Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 16:05:27 +0200 From: Oren Sarig <sarig@bezeqint.net> To: John Indra <m4v3r1ck@bigfoot.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Newbie has a lot of questions... Message-ID: <00db01bf59e1$6c96d080$370cb3d4@asmodean> References: <20000108180905.A6865@bigfoot.com>
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I'll answer some of the questions I can below. > First of all, I'm Indonesian, so English definitely is not my mother > language. Thus I beg your pardon for my vocab and grammatical errors. It's pretty good as far as I can tell. > I'm a novice sysadmin. I administer a small network with Red Hat Linux > as the core server (web, mail, and database). Have been interested with > FreeBSD for a long time, so I decided to give it a try. I had my FreeBSD > CD-ROM on Dec 31st 1999 and decided to delete a Linux partition and > place FreeBSD over it. Know what really attract me to try FreeBSD? The > daemon... ;) so... here's my first question: what's Mr D'mon name? I > can't find it on the FAQ... Maybe this question (and answer) could be > included in the future FAQ ;) He's called Chuck. > Ok... now... to get to real business... > > I understand that there is a runlevel concept in Linux. I believe that > this was inherited from SysV. Are there any runlevel concept on FreeBSD > or *BSD variant in general? Not really, just single-user mode and multi-user mode. > What is the boot sequence in FreeBSD? Till now, this is what I > understand: > Bootstrap -> /kernel -> /sbin/init -> read /etc/rc* -> invoke gettys -> > login. Is my understanding correct? Yes, that's right, but there is a thing that you should know about the /etc/rc. Basically, /etc/rc is a script you don't touch. It can configure any part of the standard fbsd system at boot time, but it doesn't do most by default. Example: it can set a video mode for all the consoles. But it won't. It only will if a variable allscreens_flags is defined. Now, you can define and enable operations by setting variables. It works this way: /etc/rc includes /etc/defaults/rc.conf which sets all the variables to their default values. Then it includes /etc/rc.conf in which you can place overrides, and then it executes the code with the defaults+your overrides. This way, if you want to put all consoles in 80x30 mode, you open /etc/rc.conf, add the line: allscreens_flags="80x30" And voila, all consoles would be 80x30 on boot time. To see what variables you can override, take a look at /etc/defaults/rc.conf, but DONT EDIT THAT. Anyways, I thought this is important to know how to configure the system startup. > AFAIK all Linux distribution use bash as their default shell. So when I > got csh as my default root shell, I panic! I can't teach you how to use csh (man csh probably can, though), but here is a suggestion: install bash (from the packages/ports), and use it as your root shell. You might want to build a statically linked version of bash and place that in /bin, so if you can't mount /usr for some reason, you won't be locked out (You do have toor, but that's another story). > # gnuls -Al --color=auto /lkm > total 0 > What's the difference between /lkm and /modules? LKMs are the old modules, and support for them is here only for backwards compatability. Nowadays, fbsd uses KLMs that are stored in /modules. > I've recompile my kernel and now, /kernel size is only 1223818 (almost > half of the generic stock kernel). Is this size not too big? Sorry, > cause I'm used to aproximately only 400 KB size of /boot/vmlinuz. Linux kernel is compressed (for no apparent reason), the fbsd one isn't, that's why. >Are > there other ways I should now to reduce my /kernel size and in the mean > time, keep my hardware working properly. Why would you want to reduce it? Anyways, one way to reduce the size is remove the debugging symbols from the kernel (Which I don't remember how to do), but then you wouldn't be able to tell why you had a panic if you had one. >I've included options LKM in my > kernel config, but that doesn't seem to reduce the size. Or... am I > missing some steps similar to make modules ; make modules_install in > Linux? In fbsd, modules work differently than with the Linux kernel: In Linux, you can choose to make a device as a module, and then "make modules modules_install" to get the modules there. In fbsd, when you install the system, it comes with all the modules already in /modules, so if a module is dynamically needed, it would just get loaded, you don't need to choose it in your kernel configuration file - whatever you put in that file gets statically linked to the kernel. An example is this - if you place options "CD9660" in your kernel configuration file, ISO9660 would be statically linked to your kernel. If you don't even mention it, and you try to mount an ISO9660 FS, the module would just get dynamically loaded. >I hope I didn't skip steps similar to that when I compiled my > /kernel. I do config NAMEOFMYKERNEL ; cd ../../compile/NAMEOFMYKERNEL ; > make depend; make ; make install You didn't skip a step. That's how you compile a kernel. > Oh yeah... this really bugs me ;) What's the meaning of make world? In FBSD, the whole system with all the utils is available as a single source tree, and can be installed in /usr/src. If you do a "make world" it would build the whole system, not just the kernel (as in everything in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /stand, /usr/games, /whatever). > How do I start single user mode? Log in as root, and type "shutdown now". If you want to, you can also click the space bar when you get that countdown prompt when you boot, and type "boot -s", but then you won't get mounted filesystems, so you would have to fsck and mount them. > And... one last question... for the moment ;) > I have an Intel Pentium III 450 MHz running on ASUS P3BF motherboard > with ATX power supply. I have included APM support in my /kernel. But > everytime I halt my system it won't shutdown automatically. Is this > normal? Generally, you need to have apm enabled in /etc/rc.conf in addition to have it enabled in the kernel, and then use `shutdown -p` (as in Power-down), though for some reason this doesn't work for me :( Hope I helped. -- Oren Sarig sarig@bezeqint.net.il To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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