affect the entire system). [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] and press Enter to continue with adding a user.
Select User
Select User with the arrow keys and press Enter.
Add User Information
The following descriptions will appear in the lower part of the screen as the items are selected with Tab to assist with entering the required information: Login ID The login name of the new user (mandatory). UID The numerical ID for this user (leave blank for automatic choice). Group The login group name for this user (leave blank for automatic choice). Password The password for this user (enter this field with care!). Full name The user's full name (comment). Member groups The groups this user belongs to (i.e. gets access rights for). Home directory The user's home directory (leave blank for default). Login shell The user's login shell (leave blank for default, e.g. /bin/sh). The login shell was changed from /bin/sh to /usr/local/bin/bash to use the bash shell that was previously installed as a package. Do not try to use a shell that does not exist or you will not be able to login. The user was also added to the wheel group to be able to become a superuser with root privileges. When you are satisfied, press &gui.ok; and the User and Group Management menu will redisplay:
Exit User and Group Management
Groups could also be added at this time if specific needs are known. Otherwise, this may be accessed through using /stand/sysinstall after installation is completed. When you are finished adding users, select Exit with the arrow keys and press Enter to continue the installation. Set <username>root</username> Password Message Now you must set the system manager's password. This is the password you'll use to log in as "root". [ OK ] [ Press enter to continue ] Press Enter to set the root password. The password will need to be typed in twice correctly. Needless to say, make sure you have a way of finding the password if you forget. Changing local password for root. New password : Retype new password : The installation will continue after the password is successfully entered. Exiting Install If you need to configure additional network devices or to do any other configurations, you can do it at this point or after installation with /stand/sysinstall. User Confirmation Requested Visit the general configuration menu for a chance to set any last options? Yes [ No ] Select [ No ] with the arrow keys and press Enter to return to the Main Installation Menu.
Exit Install
Select [X Exit Install] with the arrow keys and press Enter. You will be asked to confirm exiting the installation: User Confirmation Requested Are you sure you wish to exit? The system will reboot (be sure to remove any floppies from the drives). [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] and remove the floppy if booting from the floppy. The CDROM drive is locked until the machine starts to reboot. The CDROM drive is then unlocked and the disk can be removed from drive (quickly). The system will reboot so watch for any error messages that may appear. FreeBSD Bootup FreeBSD Bootup on the i386 If everything went well, you will see messages scroll off the screen and you will arrive at a login prompt. You can view the content of the messages by pressing Scroll-Lock and using PgUp and PgDn. Pressing Scroll-Lock again will return to the prompt. The entire message may not display (buffer limitation) but it can be viewed from the command line after logging in by typing dmesg at the prompt. Login using the username/password you set during installation (rpratt, in this example). Avoid logging in as root except when necessary. Typical boot messages (version information omitted): Copyright (c) 1992-2002 The FreeBSD Project. Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz CPU: AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor (300.68-MHz 586-class CPU) Origin = "AuthenticAMD" Id = 0x580 Stepping = 0 Features=0x8001bf<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8,MMX> AMD Features=0x80000800<SYSCALL,3DNow!> real memory = 268435456 (262144K bytes) config> di sn0 config> di lnc0 config> di le0 config> di ie0 config> di fe0 config> di cs0 config> di bt0 config> di aic0 config> di aha0 config> di adv0 config> q avail memory = 256311296 (250304K bytes) Preloaded elf kernel "kernel" at 0xc0491000. Preloaded userconfig_script "/boot/kernel.conf" at 0xc049109c. md0: Malloc disk Using $PIR table, 4 entries at 0xc00fde60 npx0: <math processor> on motherboard npx0: INT 16 interface pcib0: <Host to PCI bridge> on motherboard pci0: <PCI bus> on pcib0 pcib1: <VIA 82C598MVP (Apollo MVP3) PCI-PCI (AGP) bridge> at device 1.0 on pci0 pci1: <PCI bus> on pcib1 pci1: <Matrox MGA G200 AGP graphics accelerator> at 0.0 irq 11 isab0: <VIA 82C586 PCI-ISA bridge> at device 7.0 on pci0 isa0: <ISA bus> on isab0 atapci0: <VIA 82C586 ATA33 controller> port 0xe000-0xe00f at device 7.1 on pci0 ata0: at 0x1f0 irq 14 on atapci0 ata1: at 0x170 irq 15 on atapci0 uhci0: <VIA 83C572 USB controller> port 0xe400-0xe41f irq 10 at device 7.2 on pci0 usb0: <VIA 83C572 USB controller> on uhci0 usb0: USB revision 1.0 uhub0: VIA UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1 uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered chip1: <VIA 82C586B ACPI interface> at device 7.3 on pci0 ed0: <NE2000 PCI Ethernet (RealTek 8029)> port 0xe800-0xe81f irq 9 at device 10.0 on pci0 ed0: address 52:54:05:de:73:1b, type NE2000 (16 bit) isa0: too many dependant configs (8) isa0: unexpected small tag 14 fdc0: <NEC 72065B or clone> at port 0x3f0-0x3f5,0x3f7 irq 6 drq 2 on isa0 fdc0: FIFO enabled, 8 bytes threshold fd0: <1440-KB 3.5" drive> on fdc0 drive 0 atkbdc0: <keyboard controller (i8042)> at port 0x60-0x64 on isa0 atkbd0: <AT Keyboard> flags 0x1 irq 1 on atkbdc0 kbd0 at atkbd0 psm0: <PS/2 Mouse> irq 12 on atkbdc0 psm0: model Generic PS/2 mouse, device ID 0 vga0: <Generic ISA VGA> at port 0x3c0-0x3df iomem 0xa0000-0xbffff on isa0 sc0: <System console> at flags 0x1 on isa0 sc0: VGA <16 virtual consoles, flags=0x300> sio0 at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on isa0 sio0: type 16550A sio1 at port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on isa0 sio1: type 16550A ppc0: <Parallel port> at port 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa0 ppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP/EPP/PS2/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode ppc0: FIFO with 16/16/15 bytes threshold ppbus0: IEEE1284 device found /NIBBLE Probing for PnP devices on ppbus0: plip0: <PLIP network interface> on ppbus0 lpt0: <Printer> on ppbus0 lpt0: Interrupt-driven port ppi0: <Parallel I/O> on ppbus0 ad0: 8063MB <IBM-DHEA-38451> [16383/16/63] at ata0-master using UDMA33 ad2: 8063MB <IBM-DHEA-38451> [16383/16/63] at ata1-master using UDMA33 acd0: CDROM <DELTA OTC-H101/ST3 F/W by OIPD> at ata0-slave using PIO4 Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a swapon: adding /dev/ad0s1b as swap device Automatic boot in progress... /dev/ad0s1a: FILESYSTEM CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS /dev/ad0s1a: clean, 48752 free (552 frags, 6025 blocks, 0.9% fragmentation) /dev/ad0s1f: FILESYSTEM CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS /dev/ad0s1f: clean, 128997 free (21 frags, 16122 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation) /dev/ad0s1g: FILESYSTEM CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS /dev/ad0s1g: clean, 3036299 free (43175 frags, 374073 blocks, 1.3% fragmentation) /dev/ad0s1e: filesystem CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS /dev/ad0s1e: clean, 128193 free (17 frags, 16022 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation) Doing initial network setup: hostname. ed0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 inet 192.168.0.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255 inet6 fe80::5054::5ff::fede:731b%ed0 prefixlen 64 tentative scopeid 0x1 ether 52:54:05:de:73:1b lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384 inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x8 inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 Additional routing options: IP gateway=YES TCP keepalive=YES routing daemons:. additional daemons: syslogd. Doing additional network setup:. Starting final network daemons: creating ssh RSA host key Generating public/private rsa1 key pair. Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key. Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key.pub. The key fingerprint is: cd:76:89:16:69:0e:d0:6e:f8:66:d0:07:26:3c:7e:2d root@k6-2.example.com creating ssh DSA host key Generating public/private dsa key pair. Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key. Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub. The key fingerprint is: f9:a1:a9:47:c4:ad:f9:8d:52:b8:b8:ff:8c:ad:2d:e6 root@k6-2.example.com. setting ELF ldconfig path: /usr/lib /usr/lib/compat /usr/X11R6/lib /usr/local/lib a.out ldconfig path: /usr/lib/aout /usr/lib/compat/aout /usr/X11R6/lib/aout starting standard daemons: inetd cron sshd usbd sendmail. Initial rc.i386 initialization:. rc.i386 configuring syscons: blank_time screensaver moused. Additional ABI support: linux. -Local package initilization:. +Local package initialization:. Additional TCP options:. FreeBSD/i386 (k6-2.example.com) (ttyv0) login: rpratt Password: Generating the RSA and DSA keys may take some time on slower machines. This happens only on the initial boot-up of a new installation. Subsequent boots will be faster. If the X server has been configured and a Default Desktop chosen, it can be started by typing startx at the command line. Bootup of FreeBSD on the Alpha Alpha Once the install procedure has finished, you will be able to start FreeBSD by typing something like this to the SRM prompt: >>>BOOT DKC0 This instructs the firmware to boot the specified disk. To make FreeBSD boot automatically in the future, use these commands: >>> SET BOOT_OSFLAGS A >>> SET BOOT_FILE '' >>> SET BOOTDEF_DEV DKC0 >>> SET AUTO_ACTION BOOT The boot messages will be similar (but not identical) to those produced by FreeBSD booting on the i386. FreeBSD Shutdown It is important to properly shutdown the operating system. Do not just turn off power. First, become a superuser by typing su at the command line and entering the root password. This will work only if the user is a member of the wheel group. Otherwise, login as root and use shutdown -h now. The operating system has halted. Please press any key to reboot. It is safe to turn off the power after the shutdown command has been issued and the message Please press any key to reboot appears. If any key is pressed instead of turning off the power switch, the system will reboot. You could also use the Ctrl Alt Del key combination to reboot the system, however this is not recommended during normal operation. Supported Hardware hardware FreeBSD currently runs on a wide variety of ISA, VLB, EISA, and PCI bus-based PCs with Intel, AMD, Cyrix, or NexGen x86 processors, as well as a number of machines based on the Compaq Alpha processor. Support for generic IDE or ESDI drive configurations, various SCSI controllers, PCMCIA cards, USB devices, and network and serial cards is also provided. FreeBSD also supports IBM's microchannel (MCA) bus. A list of supported hardware is provided with each FreeBSD release in the FreeBSD Hardware Notes. This document can usually be found in a file named HARDWARE.TXT, in the top-level directory of a CDROM or FTP distribution or in sysinstall's documentation menu. It lists, for a given architecture, what hardware devices are known to be supported by each release of FreeBSD. Copies of the supported hardware list for various releases and architectures can also be found on the Release Information page of the FreeBSD Web site. Troubleshooting installation troubleshooting The following section covers basic installation troubleshooting, such as common problems people have reported. There are also a few questions and answers for people wishing to dual-boot FreeBSD with MS-DOS. What to Do If Something Goes Wrong Due to various limitations of the PC architecture, it is impossible for probing to be 100% reliable, however, there are a few things you can do if it fails. Check the Hardware Notes document for your version of FreeBSD to make sure your hardware is supported. If your hardware is supported and you still experience lock-ups or other problems, reset your computer, and when the visual kernel configuration option is given, choose it. This will allow you to go through your hardware and supply information to the system about it. The kernel on the boot disks is configured assuming that most hardware devices are in their factory default configuration in terms of IRQs, IO addresses, and DMA channels. If your hardware has been reconfigured, you will most likely need to use the configuration editor to tell FreeBSD where to find things. It is also possible that a probe for a device not present will cause a later probe for another device that is present to fail. In that case, the probes for the conflicting driver(s) should be disabled. Some installation problems can be avoided or alleviated by updating the firmware on various hardware components, most notably the motherboard. The motherboard firmware may also be referred to as BIOS and most of the motherboard or computer manufactures have a website where the upgrades and upgrade information may be located. Most manufacturers strongly advise against upgrading the motherboard BIOS unless there is a good reason for doing so, which could possibly be a critical update of sorts. The upgrade process can go wrong, causing permanent damage to the BIOS chip. Do not disable any drivers you will need during the installation, such as your screen (sc0). If the installation wedges or fails mysteriously after leaving the configuration editor, you have probably removed or changed something you should not have. Reboot and try again. In configuration mode, you can: List the device drivers installed in the kernel. Disable device drivers for hardware that is not present in your system. Change IRQs, DRQs, and IO port addresses used by a device driver. After adjusting the kernel to match your hardware configuration, type Q to boot with the new settings. Once the installation has completed, any changes you made in the configuration mode will be permanent so you do not have to reconfigure every time you boot. It is still highly likely that you will eventually want to build a custom kernel. MS-DOS User's Questions and Answers DOS Many users wish to install FreeBSD on PCs inhabited by MS-DOS. Here are some commonly asked questions about installing FreeBSD on such systems: Help, I have no space! Do I need to delete everything first? If your machine is already running MS-DOS and has little or no free space available for the FreeBSD installation, all hope is not lost! You may find the FIPS utility, provided in the tools directory on the FreeBSD CDROM or various FreeBSD FTP sites to be quite useful. FIPS FIPS allows you to split an existing MS-DOS partition into two pieces, preserving the original partition and allowing you to install onto the second free piece. You first defragment your MS-DOS partition using the Windows DEFRAG utility (go into Explorer, right-click on the hard drive, and choose to defrag your hard drive), or Norton Disk Tools. You then must run FIPS. It will prompt you for the rest of the information it needs. Afterwards, you can reboot and install FreeBSD on the new free slice. See the Distributions menu for an estimate of how much free space you will need for the kind of installation you want. Partition Magic There is also a very useful product from PowerQuest called Partition Magic. This application has far more functionality than FIPS, and is highly recommended if you plan to often add/remove operating systems (like me). However, it does cost money, and if you plan to install FreeBSD once and then leave it there, FIPS will probably be fine for you. Can I use compressed MS-DOS filesystems from FreeBSD? No. If you are using a utility such as Stacker or DoubleSpace, FreeBSD will only be able to use whatever portion of the filesystem you leave uncompressed. The rest of the filesystem will show up as one large file (the stacked/double spaced file!). Do not remove that file or you will probably regret it greatly! It is probably better to create another uncompressed primary MS-DOS partition and use this for communications between MS-DOS and FreeBSD. Can I mount my extended MS-DOS partition? partitions slices Yes. DOS extended partitions are mapped in at the end of the other slices in FreeBSD, e.g., your D: drive might be /dev/da0s5, your E: drive, /dev/da0s6, and so on. This example assumes, of course, that your extended partition is on SCSI drive 0. For IDE drives, substitute ad for da appropriately if installing 4.0-RELEASE or later, and substitute wd for da if you are installing a version of FreeBSD prior to 4.0. You otherwise mount extended partitions exactly like you would any other DOS drive, for example: &prompt.root; mount -t msdos /dev/ad0s5 /dos_d Alpha User's Questions and Answers Alpha This section answers some commonly asked questions about installing FreeBSD on Alpha systems. Can I boot from the ARC or Alpha BIOS Console? ARC Alpha BIOS SRM No. &os;, like Compaq Tru64 and VMS, will only boot from the SRM console. Help, I have no space! Do I need to delete everything first? Unfortunately, yes. Can I mount my Compaq Tru64 or VMS filesystems? No, not at this time. Valentino Vaschetto Contributed by Advanced Installation Guide This section describes how to install FreeBSD in exceptional cases. Installing FreeBSD on a System without a Monitor or Keyboard installation headless (serial console) serial console This type of installation is called a headless install, because the machine that you are trying to install FreeBSD on either does not have a monitor attached to it, or does not even have a VGA output. How is this possible you ask? Using a serial console. A serial console is basically using another machine to act as the main display and keyboard for a system. To do this, just follow these steps: Fetch the Right Boot Floppy Images First you will need to get the right disk images so that you can boot into the install program. The secret with using a serial console is that you tell the boot loader to send I/O through a serial port instead of displaying console output to the VGA device and trying to read input from a local keyboard. Enough of that now, let's get back to getting these disk images. You will need to get kern.flp and mfsroot.flp from the floppies directory. Write the Image Files to the Floppy Disks The image files, such as kern.flp, are not regular files that you copy to the disk. Instead, they are images of the complete contents of the disk. This means that you can not use commands like DOS' copy to write the files. Instead, you must use specific tools to write the images directly to the disk. fdimage If you are creating the floppies on a computer running DOS then we provide a tool to do this called fdimage. If you are using the floppies from the CDROM, and your CDROM is the E: drive then you would run this: E:\> tools\fdimage floppies\kern.flp A: Repeat this command for each .flp file, replacing the floppy disk each time. Adjust the command line as necessary, depending on where you have placed the .flp files. If you do not have the CDROM then fdimage can be downloaded from the tools directory on the FreeBSD FTP site. If you are writing the floppies on a Unix system (such as another FreeBSD