Dave Gawley wanted me to help him set up watcher202.cscf as a FreeBSD system. So here's what I did. watcher202 is a Sun Fire V60z server with a pair of Xeon 2.8GHz CPUs and a pair of 34gb SCSI disks.

Base Install

1. Obtain 5.3-RELEASE CD.
2. Boot said CD, choose Custom install.
3. Partition disks. Dave and I chose to set up a 6gb root slice, 20gb for /usr, and 3gb for /var.
4. Custom: select only the base. We don't care about installing sources, manpages, or any of that stuff, it'll come later.
5. There's probably actually a few steps missing here, but not many.
6. Copy make.conf from oates.cs (for lack of a better source for the time being) and edit out references to perl. We don't need or want profiled libraries, and they're not available from freebsd5.cscf anyway.
7. Update the OS from freebsd5.cscf 's build.

Post Install Configuration

1. Edit /etc/inetd.conf to allow the set of r utilities (shell, login, exec).
2. Edit /etc/rc.conf and let inetd run.
3. Start inetd: /etc/rc.d/inetd start.
4. Edit rhosts files as required.
5. Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config to allow root to login, and restart ssh: /etc/rc.d/sshd restart.

Adding ports

First, a brief explanation that really belongs elsewhere: I've pre-built a bunch of stuff and made packages out of it on freebsd5.cscf. The canonical place to stash packages is /usr/ports/packages/, which is a bunch of directories that really just symlink to stuff inside /usr/ports/packages/All, where the packages really live. I do this to save some time when adding new stuff. And it's faster than pkg_add -r, and sometimes I wind up rebuilding a system two or three times to get it right, so this saves some bandwidth. Package stashing locations can be modified by /etc/make.conf.

1. Mount /usr/ports from freebsd5 then change to /usr/ports/packages/All.
2. pkg_add portupgrade20041226_1.tbz - this gets us ruby18 as well.
3. pkg_add perl-5.8.6_2.tbz - we're going to have to add it eventually anyway. We're now up to four packages installed.
4. pkg_add apache+mod_ssl-1.3.33+2.8.22.tbz - nagios likes having a webserver to run from. This will suck in more stuff.

Now we have this (long pkg descriptions are cut off):

watcher202# pkg_info
apache+mod_ssl-1.3.33+2.8.22 The Apache 1.3 webserver with SSL/TLS functionality
expat-1.95.8        XML 1.0 parser written in C
mm-1.3.1            Shared memory allocation library for pre-forked process mod
perl-5.8.6_2        Practical Extraction and Report Language
portupgrade-20041226_1 FreeBSD ports/packages administration and management tool s
ruby-1.8.2_3        An object-oriented interpreted scripting language
ruby18-bdb1-0.2.2   Ruby interface to Berkeley DB revision 1.8x with full featu
watcher202# 

We want to put nagios version 2 on watcher, but I haven't yet built it on freebsd5. So I'll build it there, then we can pkg_add it too.

nagios_plugins wants configuring. I told it: fping, SNMP, mysql, postgresql, and openldap. I left qstat and radius unchecked. Be warned: it wants to create a user and group "nagios".

Back on watcher202: pkg_add nagios-2.0.b3.tbz. Whoo, that added 18 packages; mostly this is because of dependencies on things like postgres client, mysql client, fping, etc.

-- MikePatterson - 06 Apr 2005