From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Apr 18 23:47:32 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from ralf.artlogix.com (sense-mcglk-240.oz.net [216.39.168.240]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DEDE537B421 for ; Thu, 18 Apr 2002 23:47:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: by ralf.artlogix.com (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 9D8BB1B9C9F; Thu, 18 Apr 2002 23:51:00 -0700 (PDT) To: Mark Filipak Cc: freebsd-questions Subject: Re: Are you sure? (was: Hello from a newbie: Mark Filipak) References: <3CBF3231.9EB3E4A5@earthlink.net> <87hem84p9b.fsf@ralf.artlogix.com> <3CBF5140.1AAB72B4@earthlink.net> From: Ken McGlothlen Date: 18 Apr 2002 23:51:00 -0700 In-Reply-To: <3CBF5140.1AAB72B4@earthlink.net> Message-ID: <873cxs2ncb.fsf@ralf.artlogix.com> Lines: 65 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) XEmacs/21.1 (Cuyahoga Valley) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Mark Filipak writes: | > However, I would gently recommend that you toss aside your intimidation, | > and install FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE. I can guarantee that it will come with | > all the tools you need, and it's not overly difficult to configure into a | > gateway or firewall or any sort of server you desire. | | Harumph! That's *not* what I've heard. Well, GallantWEB is a commercial product, and they probably have some interest in telling you that it *is* overly difficult. It's more difficult than GallantWEB, of course, which simplifies everything for you, but you wind up with a lot more flexibility and knowledge going with 4.5-RELEASE. Wanna know how to make a FreeBSD 4.5 box into a gateway? Have the following line in /etc/rc.conf: gateway_enable="YES" You're done. No kernel recompile necessary. What else do you want? NFS? A few more options in /etc/rc.conf is all you need. xntpd (the Network Time Protocol daemon)? Same thing. Even IPv6 support is built-in. sendmail? No problem---or you can run qmail or postfix instead if you want the simplicity and security. Now, firewalls are trickier, of course, complicated by the fact that there's more than one package that will do firewalling (ipfw/natd, ipfilter/ipnat, pf). I tend to use ipfilter/ipnat, which works pretty well for what I want. Either way you go, you're going to be able to get a lot of help from here. | Do you promise not to foresake me, darling? Well, sweetie, we've just met. :) | My last experience trying to install BSD from scratch (two years ago) ended | with reformatting the disk and reinstalling Windows 98. The installer asked | me questions I didn't know how to answer, so I said "Yes" to everything. | A couple of years ago I tried participating in a group that was trying to do | a thing called "EasyBSD". The idea was to make FreeBSD installation easy. It | didn't take me very long to realize that the leaders of the group had no idea | how to do that. Well, okay. If you really want a very easy to install version of BSD, you're probably best off with Mac OS X, which even an old gnarled Unix junkie like me has to admit is pretty sweet. BSD isn't a trivial install; it's a brain transplant in many ways, and it helps to know what you're doing a bit. But then, that's why the questions@freebsd.org list exists. | [...] but knowing that UNIX systems don't generally have safety nets -- that | one wrong command switch can screw me, trashing the system that I already | have running -- that does scare me. Actually, Unix has more of a safety net than a lot of the machines you're used to. You can't treat root access cavalierly, that's true, but rarely do you ever get into a situation where you can't recover from. Before you proceed much further, I'll just say the obvious: * Keep a changelog somewhere. * Back up your user files (everything else on the system is almost certainly restorable). * Prepare to stuff lots of information into your head. :) C'mon, this'll be fun. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message