Bsd ss

BSD
S U C C E S S

S T O R I E S

11 Success stories with BSD
Adventures in BSD
How BSD Keeps Me Sane
FreeBSD at Shannon Medical Center
BSD in a Panic
You Haven’t Had E-mail Since When? FreeBSD
saves a dot-org, and maybe me, too!
A FreeBSD Success Story

(and DragonﬂyBSD too)

BSD In a Microsoft Ofﬁce
Museum Guardian
OpenBSD Saves the Day
A FreeBSD Implementation
Open Source Software in
Co-operation Ireland

Introduction
The BSDs have earned a reputation for stability, security, and performance. That's
no accident. Their Unix heritage provides the power. Careful attention to detail
and correctness on the part of their developers provides the finesse. This has
produced highly-reliable systems that are easy to administer, flexible to any task,
and compatible with tens of thousands of pieces of open source software.
No wonder BSD is a popular choice with ISPs and the basis for Apple's Darwin!
The BSDs are also proving themselves popular with both sysadmins and users
looking for alternatives to expensive, proprietary, and inflexible operating
systems. This collection of BSD Success Stories—written by ordinary users-shows just a few of the many ways in which the BSDs solve real problems
all day, every day.

Adventures in BSD
by Michael Josefsson
I am sometimes asked “Why do you use
FreeBSD?” My usual ‘auto-response’ is
“Because it is the best!” While I truly think
it is the best, this reply does not really
answer the question. I hope this article
will better explain my feelings.
Way back in 1994 I became the manager of
a hardware laboratory at my old University.
I was to manage the labs in all aspects, from
computers down to data sheets, pliers, and
students. With over 300 students attending
each year, this was a very time-consuming
task. Of the three labs, only two had
computers and networks in them. In the
third lab, 16 serial lines were connected
through a Xyplex terminal server to a
computer of unknown pedigree. (It later
turned out to be a Sun 3.) I had been into
computers since the early 80s and PCs since
1989, but I had never touched a network
of any kind.
The two labs were connected by a Lantastic
LAN. Only one area of the server’s disk was
shared and every student stored his own
home-directory on it. As long as everything
worked fine, and it generally did, I had
better things to do than trying to understand what this network setup was all
about. The odd downtime was mostly due
to students tampering with the RG-58 coax
that ran from one machine to another
continuing on into the next lab. Problems
were easy to locate. I knew the coax had
to be terminated with a 50-ohm BNC
terminator and moving this terminator
to strategic places along the cable always
led me to the culprit.
Then there was a software upgrade. The
labs had been running MS-DOS with a
DOS-based compiler for many years. The
new version of the compiler required MS
Windows. (At the time this meant Windows
for Workgroups 3.11.) I could not get the
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old LAN software to run under Windows.
I don’t remember why, perhaps I was a
victim of my own ignorance. After reading
the Windows docs I managed to set up a
common workgroup for the two labs. With
a 486/66 Windows box working as a file
server we again had a fully functioning
lab.or so we thought!
I found that it was possible to access the
server’s shared area and was quite pleased
with my doings. I compiled some typical
code from a client machine and everything
ran as expected. I did not test network
performance under a higher load. The
idea never crossed my mind.
During one compilation, several large,
multi-megabyte files were created in the
project’s home directory. This was in itself
not a problem as the network’s bandwidth
was not saturated. However, all this data
moving in and out of the server turned out
to be detrimental to its health. With 10-15
clients chewing away, the load on the server
increased. After a period of time ranging
from a few minutes to several hours, the
server would unexpectedly crash. A reboot
got everything working again. All source
files had been auto-saved before entering the
compilation stage so it was easy to start over
and hope for more success the second time.
Still, the situation was less than satisfactory.
At this point, OS/2 entered the story. In
the outside world, Windows 95 was being
deployed. I got my hands on an old OS/2
2.1 demo CD. After several problems I got
it up and running. I thought it was cool
and ordered my own OS/2 Warp soon after.
Warp was my favourite desktop for years
to come. I really liked the smooth user
interface and enjoyed the increased stability
compared to the Windows version I had
used earlier. A co-worker with a similar
interest in computers used Windows 95