system) you can use the &man.dd.1; command to write the image files directly to disk. On FreeBSD you would run: &prompt.root; dd if=kern.flp of=/dev/fd0 On FreeBSD /dev/fd0 refers to the first floppy disk (the A: drive). /dev/fd1 would be the B: drive, and so on. Other Unix variants might have different names for the floppy disk devices, and you will need to check the documentation for the system as necessary. Enabling the Boot Floppies to Boot into a Serial Console Do not try to mount the floppy if it is write-protected. mount If you were to boot into the floppies that you just made, FreeBSD would boot into its normal install mode. We want FreeBSD to boot into a serial console for our install. To do this, you have to mount the kern.flp floppy onto your FreeBSD system using the &man.mount.8; command. &prompt.root; mount /dev/fd0 /mnt Now that you have the floppy mounted, you must change into the floppy directory: &prompt.root; cd /mnt Here is where you must set the floppy to boot into a serial console. You have to make a file called boot.config containing /boot/loader -h. All this does is pass a flag to the bootloader to boot into a serial console. &prompt.root; echo "/boot/loader -h" > boot.config Now that you have your floppy configured correctly, you must unmount the floppy using the &man.umount.8; command: &prompt.root; cd / &prompt.root; umount /mnt Now you can remove the floppy from the floppy drive. Connecting Your Null Modem Cable null modem cable You now need to connect a null modem cable between the two machines. Just connect the cable to the serial ports of the 2 machines. A normal serial cable will not work here, you need a null modem cable because it has some of the wires inside crossed over. Booting Up for the Install It is now time to go ahead and start the install. Put the kern.flp floppy in the floppy drive of the machine you are doing the headless install on, and power on the machine. Connecting to Your Headless Machine cu Now you have to connect to that machine with &man.cu.1;: &prompt.root; cu -l /dev/cuaa0 That's it! You should be able to control the headless machine through your cu session now. It will ask you to put in the mfsroot.flp, and then it will come up with a selection of what kind of terminal to use. Just select the FreeBSD color console and proceed with your install! Preparing Your Own Installation Media To prevent repetition, FreeBSD disk in this context means a FreeBSD CDROM or DVD that you have purchased, or produced yourself. There may be some situations in which you need to create your own FreeBSD installation media and/or source. This might be physical media, such as a tape, or a source that sysinstall can use to retrieve the files, such as a local FTP site, or an MS-DOS partition. For example: You have many machines connected to your local network, and one FreeBSD disk. You want to create a local FTP site using the contents of the FreeBSD disk, and then have your machines use this local FTP site instead of needing to connect to the Internet. You have a FreeBSD disk, FreeBSD does not recognize your CD/DVD drive, but DOS/Windows does. You want to copy the FreeBSD installations files to a DOS partition on the same computer, and then install FreeBSD using those files. The computer you want to install on does not have a CD/DVD drive, or a network card, but you can connect a Laplink-style serial or parallel cable to a computer that does. You want to create a tape that can be used to install FreeBSD. Creating an installation CDROM As part of each release, the FreeBSD project makes available five CDROM images (ISO images). These images can be written (burned) to CDs if you have a CD writer, and then used to install FreeBSD. If you have a CD writer, and bandwidth is cheap, then this is the easiest way to install FreeBSD. Download the correct ISO images The ISO images for each release can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-arch/version or the closest mirror. Substitute arch and version as appropriate. That directory will normally contain the following images: FreeBSD ISO image names and meanings Filename Contains version-mini.iso Everything you need to install FreeBSD. version-disc1.iso Everything you need to install FreeBSD, and as many additional third party packages as would fit on the disc. version-disc2.iso A live filesystem, which is used in conjunction with the Repair facility in sysinstall. A copy of the FreeBSD CVS tree. As many additional third party packages as would fit on the disc. version-disc3.iso As many additional third party packages as would fit on the disc. version-disc4.iso As many additional third party packages as would fit on the disc.
The mini ISO was only produced for FreeBSD 4.4 and subsequent releases. The images for discs two, three, and four were only produced for FreeBSD 4.5 and subsequent releases. You must download one of either the mini ISO image, or the image of disc one. Do not download both of them, since the disc one image contains everything that the mini ISO image contains. Use the mini ISO if Internet access is cheap for you. It will let you install FreeBSD, and you can then install third party packages by downloading them using the ports/packages system (see ) as necessary. Use the image of disc one if you want a reasonable selection of third party packages on the disc as well. The additional disc images are useful, but not essential, especially if you have high-speed access to the Internet. Write the CDs You must then write the CD images to disc. If you will be doing this on another FreeBSD system then see for more information (in particular, and ). If you will be doing this on another platform then you will need to use whatever utilities exist to control your CD writer on that platform. Creating a Local FTP Site with a FreeBSD Disk installation network FTP FreeBSD disks are laid out in the same way as the FTP site. This makes it very easy for you to create a local FTP site that can be used by other machines on your network when installing FreeBSD. On the FreeBSD computer that will host the FTP site, ensure that the CDROM is in the drive, and mounted on /cdrom. &prompt.root; mount /cdrom Create an account for anonymous FTP in /etc/passwd. Do this by editing /etc/passwd using &man.vipw.8; and adding this line. ftp:*:99:99::0:0:FTP:/cdrom:/nonexistent Ensure that the FTP service is enabled in /etc/inetd.conf. Anyone with network connectivity to your machine can now chose a media type of FTP and type in ftp://your machine after picking Other in the FTP sites menu during the install. This approach is OK for a machine that is on your local network, and that is protected by your firewall. Offering up FTP services to other machines over the Internet (and not your local network) exposes your computer to the attention of crackers and other undesirables. We strongly recommend that you follow good security practices if you do this. Creating Installation Floppies installation floppies If you must install from floppy disk (which we suggest you do not do), either due to unsupported hardware or simply because you insist on doing things the hard way, you must first prepare some floppies for the installation. At a minimum, you will need as many 1.44 MB or 1.2 MB floppies as it takes to hold all the files in the bin (binary distribution) directory. If you are preparing the floppies from DOS, then they MUST be formatted using the MS-DOS FORMAT command. If you are using Windows, use Explorer to format the disks (right-click on the A: drive, and select Format. Do not trust factory pre-formatted floppies. Format them again yourself, just to be sure. Many problems reported by our users in the past have resulted from the use of improperly formatted media, which is why we are making a point of it now. If you are creating the floppies on another FreeBSD machine, a format is still not a bad idea, though you do not need to put a DOS filesystem on each floppy. You can use the disklabel and newfs commands to put a UFS filesystem on them instead, as the following sequence of commands (for a 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy) illustrates: &prompt.root; fdformat -f 1440 fd0.1440 &prompt.root; disklabel -w -r fd0.1440 floppy3 &prompt.root; newfs -t 2 -u 18 -l 1 -i 65536 /dev/fd0 Use fd0.1200 and floppy5 for 5.25" 1.2 MB disks. Then you can mount and write to them like any other filesystem. After you have formatted the floppies, you will need to copy the files to them. The distribution files are split into chunks conveniently sized so that 5 of them will fit on a conventional 1.44 MB floppy. Go through all your floppies, packing as many files as will fit on each one, until you have all of the distributions you want packed up in this fashion. Each distribution should go into a subdirectory on the floppy, e.g.: a:\bin\bin.aa, a:\bin\bin.ab, and so on. Once you come to the Media screen during the install process, select Floppy and you will be prompted for the rest. Installing from an MS-DOS Partition installation from MS-DOS To prepare for an installation from an MS-DOS partition, copy the files from the distribution into a directory called freebsd in the root directory of the partition. For example, c:\freebsd. The directory structure of the CDROM or FTP site must be partially reproduced within this directory, so we suggest using the DOS xcopy command if you are copying it from a CD. For example, to prepare for a minimal installation of FreeBSD: C:\> md c:\freebsd C:\> xcopy e:\bin c:\freebsd\bin\ /s C:\> xcopy e:\manpages c:\freebsd\manpages\ /s Assuming that C: is where you have free space and E: is where your CDROM is mounted. If you do not have a CDROM drive, you can download the distribution from ftp.FreeBSD.org. Each distribution is in its own directory; for example, the base distribution