[img_assist|fid=55|thumb=1|alt=Daemon] I am experimenting with setting up a “jail” inside of FreeBSD (on my Ultra 60). jail is a utility available on FreeBSD that imprisions a process and *all* of its descendants. It can be used as a virtual machine that runs an entire instance of FreeBSD or it can be used to encapsulate a single executable.

I have been playing with it, and I must say it is very cool indeed. Here are some links that will greatly streamline the process of setting up *your* jail:

• Making your own jail rc script
• Jail threads at BSDForums
• jexec - allows you to connect to your jail once it has been started (vi your rc script, presumably)

Something the FreeBSD docs don’t tell you (not anywhere I can find anyway) is that you have to use a serial console to install FreeBSD on Sparc64….as Adam Sandler puts it, “…again, information I could have used yesterday!” In all fairness, 6.0 is supposed to provide native terminal support for Sparc64, so this is unnecessary for that version and on (hopefully).

[img_assist|fid=55|thumb=1|alt=Daemon]

Sometime back there was a discussion at the BSD-INDIA mailing list on offline port upgrades and installs. Here's my take on that issue -

> It is normal to upgrade or install the ports when online. However, when
> one doesn't have an Internet connection and has to depend on offline
> downloaded files, how do we apply the upgrades or installs?

If you want to build from source without an internet connection, you must get the tar balls prior to the installation and put it in the distfiles directory (usually, /usr/ports/distfiles). Alternatively, you can set the "CD_MOUNTPTS" environment variable to a list of CDROM mount points to look for the distfiles. I haven't tried the latter method, you might want to check out (/usr/ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk). If you want to install from pre-compiled packages, all you need to do is,

$ pkg_add -v package.tbz

Check out pkg_add(1). Set PKG_PATH environment variable to the list of direcotries where the packages are located. Sometimes portupgrade(1), portinstall(1) can be more useful. They are extensively documented in the man pages.

If the idea is to save your time spent online, what you can do is go to the ports directory and do a recursive fetch, which will fetch all the distfiles for that port and its dependencies recursively, without building.

$ cd /usr/ports/cat/port && make fetch-recursive

Then, you may disconnect and build. You can also fetch packages recursively, see portinstall(1).

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2005-May/014425.html

When will 5.4-RELEASE be released? Check out

Samba is available on most Unix platforms, and it integrates Windows network shares into Unix machines as virtual file systems (smbfs) and provides a way for crisp interplay between the two platforms. However, FreeBSD also provides an elegant way to automount samba filesystems, and this mini howto details how you can set that up. It's short, and I don't go into details on how you can set up a samba server, just how to get client access working fast.

This is a short howto on how to get your Realtek 8180 (chipset) based wireless cards working with FreeBSD. I had an LG 2100P, and using the ndis emulation present in the 5.3 BSD kernel, I had no trouble getting the card to work. It's a mini-howto, and I've tried to reduce the steps as much as possible.

BSD - Berkely Software Distribution

• What

This article is a description of my efforts to build a minimal FreeBSD system from scratch and run it under the Bochs emulator. Inspired by "FreeBSD From Scratch" by Jens Schweikhardt, this article extends its ideas by using a file backed virtual disk, as the installation directory and harddisk image under Bochs.

The FreeBSD ports system employs "fetch", a single-threaded download utility, for fetching ports off various sources in the internet. "Prozilla" (/usr/ports/ftp/prozilla) is a nice, fast download accelerator with resume capability. Replace fetch with prozilla and voila, you can accelerate the download process. Read on..

From FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE Announcement:

Scott Long: It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE. This release marks a milestone in the FreeBSD 5.x series and the beginning of the 5-STABLE branch of releases.

Announcement, Migration Guide, Installation Notes, Errata, More..