and had to re-install every three to four
months. The system would somehow clog
itself up beyond recognition. My OS/2
machine ran happily all the time. Great!
Except for the RSA DES Challenge. Being
outside of the United States I took an
interest in the Swedish-run SolNet DESattack. With SolNet’s limited resources
there was quite some time before an OS/2
executable was published. The situation
annoyed me.
So what to do? I was unwilling to give-up
OS/2 and surrender to Windows 95. I had
started to experiment with Linux, a Unixlike system but felt very little enthusiasm for
it. Because of an earlier experience with HPUX, I was under the impression that Unix
only represented an extremely complicated
way of doing things, and therefore, Unix
was ruled out.
At this time, there were executables for
FreeBSD available. Not knowing much
about FreeBSD, I made an FTP install
of 2.1.7-STABLE. The DES-client ran as
expected. I figured out nice commands;
kill -STOP, kill -CONT and that putting
an ampersand (&) after the command line
ran a job in the background. Cool! I could
manage every aspect of the program. A taste
of a new world! This was very enticing.
My success was short-lived. There was
soon a new DES client requiring newer libs,
which forced me to install 2.2.2. This time
I ordered the 2 disc FreeBSD set from
Walnut Creek sometime around June 1997.
Before the summer I had plans to replace
the lab server with OS/2, but during the
summer, I experimented with FreeBSD
and learned about TCP/IP, Samba, FTP
and Unix.
The client machines in the lab were using
Windows 95 and since we had to get rid
of Windows for Workgroups anyway, I
installed FreeBSD on each and every
machine. I made further experiments with
the r*-services (rsh, rcp, ruptime, etc.)
among other things. All in all, the experiments made me confident with managing

FreeBSD. In the beginning of August, when
I had to wire-up the lab’s new infrastructure,
I made FreeBSD run the lab for me. That
turned out to be a wise move; not one
spontaneous reboot occurred during the
years to come.
With a busy lab, reliability is of major importance. The logs show students accessing the
server around the clock. FreeBSD really is
reliable; the server’s longest uptime to date
is 220 days.
By now, things were moving fast. The third
lab was also computerized. (The introduction
of Microchip’s PIC line of processors necessitated this.) I added a couple of hubs and
the labs were interconnected. The next
summer I set up a local name server and
a private domain on a FreeBSD box with
two NICs—one for the internal net and one
for external access. There was no forwarding
between the two interfaces. This setup
allowed me, as admin, to download
software which I then installed on the
clients. Each project team in the lab had
its own home, with permissions fixed so
they could not peek at each other’s work.
They could also edit files at home and
upload via FTP. I added the system user
as a way to keep a central repository of
programs and files that every client would
need—Adobe Acrobat for Windows for example,
printer drivers, upgrades and other stuff.
Until now all data sheets had been in a
folder in my room. The projects’ supervisors
had access to the folder and make copies
which they handed out to the project teams.
There were 95 steps to the photo copier,
and with 95 steps back from it, handling
the data sheets became more and more
cumbersome as a variety of components
were added. What to do? Install Apache!
Putting the data sheets on the server in
PDF-format has eliminated the actual paper
handling. This was a truly brilliant move
that I wish I had thought of earlier. Now
each project group could peruse the
available components’ data sheets, both from
home and when in the lab before committing
3

Adventures in BSD, continued

the device into their project. Some students
printed out data sheets of course, but I see a
trend of more and more students reading the
specs directly off the screen.
There is a lot of activity in the labs. With
up to 75 students there at the same time,
not all of them can be busy with their
assignment; installing MP3s on the clients
has become a popular pastime. It is quite
possible that the especially zealous students
fiddle around with the system settings of
Windows 95 and cause damage! To simplify
the Windows re-installation, we have made a
complete 2 gigabyte image of the Windows
partition which easily can be downloaded
and written onto the machines. While this
may sound rather brutal, it works well in
practice. In fact, every machine in the lab
was born this way.
Needless to say, the client machines dualboot between Windows 95 and FreeBSD.
It is a particular pleasure to find the
students shutting down Windows and
rebooting into FreeBSD because they feel
more at home with it.
Earlier I mentioned we had a Sun 3 box.
That particular machine has gone to the
scrap heap and the FreeBSD server has
replaced it. Using the ports, I installed the
m68k-coff cross-compiler and spent some
time rebuilding the libs needed for our
particular hardware. We were able to get
rid of gcc-1.40 and now use gcc-2.8.1 for
our in house built 68008 computer card.
Some small bits and pieces complete the
picture. The server has been endowed
with a Tandberg SLR-5 tape backup. Once
a week I do a level 0 dump and every night
a cron job initiates a level 1 incremental
backup. The machines’ disks are mirrored