can be found in the &rel.current;/base/ directory. In the 4.X and older releases of &os; the base distribution is called bin. Adjust the sample commands and URLs above accordingly, if you are using one of these versions. For as many distributions you wish to install from an MS-DOS partition (and you have the free space for), install each one under c:\freebsd — the BIN distribution is the only one required for a minimum installation. Creating an Installation Tape installation from QIC/SCSI Tape Installing from tape is probably the easiest method, short of an online FTP install or CDROM install. The installation program expects the files to be simply tarred onto the tape. After getting all of the distribution files you are interested in, simply tar them onto the tape: &prompt.root; cd /freebsd/distdir &prompt.root; tar cvf /dev/rwt0 dist1 ... dist2 When you go to do the installation, you should also make sure that you leave enough room in some temporary directory (which you will be allowed to choose) to accommodate the full contents of the tape you have created. Due to the non-random access nature of tapes, this method of installation requires quite a bit of temporary storage. You should expect to require as much temporary storage as you have stuff written on tape. When starting the installation, the tape must be in the drive before booting from the boot floppy. The installation probe may otherwise fail to find it. Before Installing over a Network installation network serial (SLIP or PPP) installation network parallel (PLIP) installation network Ethernet There are three types of network installations you can do. Serial port (SLIP or PPP), Parallel port (PLIP (laplink cable)), or Ethernet (a standard Ethernet controller (includes some PCMCIA)). The SLIP support is rather primitive, and limited primarily to hard-wired links, such as a serial cable running between a laptop computer and another computer. The link should be hard-wired as the SLIP installation does not currently offer a dialing capability; that facility is provided with the PPP utility, which should be used in preference to SLIP whenever possible. If you are using a modem, then PPP is almost certainly your only choice. Make sure that you have your service provider's information handy as you will need to know it fairly early in the installation process. If you use PAP or CHAP to connect your ISP (in other words, if you can connect to the ISP in Windows without using a script), then all you will need to do is type in dial at the ppp prompt. Otherwise, you will need to know how to dial your ISP using the AT commands specific to your modem, as the PPP dialer provides only a very simple terminal emulator. Please refer to the user-ppp handbook and FAQ entries for further information. If you have problems, logging can be directed to the screen using the command set log local .... If a hard-wired connection to another FreeBSD (2.0-R or later) machine is available, you might also consider installing over a laplink parallel port cable. The data rate over the parallel port is much higher than what is typically possible over a serial line (up to 50 kbytes/sec), thus resulting in a quicker installation. Finally, for the fastest possible network installation, an Ethernet adapter is always a good choice! FreeBSD supports most common PC Ethernet cards; a table of supported cards (and their required settings) is provided in the Hardware Notes for each release of FreeBSD. If you are using one of the supported PCMCIA Ethernet cards, also be sure that it is plugged in before the laptop is powered on! FreeBSD does not, unfortunately, currently support hot insertion of PCMCIA cards during installation. You will also need to know your IP address on the network, the netmask value for your address class, and the name of your machine. If you are installing over a PPP connection and do not have a static IP, fear not, the IP address can be dynamically assigned by your ISP. Your system administrator can tell you which values to use for your particular network setup. If you will be referring to other hosts by name rather than IP address, you will also need a name server and possibly the address of a gateway (if you are using PPP, it is your provider's IP address) to use in talking to it. If you want to install by FTP via a HTTP proxy (see below), you will also need the proxy's address. If you do not know the answers to all or most of these questions, then you should really probably talk to your system administrator or ISP before trying this type of installation. Before Installing via NFS installation network NFS The NFS installation is fairly straight-forward. Simply copy the FreeBSD distribution files you want onto a server somewhere and then point the NFS media selection at it. If this server supports only privileged port (as is generally the default for Sun workstations), you will need to set this option in the Options menu before installation can proceed. If you have a poor quality Ethernet card which suffers from very slow transfer rates, you may also wish to toggle the appropriate Options flag. In order for NFS installation to work, the server must support subdir mounts, e.g., if your FreeBSD 3.4 distribution directory lives on: ziggy:/usr/archive/stuff/FreeBSD, then ziggy will have to allow the direct mounting of /usr/archive/stuff/FreeBSD, not just /usr or /usr/archive/stuff. In FreeBSD's /etc/exports file, this is controlled by the . Other NFS servers may have different conventions. If you are getting permission denied messages from the server, then it is likely that you do not have this enabled properly. diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/vinum/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/vinum/chapter.sgml index eea2528198..86e417a29a 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/vinum/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/vinum/chapter.sgml @@ -1,1453 +1,1453 @@ The Vinum Volume Manager Synopsis No matter what disks you have, there will always be limitations: They can be too small. They can be too slow. They can be too unreliable. Greg Lehey Originally written by Disks Are Too Small Vinum RAID Software Vinum is a so-called Volume Manager, a virtual disk driver that addresses these three problems. Let us look at them in more detail. Various solutions to these problems have been proposed and implemented: Disks are getting bigger, but so are data storage requirements. Often you will find you want a file system that is bigger than the disks you have available. Admittedly, this problem is not as acute as it was ten years ago, but it still exists. Some systems have solved this by creating an abstract device which stores its data on a number of disks. Access Bottlenecks Modern systems frequently need to access data in a highly concurrent manner. For example, large FTP or HTTP servers can maintain thousands of concurrent sessions and have multiple 100 Mbit/s connections to the outside world, well beyond the sustained transfer rate of most disks. Current disk drives can transfer data sequentially at up to 70 MB/s, but this value is of little importance in an environment where many independent processes access a drive, where they may achieve only a fraction of these values. In such cases it is more interesting to view the problem from the viewpoint of the disk subsystem: the important parameter is the load that a transfer places on the subsystem, in other words the time for which a transfer occupies the drives involved in the transfer. In any disk transfer, the drive must first position the heads, wait for the first sector to pass under the read head, and then perform the transfer. These actions can be considered to be atomic: it does not make any sense to interrupt them. Consider a typical transfer of about 10 kB: the current generation of high-performance disks can position the heads in an average of 3.5 ms. The fastest drives spin at 15,000 rpm, so the average rotational latency (half a revolution) is 2 ms. At 70 MB/s, the transfer itself takes about 150 μs, almost nothing compared to the positioning time. In such a case, the effective transfer rate drops to a little over 1 MB/s and is clearly highly dependent on the transfer size. The traditional and obvious solution to this bottleneck is more spindles: rather than using one large disk, it uses several smaller disks with the same aggregate storage space. Each disk is capable of positioning and transferring independently, so the effective throughput increases by a factor close to the number of disks used. The exact throughput improvement is, of course, smaller than the number of disks involved: although each drive is capable of transferring in parallel, there is no way to ensure that the requests are evenly distributed across the drives. Inevitably the load on one drive will be higher than on another. disk concatenation Vinum concatenation The evenness of the load on the disks is strongly dependent on the way the data is shared across the drives. In the following discussion, it is convenient to think of the disk storage as a large number of data sectors which are addressable by number, rather like the pages in a book. The most obvious method is to divide the virtual disk into groups of consecutive sectors the size of the individual physical disks and store them in this manner, rather like taking a large book and tearing it into smaller sections. This method is called concatenation and has the advantage that the disks are not required to have any specific size relationships. It works well when the access to the virtual disk is spread evenly about its address space. When access is concentrated on a smaller area, the improvement is less marked. illustrates the sequence in which storage units are allocated in a concatenated organization.
