A Network Tutorial/How-To Guide
for the FreeBSD OS
by Nick Rogness
These How-To's are a guide for System Admins. They are not programming references. They will show you how to get parts of the FreeBSD system up working along with making other systems work with your setup.
For example, the Apache web server serves out web pages but needs the DNS system up and functioning properly in order for anything to work properly. To add on to that example, In order to catch errors from users you may chose to use email to communicate when a link is broken, in order to do that you need sendmail to be working with DNS and Apache, and you also may want to protect your webserver with a firewall. All of these systems use each other directly or are tied into each other somehow. You can see how this is a snowball effect. Each section will build on the previous section. It is recommended that you read the previus sections to get a good understanding of it's concepts. I also recommend this technique for troubleshooting FreeBSD problems.
We will start by looking at a basic example of a typical FreeBSD setup and working toward some of the more advanced things you can do with BSD. We will be adding features as we go hopefully getting to a point that helps most people out and also discuss some of the internal workings of FreeBSD. Note: To save space I will be referring to FreeBSD as BSD, this is just for this document to conserve key strokes. There are several other BSD flavors out there including OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Trusted BSD
The division is split as follows:
Newbie's Starter Kit
- Introduction to the FreeBSD OS and general info...Good place to start
- Start for beginners, starting with an example network
- This section we will be adding services to your BSD machine
- The Frequently Asked Questions section deals with the most commonly asked questions when dealing with FreeBSD. I have compiled a list of answers to questions occuring on the freebsd-questions over the last 2 years.