4

with vinum(8). Thus the entire /usr is
safeguarded from disk failure. To ease new
installations and administration, each client
has a P: (P for program) directory with all
non-standard Windows 95 software. It is
now sufficient to install new software on
only one client; it will become available to
the other clients at the next log-in. Every
home share is attached as Q: on the client.
To this end, Samba is configured as an NT
domain controller. Log-in scripts handle the
actual attachment of the devices at log-in
time. On the FreeBSD side I use NFS and
amd(8) to automount the user’s home
directories upon log-in.
I have unfortunately left OS/2. I really liked
the Workplace Shell, but the functionality
built into even a basic FreeBSD system makes
me more productive. I have now been using
FreeBSD exclusively for over two years for
all my desktop needs. My experience is best
summarized by something I saw someone
post to one of the FreeBSD mailing lists:
“I’m home.”
Michael Josefsson is a research engineer at
Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.
Originally published as Daemon News:
Adventures in BSD
www.daemonnews.org/200107/adventure.html

How BSD Keeps Me Sane
by Isaac Levy
I am a web application developer, and work
with Zope and ZEO clustering, as well as
web application performance tuning and
clustering. I have chosen to work with the
BSDs for years for several reasons.
When working as a young *NIX admin for
my first Open Source based company, I had
to perform install-monkey tasks for Red Hat
systems. The process was excruciating, as it
started with the installer (simple enough). I
spent the next three hours removing and
disabling all of the games and miscellaneous
daemons running on the system.
After my first FreeBSD minimal install five
years ago, I ran top and expected to learn
a whole new set of things I had to turn off
when, to my surprise, top didn’t even fill
an 80x24 terminal! I then proceeded to find
out that man pages were actually cherished
and stellar on the BSDs, and have successfully used the BSDs as the core of every
project since.
Recently, I worked on a Zope project on
another sysadmin’s network, then running
Mandrake. I had never worked on Mandrake
before, and was immediately totally lost in
reverse-engineer and second-guess someone
else’s brain to run our web apps and Object
DB, which was extremely costly, as the servers
needed to run in a fairly advanced cluster
setup. I lost hours on the project, and in the
end, lost sleep making the system run in a
manner I found comfortable. With that,
all of the applications I’m used to compiling
myself, or installing via ports, were all part
of the base install— and with configurations
completely customized to someone else’s
needs and massively undocumented!
I suddenly deeply began to appreciate
something in the BSDs which I have always
taken for granted, uniform adherence to
standards and well-documented working
processes which free me to solve very

specific problems. The consistency is so
well executed in the BSDs, it’s completely
transparent and therefore easily forgotten.
To make things worse, three weeks after
the project ended, the boxes were cracked
due to a mail related configuration error,
exploiting a hole that the GUI mail administration tools could not close. The system
was now a warez and IRC server. My client
decided to switch to Red Hat in light of the
compromise and set up two new Red Hat
boxes. With a new set of what I felt to be
un-unix like configurations and conventions
and lackluster documentation natively
available, I hacked my way through
rebuilding the web-applications—nearly
from scratch—forcing a completely different
configuration in the end. The changes and
the costs incurred by the client made them
choose not to pay me to document the new
system and changes properly. (I couldn’t
bear that idea and provided basic configuration and system notes.) This refreshed
my deep appreciation for the BSDs. For
the bulk of my projects, I hardly think
about the BSDs because things that truly
work transparently support everything.
Isaac Levy is an independent web application developer and consultant in New
York City, with a focus on Open Source
solutions and development. Isaac has
worked in Open Source web hosting, in
Zope development, and with BSD Unix
for years in various forms. He aims to bring
experience in large enterprise software applications to small and medium businesses.