Concatenated Organization
disk striping Vinum striping An alternative mapping is to divide the address space into smaller, equal-sized components and store them sequentially on different devices. For example, the first 256 sectors may be stored on the first disk, the next 256 sectors on the next disk and so on. After filling the last disk, the process repeats until the disks are full. This mapping is called striping or RAID-0 RAID RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks and offers various forms of fault tolerance, though the latter term is somewhat misleading: it provides no redundancy. . Striping requires somewhat more effort to locate the data, and it can cause additional I/O load where a transfer is spread over multiple disks, but it can also provide a more constant load across the disks. illustrates the sequence in which storage units are allocated in a striped organization.
Striped Organization
Data Integrity The final problem with current disks is that they are unreliable. Although disk drive reliability has increased tremendously over the last few years, they are still the most likely core component of a server to fail. When they do, the results can be catastrophic: replacing a failed disk drive and restoring data to it can take days. disk mirroring Vinum mirroring RAID-1 The traditional way to approach this problem has been mirroring, keeping two copies of the data on different physical hardware. Since the advent of the RAID levels, this technique has also been called RAID level 1 or RAID-1. Any write to the volume writes to both locations; a read can be satisfied from either, so if one drive fails, the data is still available on the other drive. Mirroring has two problems: The price. It requires twice as much disk storage as a non-redundant solution. The performance impact. Writes must be performed to both drives, so they take up twice the bandwidth of a non-mirrored volume. Reads do not suffer from a performance penalty: it even looks as if they are faster. RAID-5An alternative solution is parity, implemented in the RAID levels 2, 3, 4 and 5. Of these, RAID-5 is the most interesting. As implemented in Vinum, it is a variant on a striped organization which dedicates one block of each stripe to parity of the other blocks. As implemented by Vinum, a RAID-5 plex is similar to a striped plex, except that it implements RAID-5 by including a parity block in each stripe. As required by RAID-5, the location of this parity block changes from one stripe to the next. The numbers in the data blocks indicate the relative block numbers.
RAID-5 Organization
Compared to mirroring, RAID-5 has the advantage of requiring significantly less storage space. Read access is similar to that of striped organizations, but write access is significantly slower, approximately 25% of the read performance. If one drive fails, the array can continue to operate in degraded mode: a read from one of the remaining accessible drives continues normally, but a read from the failed drive is recalculated from the corresponding block from all the remaining drives. Vinum Objects In order to address these problems, Vinum implements a four-level hierarchy of objects: The most visible object is the virtual disk, called a volume. Volumes have essentially the same properties as a UNIX™ disk drive, though there are some minor differences. They have no size limitations. Volumes are composed of plexes, each of which represent the total address space of a volume. This level in the hierarchy thus provides redundancy. Think of plexes as individual disks in a mirrored array, each containing the same data. Since Vinum exists within the UNIX™ disk storage framework, it would be possible to use UNIX™ partitions as the building block for multi-disk plexes, but in fact this turns out to be too inflexible: UNIX™ disks can have only a limited number of partitions. Instead, Vinum subdivides a single UNIX™ partition (the drive) into contiguous areas called subdisks, which it uses as building blocks for plexes. Subdisks reside on Vinum drives, currently UNIX™ partitions. Vinum drives can contain any number of subdisks. With the exception of a small area at the beginning of the drive, which is used for storing configuration and state information, the entire drive is available for data storage. The following sections describe the way these objects provide the functionality required of Vinum. Volume Size Considerations Plexes can include multiple subdisks spread over all drives in the Vinum configuration. As a result, the size of an individual drive does not limit the size of a plex, and thus of a volume. Redundant Data Storage Vinum implements mirroring by attaching multiple plexes to a volume. Each plex is a representation of the data in a volume. A volume may contain between one and eight plexes. Although a plex represents the complete data of a volume, it is possible for parts of the representation to be physically missing, either by design (by not defining a subdisk for parts of the plex) or by accident (as a result of the failure of a drive). As long as at least one plex can provide the data for the complete address range of the volume, the volume is fully functional. Performance Issues Vinum implements both concatenation and striping at the plex level: A concatenated plex uses the address space of each subdisk in turn. A striped plex stripes the data across each subdisk. The subdisks must all have the same size, and there must be at least two subdisks in order to distinguish it from a concatenated plex. Which Plex Organization? The version of Vinum supplied with FreeBSD &rel.current; implements two kinds of plex: Concatenated plexes are the most flexible: they can contain any number of subdisks, and the subdisks may be of different length. The plex may be extended by adding additional subdisks. They require less CPU time than striped plexes, though the difference in CPU overhead is not measurable. On the other hand, they are most susceptible to hot spots, where one disk is very active and others are idle. The greatest advantage of striped (RAID-0) plexes is that they reduce hot spots: by choosing an optimum sized stripe (about 256 kB), you can even out the load on the component drives. The disadvantages of this approach are (fractionally) more complex code and restrictions on subdisks: they must be all the same size, and extending a plex by adding new subdisks is so complicated that Vinum currently does not implement it. Vinum imposes an additional, trivial restriction: a striped plex must have at least two subdisks, since otherwise it is indistinguishable from a concatenated plex. summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of each plex organization. Vinum Plex Organizations Plex type Minimum subdisks Can add subdisks Must be equal size Application concatenated 1 yes no Large data storage with maximum placement flexibility and moderate performance striped 2 no yes High performance in combination with highly concurrent access
Some Examples Vinum maintains a configuration database which describes the objects known to an individual system. Initially, the user creates the configuration database from one or more configuration files with the aid of the &man.vinum.8; utility program. Vinum stores a copy of its configuration database on each disk slice (which Vinum calls a device) under its control. This database is updated on each state change, so that a restart accurately restores the state of each Vinum object. The Configuration File The configuration file describes individual Vinum objects. The definition of a simple volume might be: drive a device /dev/da3h volume myvol plex org concat sd length 512m drive a This file describes four Vinum objects: The drive line describes a disk partition (drive) and its location relative to the underlying hardware. It is given the symbolic name a. This separation of the symbolic names from the device names allows disks to be moved from one location to another without confusion. The volume line describes a volume. The only required attribute is the name, in this case myvol. The plex line defines a plex. The only required parameter is the organization, in this case concat. No name is necessary: the system automatically generates a name from the volume name by adding the suffix .px, where x is the number of the plex in the volume. Thus this plex will be called myvol.p0. The sd line describes a subdisk. The minimum specifications are the name of a drive on which to store it, and the length of the subdisk. As with plexes, no name is necessary: the system automatically assigns names derived from the plex name by adding the suffix .sx, where x is the number of the subdisk in the plex. Thus Vinum gives this subdisk the name myvol.p0.s0. After processing this file, &man.vinum.8; produces the following output: &prompt.root; vinum -> create config1 Configuration summary Drives: 1 (4 configured) Volumes: 1 (4 configured) Plexes: 1 (8 configured) Subdisks: 1 (16 configured) D a State: up Device /dev/da3h Avail: 2061/2573 MB (80%) V myvol State: up Plexes: 1 Size: 512 MB P myvol.p0 C State: up Subdisks: 1 Size: 512 MB S myvol.p0.s0 State: up PO: 0 B Size: 512 MB This output shows the brief listing format of &man.vinum.8;. It is represented graphically in .
A Simple Vinum Volume
This figure, and the ones which follow, represent a volume, which contains the plexes, which in turn contain the subdisks. In this trivial example, the volume contains one plex, and the plex contains one subdisk. This particular volume has no specific advantage over a conventional disk partition. It contains a single plex, so it is not redundant. The plex contains a single subdisk, so there is no difference in storage allocation from a conventional disk partition. The following sections illustrate various more interesting configuration methods. Increased Resilience: Mirroring The resilience of a volume can be increased by mirroring. When laying out a mirrored volume, it is important to ensure that the subdisks of each plex are on different drives, so that a drive failure will not take down both plexes. The following configuration mirrors a volume: drive b device /dev/da4h volume mirror plex org concat sd length 512m drive a plex org concat sd length 512m drive b In this example, it was not necessary to specify a definition of drive a again, since Vinum keeps track of all objects in its configuration database. After processing this definition, the configuration looks like: Drives: 2 (4 configured) Volumes: 2 (4 configured) Plexes: 3 (8 configured) Subdisks: 3 (16 configured) D a State: up Device /dev/da3h Avail: 1549/2573 MB (60%) D b State: up Device /dev/da4h Avail: 2061/2573 MB (80%) V myvol State: up Plexes: 1 Size: 512 MB V mirror State: up Plexes: 2 Size: 512 MB P myvol.p0 C State: up Subdisks: 1 Size: 512 MB P mirror.p0 C State: up Subdisks: 1 Size: 512 MB P mirror.p1 C State: initializing Subdisks: 1 Size: 512 MB S myvol.p0.s0 State: up PO: 0 B Size: 512 MB S mirror.p0.s0 State: up PO: 0 B Size: 512 MB S mirror.p1.s0 State: empty PO: 0 B Size: 512 MB shows the structure graphically.
