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Building a duplicate FreeBSD server

A duplicate FreeBSD server, built on chrome, would provide a backup should crimson die. Since chrome was even slower than crimson (100MHz vs. 120MHz), I decided to installed packages (pre-compiled ports) whenever possible.

The FreeBSD version of chrome was built from the FreeBSD 4.9 CD, downloaded from the web. This was the first time I had built FreeBSD with a large amount of disk to play with (60GB). I placed the new disk into chrome as master disk on the primary IDE channel. I wanted to built the disk with one large slice, containing the following partitions (FreeBSD terminology): 

      /
      /var
      /tmp
      [swap]
      /usr
      /usr/local
      /home
      /opt

When I tried to define the last partition, it was given a device name of X. I discovered (as I should have known all along) that FreeBSD only allows eight partitions per slice, one of which (ad2s1c) is reserved to address the entire slice, leaving only seven partitions to play with. The partitioning scheme I wanted was not going to work. I then tried to create two slices, with /opt on the second slice. The install seemed to go fine, until I tried to reboot and got "Invalid Partition Table" as the only message on the screen.

Some googling indicated that sysinstall was a bit flaky in building partition tables. I therefore installed the FreeBSD drive as master on the secondary IDE channel, re-connected the Linux disk, and booted into Linux. The Linux fdisk program was used to define two partitions on the FreeBSD drive. I then re-installed FreeBSD on the freshly created partitions, using the following scheme: 

      Filesystem  1K-blocks    Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
      /dev/ad2s1a    120926   46890    64362    42%    /
      /dev/ad2s1h  23834554  402310 21525480     2%    /home
      /dev/ad2s2e  30269782  278534 27569666     1%    /opt
      /dev/ad2s1f    251950      10   231784     0%    /tmp
      /dev/ad2s1g   4129310 1947378  1851588    51%    /usr
      /dev/ad2s1e    251950    5564   226230     2%    /var

I choose to install the All option from the CD, Once this was complete, I installed the following packages:

Cupsd 1.1.19 out of the ports failed to work properly. It was impossible to define a printer using the web interface (http://localhost:631), as every time a printer was defined, the error message "Request Entity Too Large - The request is too large for this server to process." was issued. Google indicated that was a previously encountered problem, and the recommended solution was to build from ports. I therefore cvsup'd cupsd and built it on chrome. Once this version was installed (some time later), cupsd worked. So much for my idea of minimising the amount of compilation necessary.

In configuring the printer to cups, using the web interface (http://localhost:631), make sure the printer is turned on. If not, cups will not present an option to set the connection as the parallel device (parallel:/dev/lp0).

After building the world and kernel, using a customised kernel configuration file, apache refused to start, with the error message: "default_listeners(): getaddrinfo(PASSIVE) for family 28: No address associated with hostname". There was little on this particular error message on the web, but a response from Matthew Seaman to a similar query provided the necessary clue: 

      Looks like apache is getting mixed up with IP6 addresses ---
      /usr/include/sys/socket.h has

      #define AF_INET6        28              /* IPv6 */

      I've never seen that happen myself on an IPv6 capable FreeBSD
      box, so I'm at a loss as to what to suggest.  Only thing I can
      think of is to try using Listen directives in your httpd.conf to
      force it to bind to your IPv4 addresses only."

This seemed plausible; my custom config omitted IPV6. A quick look at pkg_info confirmed this assertion; the package version was actually called apache-ipv6. I therefore deleted this version using pkg_delete, and built the version from /usr/ports/www/apache13.

Sendmail had to be built from the ports anyway, as I had to turn off IPV6 support (for the reason why, see The Sendmail Saga. One challenge was yet to be faced: how to configure sendmail to deliver to machines in the domain without masquerading the sender address, but to deliver mail to outside domains with the masquerading. Exim on the Debian version of chrome had been configured this way; surely it was possible to set sendmail up the same way? That's a retorical question - I found the solution for sendmail.

The only other major difference between the two systems was the method of burning CDs. Debian used cdrecord, whereas FreeBSD uses burncd. At least burncd doesn't require any messing about with SCSI drivers. As on Debian, an iso image has to be created first (using mkisofs), then burncd is used to write the image to a CD. The most frequently used commands are: 

      mkisofs -U -o backup.iso  directory                # create iso image
      burncd -f /dev/acd0c -s max blank                  # erase CD-RW disk
      burncd -f /dev/acd0c -s max data backup.iso fixate # burn backup.iso
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