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FreeBSD at Shannon Medical Center
by Andrew Gould
Shannon Medical Center is a not-for-profit
trauma center in West Texas that acts as the
safety-net hospital for the surrounding area.
As the health care industry is under pressure
from increased costs of providing health care,
coupled with reductions in reimbursements
for providing that care, the importance of
providing timely information to hospital
management has never been higher.
Shannon Medical Center uses a Decision
Support System (DSS) from a commercial
vendor. In 2000, a supplemental decision
support database was built using FreeBSD
and PostgreSQL. This system integrates
key data from the commercial DSS, other
sources of internal data that cannot be
imported into the commercial DSS, and
external data for benchmarking purposes.
Analysts access the data using preexisting
database clients via ODBC, eliminating the
need for additional training. The initial
system was built on an existing desktop
computer for proof-of-concept. Due to the
project’s success, the system’s hardware was
upgraded to a database server in 2001.
In the words of Andrew Gould, Manager,
Clinical Decision Support:
The FreeBSD/PostgreSQL combination is
extremely flexible and robust. FreeBSD
provides a stable and efficient environment
for the database server. The relational data
model facilitates flexible analysis that is

7

unsupported by the commercial DSS. The
database is used primarily for financial,
clinical and market share analysis. Some of
the results of this implementation include:
• Hospital management receives information that was previously unavailable.
• Increased efficiency—highly focused,
clinical data analysis reduces the number
of medical charts to be reviewed manually.
• Unplanned downtime since/including
installation = 0.
• License fees since/including
installation = $0.
• Support expenses since/including
installation = $0.
The flexibility and low cost of this project
reduce our dependency upon vendors and
free us from many budgetary constraints.
We can adapt the system whenever we
want, however we want, to meet our
changing needs.
Andrew Gould, CPA, performs financial
and clinical data analysis for Shannon
Medical Center. His primary tool for data
integration is a PostgreSQL database server
running on FreeBSD. Andrew has been
using FreeBSD at both work and home for
four years. Andrew has a BS in Education
and a BBA in Accounting from the
University of Texas at Austin.

BSD in a Panic
by Michael Lucas
My employer’s main business is designing
Web applications, but once those applications are built our clients turn around and
ask “Where should we host this?” That’s
where I come in, building and running a
small but professional-grade data center
for custom applications.
As with any new business, our hosting
operation had to make the most of the
resources we had. Our resources were
strictly limited to cast-off hardware from
the web developers and free software.
The only major expense was a big-name
commercial firewall, purchased for
marketing reasons rather than technical
ones. With FreeBSD and a whole mess of
open-source software, we built a reliable
network management system that provides
the clients with a great deal of insight into
their equipment. The clients, of course, pay
for their own hardware and so have fancy
high-end rackmount servers with their
chosen applications, platforms, and
operating systems. We’ve since upgraded
the hardware — warranties are nice, after
all! — but have seen no need to change
the software.
One day, a customer that had expected to
use very little bandwidth found that they
had enough requests coming in to use
close to twice the bandwidth we had for
the entire datacenter. This affected every
customer, slowing the entire hosting
environment to speeds comparable to a
snail in molasses. If your $9.95/month
web page is slow you have little to complain
about, but if your $50,000/month Web
application is slow you pick up the phone
and scream until it stops.
To make matters worse, my grandmother had
died only a couple days before. Visitation
was on Tuesday, and the funeral was
Wednesday morning. Monday morning

I handed the problem to a minion and said
“Here, do something about this.” I knew
bandwidth could be managed at many
points: the Web servers themselves, the
load balancer in front of them, the
commercial firewall, or even the router.
Tuesday after the visitation I found my
cellphone full of messages. Internet
Information Server can manage bandwidth
— in eight megabyte increments and only
if the content is static HTML and JPEG files.
With several Web servers behind the load
balancer, that fell somewhere between
useless and laughable. The load balancer
did support traffic shaping, if we bought
the new feature set. If we plopped down
a credit card number, we could have it
installed by next Sunday. Our big-name
commercial firewall also had traffic shaping
features available, if we upgraded our
service level and paid an additional (and
quite hefty) fee for the feature set. That left
the router, which I had previously investigated and found would support traffic
shaping with only a flash upgrade.
I was on the phone until midnight Tuesday
night, making arrangements to do an
emergency OS upgrade on the router on
Wednesday night. I had planned to go to
the funeral in the morning, give the eulogy,
go home and take a nap, and arrive at work
at midnight ready to rock. The funeral
turned out to be more dramatic than I
had expected and I showed up at work at
midnight sleepless, bleary-eyed, and upright
only courtesy of the twin blessings of
caffeine and adrenaline. In my email, I
found a note that several big clients had
threatened to leave unless the problem
were resolved Thursday morning. If I hadn’t
already been stressed out, the prospect
of choosing a friend to lay off would
have done the trick.
8