A Mirrored Vinum Volume
In this example, each plex contains the full 512 MB of address space. As in the previous example, each plex contains only a single subdisk. Optimizing Performance The mirrored volume in the previous example is more resistant to failure than an unmirrored volume, but its performance is less: each write to the volume requires a write to both drives, using up a greater proportion of the total disk bandwidth. Performance considerations demand a different approach: instead of mirroring, the data is striped across as many disk drives as possible. The following configuration shows a volume with a plex striped across four disk drives: drive c device /dev/da5h drive d device /dev/da6h volume stripe plex org striped 512k sd length 128m drive a sd length 128m drive b sd length 128m drive c sd length 128m drive d As before, it is not necessary to define the drives which are already known to Vinum. After processing this definition, the configuration looks like: Drives: 4 (4 configured) Volumes: 3 (4 configured) Plexes: 4 (8 configured) Subdisks: 7 (16 configured) D a State: up Device /dev/da3h Avail: 1421/2573 MB (55%) D b State: up Device /dev/da4h Avail: 1933/2573 MB (75%) D c State: up Device /dev/da5h Avail: 2445/2573 MB (95%) D d State: up Device /dev/da6h Avail: 2445/2573 MB (95%) V myvol State: up Plexes: 1 Size: 512 MB V mirror State: up Plexes: 2 Size: 512 MB V striped State: up Plexes: 1 Size: 512 MB P myvol.p0 C State: up Subdisks: 1 Size: 512 MB P mirror.p0 C State: up Subdisks: 1 Size: 512 MB P mirror.p1 C State: initializing Subdisks: 1 Size: 512 MB P striped.p1 State: up Subdisks: 1 Size: 512 MB S myvol.p0.s0 State: up PO: 0 B Size: 512 MB S mirror.p0.s0 State: up PO: 0 B Size: 512 MB S mirror.p1.s0 State: empty PO: 0 B Size: 512 MB S striped.p0.s0 State: up PO: 0 B Size: 128 MB S striped.p0.s1 State: up PO: 512 kB Size: 128 MB S striped.p0.s2 State: up PO: 1024 kB Size: 128 MB S striped.p0.s3 State: up PO: 1536 kB Size: 128 MB
A Striped Vinum Volume
This volume is represented in . The darkness of the stripes indicates the position within the plex address space: the lightest stripes come first, the darkest last. Resilience and Performance With sufficient hardware, it is possible to build volumes which show both increased resilience and increased performance compared to standard UNIX™ partitions. A typical configuration file might be: volume raid10 plex org striped 512k sd length 102480k drive a sd length 102480k drive b sd length 102480k drive c sd length 102480k drive d sd length 102480k drive e plex org striped 512k sd length 102480k drive c sd length 102480k drive d sd length 102480k drive e sd length 102480k drive a sd length 102480k drive b The subdisks of the second plex are offset by two drives from those of the first plex: this helps ensure that writes do not go to the same subdisks even if a transfer goes over two drives. represents the structure of this volume.
A Mirrored, Striped Vinum Volume
Object Naming As described above, Vinum assigns default names to plexes and subdisks, although they may be overridden. Overriding the default names is not recommended: experience with the VERITAS volume manager, which allows arbitrary naming of objects, has shown that this flexibility does not bring a significant advantage, and it can cause confusion. Names may contain any non-blank character, but it is recommended to restrict them to letters, digits and the underscore characters. The names of volumes, plexes and subdisks may be up to 64 characters long, and the names of drives may be up to 32 characters long. Vinum objects are assigned device nodes in the hierarchy /dev/vinum. The configuration shown above would cause Vinum to create the following device nodes: The control devices /dev/vinum/control and /dev/vinum/controld, which are used by &man.vinum.8; and the Vinum daemon respectively. Block and character device entries for each volume. These are the main devices used by Vinum. The block device names are the name of the volume, while the character device names follow the BSD tradition of prepending the letter r to the name. Thus the configuration above would include the block devices /dev/vinum/myvol, /dev/vinum/mirror, /dev/vinum/striped, /dev/vinum/raid5 and /dev/vinum/raid10, and the character devices /dev/vinum/rmyvol, /dev/vinum/rmirror, /dev/vinum/rstriped, /dev/vinum/rraid5 and /dev/vinum/rraid10. There is obviously a problem here: it is possible to have two volumes called r and rr, but there will be a conflict creating the device node /dev/vinum/rr: is it a character device for volume r or a block device for volume rr? Currently Vinum does not address this conflict: the first-defined volume will get the name. A directory /dev/vinum/drive with entries for each drive. These entries are in fact symbolic links to the corresponding disk nodes. A directory /dev/vinum/volume with entries for each volume. It contains subdirectories for each plex, which in turn contain subdirectories for their component subdisks. The directories /dev/vinum/plex, /dev/vinum/sd, and /dev/vinum/rsd, which contain block device nodes for each plex and block and character device nodes respectively for each subdisk. For example, consider the following configuration file: drive drive1 device /dev/sd1h drive drive2 device /dev/sd2h drive drive3 device /dev/sd3h drive drive4 device /dev/sd4h volume s64 setupstate plex org striped 64k sd length 100m drive drive1 sd length 100m drive drive2 sd length 100m drive drive3 sd length 100m drive drive4 After processing this file, &man.vinum.8; creates the following structure in /dev/vinum: brwx------ 1 root wheel 25, 0x40000001 Apr 13 16:46 Control brwx------ 1 root wheel 25, 0x40000002 Apr 13 16:46 control brwx------ 1 root wheel 25, 0x40000000 Apr 13 16:46 controld drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Apr 13 16:46 drive drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Apr 13 16:46 plex crwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 91, 2 Apr 13 16:46 rs64 drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Apr 13 16:46 rsd drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Apr 13 16:46 rvol brwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 25, 2 Apr 13 16:46 s64 drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Apr 13 16:46 sd drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 512 Apr 13 16:46 vol /dev/vinum/drive: total 0 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9 Apr 13 16:46 drive1 -> /dev/sd1h lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9 Apr 13 16:46 drive2 -> /dev/sd2h lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9 Apr 13 16:46 drive3 -> /dev/sd3h lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9 Apr 13 16:46 drive4 -> /dev/sd4h /dev/vinum/plex: total 0 brwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 25, 0x10000002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0 /dev/vinum/rsd: total 0 crwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 91, 0x20000002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.s0 crwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 91, 0x20100002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.s1 crwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 91, 0x20200002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.s2 crwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 91, 0x20300002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.s3 /dev/vinum/rvol: total 0 crwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 91, 2 Apr 13 16:46 s64 /dev/vinum/sd: total 0 brwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 25, 0x20000002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.s0 brwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 25, 0x20100002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.s1 brwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 25, 0x20200002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.s2 brwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 25, 0x20300002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.s3 /dev/vinum/vol: total 1 brwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 25, 2 Apr 13 16:46 s64 drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 512 Apr 13 16:46 s64.plex /dev/vinum/vol/s64.plex: total 1 brwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 25, 0x10000002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0 drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.sd /dev/vinum/vol/s64.plex/s64.p0.sd: total 0 brwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 25, 0x20000002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.s0 brwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 25, 0x20100002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.s1 brwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 25, 0x20200002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.s2 brwxr-xr-- 1 root wheel 25, 0x20300002 Apr 13 16:46 s64.p0.s3 Although it is recommended that plexes and subdisks should not be allocated specific names, Vinum drives must be named. This makes it possible to move a drive to a different location and still recognize it automatically. Drive names may be up to 32 characters long. Creating File Systems Volumes appear to the system to be identical to disks, with one exception. Unlike UNIX™ drives, Vinum does not partition volumes, which thus do not contain a partition table. This has required modification to some disk utilities, notably &man.newfs.8;, which previously tried to interpret the last letter of a Vinum volume name as a partition identifier. For example, a disk drive may have a name like /dev/ad0a or /dev/da2h. These names represent the first partition (a) on the first (0) IDE disk (ad) and the eighth partition (h) on the third (2) SCSI disk (da) respectively. By contrast, a Vinum volume might be called /dev/vinum/concat, a name which has no relationship with a partition name. Normally, &man.newfs.8; interprets the name of the disk and complains if it cannot understand it. For example: &prompt.root; newfs /dev/vinum/concat newfs: /dev/vinum/concat: can't figure out file system partition The following is only valid for FreeBSD versions prior to 5.0: In order to create a file system on this volume, use the option to &man.newfs.8;: &prompt.root; newfs -v /dev/vinum/concat Configuring Vinum The GENERIC kernel does not contain Vinum. It is possible to build a special kernel which includes Vinum, but this is not recommended. The standard way to start Vinum is as a kernel module (kld). You do not even need to use &man.kldload.8; for Vinum: when you start &man.vinum.8;, it checks whether the module has been loaded, and if it is not, it loads it automatically. Startup Vinum stores configuration information on the disk slices in essentially the same form as in the configuration files. When reading from the configuration database, Vinum recognizes a number of keywords which are not allowed in the configuration files. For example, a disk configuration might contain the following text: volume myvol state up volume bigraid state down plex name myvol.p0 state up org concat vol myvol plex name myvol.p1 state up org concat vol myvol plex name myvol.p2 state init org striped 512b vol myvol plex name bigraid.p0 state initializing org raid5 512b vol bigraid sd name myvol.p0.s0 drive a plex myvol.p0 state up len 1048576b driveoffset 265b plexoffset 0b sd name myvol.p0.s1 drive b plex myvol.p0 state up len 1048576b driveoffset 265b plexoffset 1048576b sd name myvol.p1.s0 drive c plex myvol.p1 state up len 1048576b driveoffset 265b plexoffset 0b sd name myvol.p1.s1 drive d plex myvol.p1 state up len 1048576b driveoffset 265b plexoffset 1048576b sd name myvol.p2.s0 drive a plex myvol.p2 state init len 524288b driveoffset 1048841b plexoffset 0b sd name myvol.p2.s1 drive b plex myvol.p2 state init len 524288b driveoffset 1048841b plexoffset 524288b sd name myvol.p2.s2 drive c plex myvol.p2 state init len 524288b driveoffset 1048841b plexoffset 1048576b sd name myvol.p2.s3 drive d plex myvol.p2 state init len 524288b driveoffset 1048841b plexoffset 1572864b sd name bigraid.p0.s0 drive a plex bigraid.p0 state initializing len 4194304b driveoff set 1573129b plexoffset 0b sd name bigraid.p0.s1 drive b plex bigraid.p0 state initializing len 4194304b driveoff set 1573129b plexoffset 4194304b sd name bigraid.p0.s2 drive c plex bigraid.p0 state initializing len 4194304b driveoff set 1573129b plexoffset 8388608b sd name bigraid.p0.s3 drive d plex bigraid.p0 state initializing len 4194304b driveoff set 1573129b plexoffset 12582912b sd name bigraid.p0.s4 drive e plex bigraid.p0 state initializing len 4194304b driveoff set 1573129b plexoffset 16777216b The obvious differences here are the presence of explicit location information and naming (both of which are also allowed, but discouraged, for use by the user) and the information on the states (which are not available to the user). Vinum does not store information about drives in the configuration information: it finds the drives by scanning the configured disk drives for partitions with a Vinum label. This enables Vinum to identify drives correctly even if they have been assigned different UNIX™ drive IDs. Automatic Startup In order to start Vinum automatically when you boot the system, ensure that you have the following line in your /etc/rc.conf: start_vinum="YES" # set to YES to start vinum If you do not have a file /etc/rc.conf, create one with this content. This will cause the system to load the Vinum kld at startup, and to start any objects mentioned in the configuration. This is done before mounting file systems, so it is possible to automatically &man.fsck.8; and mount file systems on Vinum volumes. When you start Vinum with the vinum start command, Vinum reads the configuration database from one of the Vinum drives. Under normal circumstances, each drive contains an identical copy of the configuration database, so it does not matter which drive is read. After a crash, however, Vinum must determine which drive was updated most recently and read the configuration from this drive. It then updates the configuration if necessary from progressively older drives. Using Vinum for the root filesystem For a machine that has fully-mirrored filesystems using Vinum, it is desirable to also mirror the root filesystem. Setting up such a configuration is less trivial than mirroring an arbitrary filesystem because: The root filesystem must be available very early during the boot process, so the Vinum infrastructure must already be available at this time. The volume containing the root filesystem also contains the system bootstrap and the kernel, which must be read using the host system's native utilites (e. g. the BIOS on PC-class machines) which often cannot be taught about the details of Vinum. In the following sections, the term root volume is generally used to describe the Vinum volume that contains the root filesystem. It is probably a good idea to use the name "root" for this volume, but this is not technically required in any way. All command examples in the following sections assume this name though. Starting up Vinum early enough for the root filesystem There are several measures to take for this to happen: Vinum must be available in the kernel at boot-time. Thus, the method to start Vinum automatically described in is not applicable to accomplish this task, and the start_vinum parameter must actually not be set when the following setup is being arranged. The first option would be to compile Vinum statically into the kernel, so it is available all the time, but this is usually not desirable. There is another option as well, to have /boot/loader () load the vinum kernel module early, before starting the kernel. This can be accomplished by putting the line vinum_load="YES" into the file /boot/loader.conf. Vinum must be initialized early since it needs to supply the volume for the root filesystem. By default, the Vinum kernel part is not looking for drives that might contain Vinum volume information until the administrator (or one of the startup scripts) issues a vinum start command. The following paragraphs are outlining the steps needed for FreeBSD 5.x and above. The setup required for FreeBSD 4.x differs, and is described below in . By placing the line: vinum.autostart="YES" into /boot/loader.conf, Vinum is instructed to automatically scan all drives for Vinum information as part of the kernel startup. Note that it is not necessary to instruct the kernel where to look for the root filesystem. /boot/loader looks up the name of the root device in /etc/fstab, and passes this information on to the kernel. When it comes to mount the root filesystem, the kernel figures out from the devicename provided which driver to ask to translate this into the internal device ID (major/minor number). Making a Vinum-based root volume accessible to the bootstrap Since the current FreeBSD bootstrap is only 7.5 KB of code, and already has the burden of reading files (like /boot/loader) from the UFS filesystem, it is sheer impossible to also teach it about internal Vinum structures so it could parse the Vinum configuration data, and figure out about the elements of a boot volume itself. Thus, some tricks are necessary to provide the bootstrap code with the illusion of a standard "a" partition that contains the root filesystem. For this to be possible at all, the following requirements must be met for the root volume: The root volume must not be striped or RAID-5. The root volume must not contain more than one concatenated subdisk per plex. Note that it is desirable and possible that there are multiple plexes, each containing one replica of the root filesystem. The bootstrap process will, however, only use one of these replica for finding the bootstrap and all the files, until the kernel will eventually mount the root filesystem itself. Each single subdisk within these plexes will then need its own "a" partition illusion, for the respective device to become bootable. It is not strictly needed that each of these faked "a" partitions is located at the same offset within its device, compared with other devices containing plexes of the root volume. However, it is probably a good idea to create the Vinum volumes that way so the resulting mirrored devices are symmetric, to avoid confusion. In order to setup these "a" partitions, for each device containing part of the root volume, the following needs to be done: The location (offset from the beginning of the device) and size of this device's subdisk that is part of the root volume need to be examined, using the command vinum l -rv root Note that Vinum offsets and sizes are measured in bytes. They must be divided by 512 in order to obtain the block numbers that are to be used in the disklabel command. Run the command disklabel -e devname for each device that participates in the root volume. devname must be either the name of the disk (like da0) for disks without a slice (aka. fdisk) table, or the name of the slice (like ad0s1). If there is already an "a" partition on the device (presumably, containing a pre-Vinum root filesystem), it should be renamed to something else, so it remains accessible (just in case), but will no longer be used by default to bootstrap the system. Note that active partitions (like a