PrefaceIntended
AudienceThe &os; newcomer will find that the first section of this
book guides the user through the &os; installation process and
gently introduces the concepts and conventions that underpin
&unix;. Working through this section requires little more than
the desire to explore, and the ability to take on board new
concepts as they are introduced.Once you have traveled this far, the second, far larger,
section of the Handbook is a comprehensive reference to all manner
of topics of interest to &os; system administrators. Some of
these chapters may recommend that you do some prior reading, and
this is noted in the synopsis at the beginning of each
chapter.For a list of additional sources of information, please see
.Changes
from the Third EditionThe current online version of the Handbook represents the
cumulative effort of many hundreds of contributors over the past
10 years. The following are some of the significant changes since
the two volume third edition was published in 2004: has been added with information
about how to run &windows; applications on &os;. has been added with information
about the powerful &dtrace; performance analysis tool. has been added with
information about non-native file systems in &os;, such as ZFS
from &sun;. has been added to cover the new
auditing capabilities in &os; and explain its use. has been added with
information about installing &os; on virtualization
software. has been added to cover
installation of &os; using the new installation utility,
bsdinstall.Changes
from the Second Edition (2004)The third edition was the culmination of over two years of
work by the dedicated members of the &os; Documentation
Project. The printed edition grew to such a size that it was
necessary to publish as two separate volumes. The following are
the major changes in this new edition: has been expanded with new
information about the ACPI power and resource management, the
cron system utility, and more kernel tuning
options. has been expanded with new
information about virtual private networks (VPNs), file system
access control lists (ACLs), and security advisories. is a new chapter with this edition.
It explains what MAC is and how this mechanism can be used to
secure a &os; system. has been expanded with new
information about USB storage devices, file system snapshots,
file system quotas, file and network backed filesystems, and
encrypted disk partitions.A troubleshooting section has been added to . has been expanded with new
information about using alternative transport agents, SMTP
authentication, UUCP, fetchmail,
procmail, and other advanced
topics. is all new with this
edition. This chapter includes information about setting up
the Apache HTTP Server,
ftpd, and setting up a server for
µsoft; &windows; clients with
Samba. Some sections from were moved here to improve
the presentation. has been expanded
with new information about using &bluetooth; devices with
&os;, setting up wireless networks, and Asynchronous Transfer
Mode (ATM) networking.A glossary has been added to provide a central location
for the definitions of technical terms used throughout the
book.A number of aesthetic improvements have been made to the
tables and figures throughout the book.Changes from
the First Edition (2001)The second edition was the culmination of over two years of
work by the dedicated members of the &os; Documentation Project.
The following were the major changes in this edition:A complete Index has been added.All ASCII figures have been replaced by graphical
diagrams.A standard synopsis has been added to each chapter to
give a quick summary of what information the chapter
contains, and what the reader is expected to know.The content has been logically reorganized into three
parts: Getting Started, System
Administration, and
Appendices. has been expanded to contain
additional information about processes, daemons, and
signals. has been expanded to contain
additional information about binary package
management. has been completely rewritten with
an emphasis on using modern desktop technologies such as
KDE and
GNOME on &xfree86; 4.X. has been expanded. has been written from what used
to be two separate chapters on Disks and
Backups. We feel that the topics are easier
to comprehend when presented as a single chapter. A section
on RAID (both hardware and software) has also been
added. has been completely
reorganized and updated for &os; 4.X/5.X. has been substantially
updated.Many new sections have been added to . has been expanded to include more
information about configuring
sendmail. has been expanded to include
information about installing
&oracle; and
&sap.r3;.The following new topics are covered in this second
edition:..Organization of This BookThis book is split into five logically distinct sections.
The first section, Getting Started, covers
the installation and basic usage of &os;. It is expected that
the reader will follow these chapters in sequence, possibly
skipping chapters covering familiar topics. The second section,
Common Tasks, covers some frequently used
features of &os;. This section, and all subsequent sections,
can be read out of order. Each chapter begins with a succinct
synopsis that describes what the chapter covers and what the
reader is expected to already know. This is meant to allow the
casual reader to skip around to find chapters of interest. The
third section, System Administration, covers
administration topics. The fourth section, Network
Communication, covers networking and server topics.
The fifth section contains appendices of reference
information.Introduces &os; to a new user. It describes the
history of the &os; Project, its goals and development
model.Walks a user through the entire installation process of
&os; 9.x and later using
bsdinstall.Covers the basic commands and functionality of the
&os; operating system. If you are familiar with &linux;
or another flavor of &unix; then you can probably skip this
chapter.Covers the installation of third-party software with
both &os;'s innovative Ports Collection and
standard binary packages.Describes the X Window System in general and using X11
on &os; in particular. Also describes common desktop
environments such as KDE and
GNOME.Lists some common desktop applications, such as web
browsers and productivity suites, and describes how to
install them on &os;.Shows how to set up sound and video playback support
for your system. Also describes some sample audio and video
applications.Explains why you might need to configure a new kernel
and provides detailed instructions for configuring,
building, and installing a custom kernel.Describes managing printers on &os;, including
information about banner pages, printer accounting, and
initial setup.Describes the &linux; compatibility features of &os;.