BSD in a Panic, continued

Still, only a simple router flash upgrade and
some basic configuration stood between me
and relief. What could possibly go wrong?
The upgrade went smoothly, but the router
behaved oddly when I enabled traffic
shaping. Over the next few hours, I
discovered that the router didn’t have
enough memory to simultaneously support
all of our BGP feeds and the traffic shaping
functionality. Worse, this router wouldn’t
accept more memory. At about six in the
morning, I got an admission from the
router vendor that they could not help me.
I hung up the phone. The first client
who had threatened departure would be
checking in at seven thirty AM. I had slept
four hours of the last forty-eight, and had
spent most of that time under a fiendish
level of emotional stress. I had already
emptied my stash of quarters for the soda
machine, and had been forced to pillage a
co-worker’s desk for his. The caffeine and
adrenaline that had gotten me to the office
had long since worn off, and further doses
of each merely slowed my collapse. We
had support contracts on every piece of
equipment and they were all useless. All
the hours of work I had put in, and my
team before me, left me with a sum total
of absolutely nothing.
I made myself sit still for two minutes
simply focusing on breathing, making
my head stop sliding around loose on
my shoulders, and ignoring the loud
ticking of the server room clock. What
could be done in ninety minutes —
no, now only eighty-eight?
I really had one only option. If it didn’t
work, I would be choosing someone to
lay off or filing for unemployment myself.
6:05 AM. I slammed the floppy disk into
the drive and started downloading the
OpenBSD install floppy then grabbed
a spare desktop machine, selecting it from
amongst many similar machines by virtue
of it being on top of the pile. The next few
minutes I alternated between hitting the
9

few required installation commands and
dismantling every unused machine unlucky
enough to be in reach to find two decent
network cards. By 6:33 AM I had two Intel
EtherExpress cards in my hands and a new
OpenBSD 3.5-snapshot system. I logged in
long enough to shut the system down so I
could wrench the case off, slam the cards
into place, and boot again. OpenBSD’s builtin PF packet filter includes all sorts of nifty
filtering abilities, all of which I ignored in
favor of the traffic-shaping functions. By
6:37 AM I was wheeling a cart with a
monitor, keyboard, and my new traffic
shaper over to the rack.
Here, the killer problems manifested. I
didn’t have a spare switch that could handle
our Internet bandwidth. The router rack
was jammed full, leaving me no place to
put the new shaper. I lost almost half an
hour finding a crossover cable, and when
I discovered one it was only two feet long.
The router, of course, was at the top of the
rack. Fortunately, if I put the desktop PC
on end and left it sitting on the cart, the
cable just reached the router. I discovered
this about 7:10 AM. I stacked everything
so it would reach and began re-wiring the
network and reconfiguring subnets.
I vaguely recall my manager coming in
about 7:15 AM, asking with taut calmness
if he could help. If I remember correctly, as
I typed madly at the router console I said
“Yes. Go away.”
At 7:28 AM we had an OpenBSD traffic
shaper between the hosting area and our
router. All the client applications were
reachable from the Internet. I collapsed
in my chair and stared blankly at the wall.
While everything seemed to work, the proof
would be in what happened as our
offending site started its daily business.
I watched with growing tension as that
client’s network traffic climbed towards
the red line that indicated trouble. The
traffic grew to just short of the danger line
— and flatlined. Other clients called, happy