root filesystem currently mounted) cannot be renamed, so this must be executed either when being booted from a Fixit medium, or in a two-step process, where (in a mirrored situation) the disk that has not been currently booted is being manipulated first. Then, the offset the Vinum partition on this device (if any) must be added to the offset of the respective root volume subdisk on this device. The resulting value will become the "offset" value for the new "a" partition. The "size" value for this partition can be taken verbatim from the calculation above. The "fstype" should be 4.2BSD. The "fsize", "bsize", and "cpg" values should best be chosen to match the actual filesystem, though they are fairly unimportant within this context. That way, a new "a" partition will be established that overlaps the Vinum partition on this device. Note that the disklabel will only allow for this overlap if the Vinum partition has properly been marked using the "vinum" fstype. That's all! A faked "a" partition does exist now on each device that has one replica of the root volume. It is highly recommendable to verify the result again, using a command like fsck -n /dev/devnamea It should be remembered that all files containing control information must be relative to the root filesystem in the Vinum volume which, when setting up a new Vinum root volume, might not match the root filesystem that is currently active. So in particular, the files /etc/fstab and /boot/loader.conf need to be taken care of. At next reboot, the bootstrap should figure out the appropriate control information from the new Vinum-based root filesystem, and act accordingly. At the end of the kernel initialization process, after all devices have been announced, the prominent notice that shows the success of this setup is a message like: Mounting root from ufs:/dev/vinum/root Example of a Vinum-based root setup After the Vinum root volume has been set up, the output of vinum l -rv root could look like: ... Subdisk root.p0.s0: Size: 125829120 bytes (120 MB) State: up Plex root.p0 at offset 0 (0 B) Drive disk0 (/dev/da0h) at offset 135680 (132 kB) Subdisk root.p1.s0: Size: 125829120 bytes (120 MB) State: up Plex root.p1 at offset 0 (0 B) Drive disk1 (/dev/da1h) at offset 135680 (132 kB) The values to note are 135680 for the offset (relative to partition /dev/da0h). This translates to 265 512-byte disk blocks in disklabel's terms. Likewise, the size of this root volume is 245760 512-byte blocks. /dev/da1h, containing the second replica of this root volume, has a symmetric setup. The disklabel for these devices might look like: ... 8 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] a: 245760 281 4.2BSD 2048 16384 0 # (Cyl. 0*- 15*) c: 71771688 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 4467*) h: 71771672 16 vinum # (Cyl. 0*- 4467*) It can be observed that the "size" parameter for the faked "a" partition matches the value outlined above, while the "offset" parameter is the sum of the offset within the Vinum partition "h", and the offset of this partition within the device (or slice). This is a typical setup that is necessary to avoid the problem described in . It can also be seen that the entire "a" partition is completely within the "h" partition containing all the Vinum data for this device. Note that in the above example, the entire device is dedicated to Vinum, and there is no leftover pre-Vinum root partition, since this has been a newly set-up disk that was only meant to be part of a Vinum configuration, ever. Troubleshooting If something goes wrong, a way is needed to recover from the situation. The following list contains few known pitfalls and solutions. System bootstrap loads, but system does not boot If for any reason the system does not continue to boot, the bootstrap can be interrupted with by pressing the space key at the 10-seconds warning. The loader variables (like vinum.autostart) can be examined using the show, and manipulated using set or unset commands. If the only problem was that the Vinum kernel module was not yet in the list of modules to load automatically, a simple load vinum will help. When ready, the boot process can be continued with a boot -as. The options will request the kernel to ask for the root filesystem to mount (), and make the boot process stop in single-user mode (), where the root filesystem is mounted read-only. That way, even if only one plex of a multi-plex volume has been - mounted, no data inconsitency between plexes is being + mounted, no data inconsistency between plexes is being risked. At the prompt asking for a root filesystem to mount, any device that contains a valid root filesystem can be entered. If /etc/fstab had been set up correctly, the default should be something like ufs:/dev/vinum/root. A typical alternate choice would be something like ufs:da0d which could be a hypothetical partition that contains the pre-Vinum root filesystem. Care should be taken if one of the alias "a" partitions are entered here that are actually reference to the subdisks of the Vinum root device, because in a mirrored setup, this would only mount one piece of a mirrored root device. If this filesystem is to be mounted read-write later on, it is necessary to remove the other plex(es) of the Vinum root volume since these plexes would otherwise carry inconsistent data. Only primary bootstrap loads If /boot/loader fails to load, but the primary bootstrap still loads (visible by a single dash in the left column of the screen right after the boot process starts), an attempt can be made to interrupt the primary bootstrap at this point, using the space key. This will make the bootstrap stop in stage two, see . An attempt can be made here to boot off an alternate partition, like the partition containing the previous root filesystem that has been moved away from "a" above. Nothing boots, the bootstrap panics This situation will happen if the bootstrap had been destroyed by the Vinum installation. Unfortunately, Vinum accidentally currently leaves only 4 KB at the beginning of its partition free before starting to write its Vinum header information. However, the stage one and two bootstraps plus the disklabel embedded between them currently require 8 KB. So if a Vinum partition was started at offset 0 within a slice or disk that was meant to be bootable, the Vinum setup will trash the bootstrap. Similarly, if the above situation has been recovered, for example by booting from a Fixit medium, and the bootstrap has been re-installed using disklabel -B as described in , the bootstrap will trash the Vinum header, and Vinum will no longer find its disk(s). Though no actual Vinum configuration data or data in Vinum volumes will be trashed by this, and it would be possible to recover all the data by entering exact the same Vinum configuration data again, the situation is hard to fix at all. It would be necessary to move the entire Vinum partition by at least 4 KB off, in order to have the Vinum header and the system bootstrap no longer collide. Differences for FreeBSD 4.x Under FreeBSD 4.x, some internal functions required to make Vinum automatically scan all disks are missing, and the code that figures out the internal ID of the root device is not smart enough to handle a name like /dev/vinum/root automatically. Therefore, things are a little different here. Vinum must explicitly be told which disks to scan, using a line like the following one in /boot/loader.conf: vinum.drives="/dev/da0 /dev/da1" It is important that all drives are mentioned that could possibly contain Vinum data. It does not harm if more drives are listed, nor is it necessary to add each slice and/or partition explicitly, since Vinum will scan all slices and partitions of the named drives for valid Vinum headers. Since the routines used to parse the name of the root filesystem, and derive the device ID (major/minor number) are only prepared to handle classical device names like /dev/ad0s1a, they cannot make any sense out of a root volume name like /dev/vinum/root. For that reason, Vinum itself needs to pre-setup the internal kernel parameter that holds the ID of the root device during its own initialization. This is requested by passing the name of the root volume in the loader variable vinum.root. The entry in /boot/loader.conf to accomplish this looks like: vinum.root="root" Now, when the kernel initialization tries to find out the root device to mount, it sees whether some kernel module has already pre-initialized the kernel parameter for it. If that is the case, and the device claiming the root device matches the major number of the driver as figured out from the name of the root device string being passed (that is, "vinum" in our case), it will use the pre-allocated device ID, instead of trying to figure out one itself. That way, during the usual automatic startup, it can continue to mount the Vinum root volume for the root filesystem. However, when boot -a has been requesting to ask for entering the name of the root device manually, it must be noted that this routine still cannot actually parse a name entered there that refers to a Vinum volume. If any device name is entered that does not refer to a Vinum device, the mismatch between the major numbers of the pre-allocated root parameter and the driver as figured out from the given name will make this routine enter its normal parser, so entering a string like ufs:da0d will work as expected. Note that if this fails, it is however no longer possible to re-enter a string like ufs:vinum/root again, since it cannot be parsed. The only way out is to reboot again, and start over then. (At the askroot prompt, the initial /dev/ can always be omitted.)