Date: Sat, 18 Sep 1999 19:06:15 -0500 From: John Amdor III <johnmxl@radiks.net> To: "freebsd, newbies" <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: A Positive Story (LONG!) Message-ID: <37E428F7.5C2A18@radiks.net>
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Hi All! After a pretty dismal week, both at work and here on the list, I thought I'd post a success story. I've been interested in FreeBSD for a couple of years after a recommendation from a friend. I bought The Book and 2.2.5 CDs but didn't have the hardware to run it (the wife didn't want to give up her Windows machine). This past year the IRS relented and gave us some of our money back so we bought a new Whiz-Bang Win 98 machine for her to play games on and I confiscated the 486DX2-66 that had been our home machine. I tried to share the 850MB HD with DOS/Win 3.11 and FreeBSD but couldn't figure out how to get by the disk overlay. So I threw caution to the winds, zipped up all of the DOS and Windows files, copied them to the Win 98 machine and nuked the 850 and made it a dedicated FreeBSD machine. The install went fine, finding everything on the machine that was supported in the GENERIC kernel. I took the plunge, loaded the sources and built a new kernel, adding my sound card and taking out everything I didn't need. That was a couple of months ago. The only time this machine gets shut down now is during storms. I have X set up, and am trying various applications like Netscape. About this same time I started working with a local public library to set up a group of donated 486s to share an internet connection so that library patrons could surf. Originally we used a commercial product but it kept crashing. It got to the point that it would crash as soon as the first workstation made a request for a web page. We figured that part of the problem was trying to run Win 95 on old boxes, so I decided to try and set up a box using FreeBSD and User PPP to serve as our gateway computer. Since the machine I was installing on didn't have a CD-ROM drive but did have a network card, I decided to try installing via NFS from the CD-ROM drive on the 486DX2. After figuring out that I had to make my NIC conform to FreeBSD, not the other way around, the install via NFS went off without a hitch. I built a kernel on that machine, too. It's a barebones Compaq 486/33, so I didn't need the extra stuff in the GENERIC kernel. After some fits and starts caused by a malfunctioning external modem, I've got the box running in -alias mode. It's not fast using a 33K6 modem, but we get decent enough thru-put for Hotmail and Yahoo! using 3 user workstations. The library staff loves it because it works - uptime in the two or three weeks in use is better than in almost 6 months of using the commercial product. They also love it because they aren't expected to do anything to it. It doesn't even get shut down at night. In fact, they don't even have a login. I'm working on getting my Dad interested in FreeBSD...he is a DOS diehard - the only thing wrong with Windoze is doesn't use a command-line interface :) I gave him the new users tutorial and set up a login for him on the library box. About the only frustrating thing about setting up the library box was getting the configuration files for PPP set up. Of course it was made more difficult by a modem that kept dying... I built and installed the newest PPP version, then used the script from the "Lazy and Hopeless" site. Later I figured out that the script had a couple of problems in it...once those were corrected PPP works fine. I guess this turned into more of a ramble than I had intended...oh well, it was good to tell the story. Hopefully it encourages someone else to try (or try again) FreeBSD. Later... John Amdor johnmxl@radiks.net "If at first you don't succeed, try Management!" To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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