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Date:      Tue, 23 Apr 1996 21:08:31 -0500
From:      willvito@niia.net (Bill Vitaniemi)
To:        questions@Freebsd.org
Subject:   BSD questions....
Message-ID:  <199604240208.VAA11942@silver.niia.net>

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To the people with the answers...
   Got some questions for you guys (gals) about BSD. First off, about 6
months ago, I got introduced to Unix (U kNow It's eXcellant) by having a BSD
machine dropped in my lap at work. The objective of my boss is to get an
Intranet up and going for our company that is spread out across the northern
1/3 of the state of Indiana (Electric Utility). The machine that was dropped
in my lap is a Gateway 4DX2 66 with 16M of RAM and a IDE 220M harddrive.
I've got Netscapes Communication Server running on top of BSD. This has all
been in the developmental stages up to now. However, very soon this thing
might be blown wide open to the company people and possibly even going
Internet due to some new regulations in the Electric Utility Industry. I've
pretty much got the Netscape portion down, configuring the server and
learning all that html stuff, cgi, etc. Now my objective is to get the BSD
portion down.
   About a month ago I got Walnut Creek's FreeBSD CD (v2.1). I'm using my
own pc at work to do all my Unix experimenting on so I don't jepordize my
online machine. I partioned my 1.6M harddrive (IDE) so I can boot to either
DOS or UNIX. (Discovered that the unix partion must be below 1M or it just
won't boot to Unix. Didn't see anything about this in the documentation
anywhere.) As far as Unix, everything I've learned has been from one of two
books (Unix Administration by Garth, Nemeth, etc. and the other book is the
O'reilly book with the armadillo on the cover) or by trial and fire. Neither
of the books are very BSD specific though. There isn't a whole lot about
initially configuring a new machine in any documentation I've seen. One
problem I have is on booting my experimental machine is I see some lines
that say something like..

myname.my.domain: bad value
starting routing daemons:
standard daemons:cron, printer, sendmail (myname...) does not seem to exist!:
connection refused

I'm on the trail of getting this one figured out, have been messing with
sysconfig and some files in /etc/named. Fortunately, I can do comparisons
between my on line machine and experimental machine configuration files.
Even so, I still need to understand why the error. The is also another error
that says something about the router value being bad just before the above
lines. After getting BSD configured, then it's off to configuring x-windows.
   Another problem I have (on my online machine) is that it appears that the
hard drive is going to sleep after awhile. If the machine has been sitting
awhile and I then go to do something on it, I hear the hard drive wind up.
Have been getting "seek errors" at the same time. I'm assuming they are
related. 
   Just yesterday, when I exited x-windows, my monitor just went blank. If I
blindly typed in startx, x-windows would start up. But same blank screen
everytime I exited x-windows. The only way I found out of it was to just
crash the machine. Any ideas on this one.
   On my experimental machine, I attempted to put another small hard drive
on it just so I could do some playing with file systems and multiple hard
drives under BSD. However, I can't seem to get BSD to give me usable space
on it when I go and create a partition on it. Both of my books discuss
adding hard drives but only SCSI and not IDE. 
   I would appreciate any help you can give or tell me where I can find some
BSD specific documentation. I have gleaned some info from the FAQ and
handbook. This will greatly help me to advance toward my goal, to become one
of the few, the proud, a "Unix Guru".

                                        Thanks,
                                        Bill  




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