Also provides detailed installation instructions for many
popular &linux; applications such as
&oracle; and
&mathematica;.Describes the parameters available for system
administrators to tune a &os; system for optimum
performance. Also describes the various configuration files
used in &os; and where to find them.Describes the &os; boot process and explains how to
control this process with configuration options.Describes many different tools available to help keep
your &os; system secure, including Kerberos, IPsec and
OpenSSH.Describes the jails framework, and the improvements of
jails over the traditional chroot support of &os;.Explains what Mandatory Access Control (MAC) is and
how this mechanism can be used to secure a &os;
system.Describes what &os; Event Auditing is, how it can be
installed, configured, and how audit trails can be inspected
or monitored.Describes how to manage storage media and filesystems
with &os;. This includes physical disks, RAID arrays,
optical and tape media, memory-backed disks, and network
filesystems.Describes what the GEOM framework in &os; is and how
to configure various supported RAID levels.Examines support of non-native file systems in &os;,
like the Z File System from &sun;.Describes what virtualization systems offer, and how
they can be used with &os;.Describes how to use &os; in languages other than
English. Covers both system and application level
localization.Explains the differences between &os;-STABLE,
&os;-CURRENT, and &os; releases. Describes which users
would benefit from tracking a development system and
outlines that process. Covers the methods users may take
to update their system to the latest security
release.Describes how to configure and use the &dtrace; tool
from &sun; in &os;. Dynamic tracing can help locate
performance issues, by performing real time system
analysis.Explains how to connect terminals and modems to your
&os; system for both dial in and dial out
connections.Describes how to use PPP to connect to remote systems
with &os;.Explains the different components of an email server
and dives into simple configuration topics for the most
popular mail server software:
sendmail.Provides detailed instructions and example configuration
files to set up your &os; machine as a network filesystem
server, domain name server, network information system
server, or time synchronization server.Explains the philosophy behind software-based firewalls
and provides detailed information about the configuration
of the different firewalls available for &os;.Describes many networking topics, including sharing an
Internet connection with other computers on your LAN,
advanced routing topics, wireless networking, &bluetooth;,
ATM, IPv6, and much more.Lists different sources for obtaining &os; media on
CDROM or DVD as well as different sites on the Internet
that allow you to download and install &os;.This book touches on many different subjects that may
leave you hungry for a more detailed explanation. The
bibliography lists many excellent books that are referenced
in the text.Describes the many forums available for &os; users to
post questions and engage in technical conversations about
&os;.Lists the PGP fingerprints of several &os;
Developers.Conventions used
in this bookTo provide a consistent and easy to read text, several
conventions are followed throughout the book.Typographic ConventionsItalicAn italic font is used for
filenames, URLs, emphasized text, and the first usage of
technical terms.MonospaceA monospaced font is used for error
messages, commands, environment variables, names of ports,
hostnames, user names, group names, device names, variables,
and code fragments.BoldA bold font is used for
applications, commands, and keys.User
InputKeys are shown in bold to stand out from
other text. Key combinations that are meant to be typed
simultaneously are shown with `+' between
the keys, such as:CtrlAltDelMeaning the user should type the Ctrl,
Alt, and Del keys at the same
time.Keys that are meant to be typed in sequence will be separated
with commas, for example:CtrlX,
CtrlSWould mean that the user is expected to type the
Ctrl and X keys simultaneously
and then to type the Ctrl and S
keys simultaneously.ExamplesExamples starting with C:\>
indicate a &ms-dos; command. Unless otherwise noted, these
commands may be executed from a Command Prompt
window in a modern µsoft.windows;
environment.E:\>tools\fdimage floppies\kern.flp A:Examples starting with &prompt.root; indicate a command that
must be invoked as the superuser in &os;. You can login as
root to type the
command, or login as your normal account and use &man.su.1; to
gain superuser privileges.&prompt.root; dd if=kern.flp of=/dev/fd0Examples starting with &prompt.user; indicate a command that
should be invoked from a normal user account. Unless otherwise
noted, C-shell syntax is used for setting environment variables
and other shell commands.&prompt.user; topAcknowledgmentsThe book you are holding represents the efforts of many
hundreds of people around the world. Whether they sent in fixes
for typos, or submitted complete chapters, all the contributions
have been useful.Several companies have supported the development of this
document by paying authors to work on it full-time, paying for
publication, etc. In particular, BSDi (subsequently acquired by
Wind River
Systems) paid members of the &os; Documentation Project
to work on improving this book full time leading up to the
publication of the first printed edition in March 2000 (ISBN
1-57176-241-8). Wind River Systems then paid several additional
authors to make a number of improvements to the print-output
infrastructure and to add additional chapters to the text. This
work culminated in the publication of the second printed edition
in November 2001 (ISBN 1-57176-303-1). In 2003-2004, &os; Mall, Inc,
paid several contributors to improve the Handbook in preparation
for the third printed edition.