Introduction

This lab will guide you through the process of installing and configuring the open source FreeBSD operating system in a virtual environment. The installation will include creating partitions, apply/formatting file systems, a swap partition, create user accounts and modify groups. The lab will also cover how to properly reboot and shutdown the operating system, Determine disk usage and monitor running processes. You will also have the chance to review shell commands like mount, umount, du, ps and df, as well as learning some new commands like setenv, rehash, pkg_add and chsh.

Notes for this Lab:

See the FreeBSD Handbook Section on Installing and get very familiar with this Handbook, it will be the main reference throughout this course. Man (manual) pages are also an invaluable reference and there are excellent FreeBSD Hypertext "man pages" available as well. Please note, you will not be able to complete these labs without using the on-line documentation.
The installation will be from ISO images and the install will be in a virtual emvironment using VMWare. Sysinstall is the "arcane" but very flexible installer used by FreeBSD. Follow the instructions provided by your instructor during the demo installation to learn about the user interface. Sysinstall is also very useful for post installation system administrative tasks and we will use it to configure some of our services after the successful installation.

On the host machine:

Start VMware from the host workstation
Create a new guest OS and use the ISO images found under D:/courses/ISO (7.2-RELEASE)
Follow the instructions for your guest virtual environment for creating a logical drive and bridged network
Make sure that the CDROM is available to the guest OS and that it is pointing to ISO images on the file system
Sysinstall will take you through the installation and prompt for your custom configurations
The Disk partition editor let's you take a default configuration by choosing the entire drive by choosing "A" for "All"
Once you have the partitioning done you can choose "Q" to quit
You will now be prompted to select a boot loader, choose the default
The Disk Label Editor then asks you for a partioning scheme for your file systems. press "A" for "Automatic", then "Q" to quit

Create BIOS Partitions (Called "Slices" in BSD):

sysinstall runs fdisk and prompts for you to create partitions (slices) of the disk /dev/ad0 for IDE (PATA/SATA) or /dev/da0 for SCSI/USB drives. There is a BIOS limition of 4 primary Partitions (Slices), and this is why FreeBSD subdivides the BIOS partitions, instead of having to create extended partitions like linux does.

Create BSD Partitions

The disk Label Editor further subdivides the slices into BSD partitions which are attached to specific locations (mount points) in the file system. The first slice of an IDE drive would be /dev/ad0s1 and once it is carved up into BSD partitions each partition will be identified by a letter. The root partition would look like this: /dev/ad0s1a and by default the file system will be ufs2. The letter b is reserved for SWAP partitions, and the letter c is reserved as a special character device for the raw data, the remainder of your partitions will be labeled alphabetically.

sysinstall - choose a packaged installation:

choose a standard installation and then "Average User - Binaries and Docs"
when prompted answer no to the following configuration options:

nfs, inetd, dhcp, creating new user accounts

FreeBSD boots

Once all of the questions have been answered exit sysinstall and the installation is complete and the system will reboot. The boot process on unix is very verbose and may seem like unnecessary information but it can be extremely useful for troubleshooting when there are problems. Hardware related messages are written to /var/run/dmesg.boot and can be accessed with the dmesg command. Post Installation tasks.

using the root account, login or su?

add a user account (your name) with the interactive adduser command
login to this account and su (switch user) to root - what happens?
What are the two main reasons for logging into your regular account and switching into root? (see lecture notes).
check the /var/log/messages file - is there an entry for the attempted su command?
modify your new account and add it to the "wheel" group - check pw usermod in the man pages
what partitions are configured and what are their mount points?
plug in your usb drive
what type of device is the drive (how does the system see the drive?) check the dmesg file with dmesg | less
create a mount point for your new drive and call it usb_removable - use the mkdir command
mount the usb drive to your new mount point
check out the /etc/fstab file - what entry would you need if you wanted a "shortcut" to mount your usb drive? (look at the CDROM entry)
change the root password with passwd (to whatever you like)

Shutdown, reboot and single user mode:

There is a proper way to shutdown a unix OS and that is with the shutdown command. shutdown takes several arguments, indicating when to shutdown, what type of shutdown to perform, and what to do afterwards.

reboot the system using command line arguments to the shutdown command
schedule the shutdown for 10 minutes from now
take this time to look at the entries in the /etc/ttys file - particularly the security considerations for root in single user
shutdown into single user mode and change the root password
were you required to know the root password before you could apply a new root password?
modify the /etc/ttys file so that you are required to know the password before you could change it (you can use the ee (easy editor) or vi
what are the security implications in not requiring the password for root to be able to change it in single user mode

Returning/Continuing to Multi-User Mode

To continue booting when in single user, you can type exit, or press Ctrl-D. As well, if you made changes you may want to enter the reboot command to make sure they apply properly.

shutdown to single user mode again
from single user mode try to edit the /etc/fstab file
what needs to be done before you can write to that file system
change the default shell for the root user account with chsh (bash or tcsh)

System Resources

display the file systems and their mount points
how much disk space is /home using (du and df)
Is the inetd daemon running on the system
what services are running on the system - the ps command shows information about running processes
is syslogd running
where are the log files kept?
look at /bin and /usr/local/bin and determine the types of binaries that are in these directories. Read man hier to better understand the filesystem layout

Network services

display the current network configuration with ifconfig
What is the device name of the ethernet card?
is there an IP address assigned to the NIC card? (If you answered no to DHCP during the install, there shouldn't be)
can you reach another host?
are there DNS servers configured?
enter the dhclient command with an argument of the name of the device that you saw with the ifconfig command.
you should now have an IP address and you should be able to ping the default gateway or any host

Questions

      What types of files are stored in the /sbin directory?

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      What types of files are stored in the /usr/local/bin directory?

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      What is the difference between the types of files in /bin and /usr/bin ?

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      Where are the configuration files for third party programs (ports/packages) stored?

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Last updated: 2009-09-11
Updated by: Allan Jude

Written by: Cheri Weaver