that their service was restored to its usual
quality. (One complained that his site was
still slow, but it turned out that bandwidth
problems had masked a problem with his
application.) The offending client complained
that their web site was even slower than
before, to which we offered to purchase
more bandwidth if they’d agree to buy it.
Today, I have two new routers and new
DS3s. The racks are clean again, without
extra cables from thrown-together solutions.
The desktop machine has been replaced
by two OpenBSD boxes in a live-failover
configuration, providing protection for our
big-name commercial firewall as well as
shaping traffic.
My thrown-together OpenBSD desktop
machine is sitting in the corner of the

hardware room. The sign on it says “DO
NOT TOUCH: EMERGENCY USE ONLY.”
Should the clock tick down on some other
problem, well, at least I won’t have to spend
the thirty minutes it took to install.
Michael Lucas lives in a haunted house in
Detroit, Michigan with his wife Liz, assorted
rodents, and a multitude of fish. He has
been a pet wrangler, a librarian, a security
consultant, and now works as a network
engineer and systems administrator with
the Great Lakes Technologies Group. He’s
the author of Absolute BSD and Absolute
OpenBSD, and is currently preparing a
book about NetBSD.

10

You Haven’t Had E-mail Since When?
FreeBSD saves a dot-org, and maybe me, too!
by Kevin Kinsey
The phone rang… “Hello, this is
Susan*…this may seem strange, but I was
thinking about some problems we’ve been
having, and I thought you could help us.
Could you come down sometime and take a
look at our computers? We’re really struggling here.…”
She went on in some detail about the state
of things at her office. I assured her I’d think
about it, and hung up…like Samuel Morse,
thinking “what hath God wrought?” I’d
created an HTML page or two, but I was
no computer genius. I had a computer
and I had friends and a smart brother who
worked on them and with them, and that
was about it. My training was in a totally
unrelated field; although I was currently in
a “career path crisis”, I was neither computer
repairman nor network consultant.
The caller was a friend, personal secretary to
the pastor of the largest church in a nearby
city; I was on the ministerial staff at the
smallest church in the next town up the
road, and as far as she knew, our computers
were always working. (Of course, she didn’t
know that we never asked them to do
much.…)
I went down there; things were a mess. It
was September 2001; in addition to frightful
things in the world at large, Code Red and
Nimda were ravaging computers globally.
The machines at Big Church* ran that
“Wonderful” OS (well, it starts with a “W”,
anyway) and some were infected. Furthermore,
although everyone had high-speed Internet,
almost no one was using e-mail to communicate. It was strange; an organization with
their own domain name, over a dozen paid
staff members, and a budget of nearly a
million dollars still depended on sticky
notes for intra-office communication and
spent a lot of phone time just hashing out
details of upcoming activities with their
11

members. I didn’t think that was possible
in the 21st century.
After removing Nimda from a couple of
machines, I asked about their e-mail. “Oh,
that hasn’t worked for a while…” Curiously,
I opened a couple of outboxes on their POP
clients. The most recent sent items were
from November 2000, ten months past!!
Inboxes? Same story….
Timidly, I asked, “Where’s the server?”
“The server? Hmm, that would be Brenda*’s
machine.”
Brenda was in charge of payroll and
financial and membership records. Her
computer was a 500 MHz Athlon with 128
MB of RAM. The OS looked a tad different
from everyone else’s. Whatever it was, it
didn’t run so well, and there were some
obvious reasons. This machine was running
an “Advanced” version of that same very
popular OS, and between being infected
with Nimda and attempting to operating
as a PDC, along with IIS SMTP, and (for
some strange reason) anonymous FTP
servers, plus Brenda’s browsing (she had
been smart enough to get a mail account
at Yahoo!) and the large financial package
she used, this machine was taxed past the
limit of its resources. Furthermore, I couldn’t
believe that they would spend so much
money just to run Web and Mail for 12
users. Of course, once I removed the virus
I discovered they hadn’t spent quite enough!
There was no POP/IMAP service on this
box, it was not firewalled, and most of the
services it did offer were badly configured
or not working properly.
I called a friend of mine who worked for a
small ISP. He’d been kind enough to do a
little open-source evangelism with me, and
had given me a shell account on a virtual
server that hosted the company’s website.
I’d learned a little about telnet and ftp,

knew ls and cd, and could use pico to edit
text or HTML files. I was certainly no guru.
“What is that OS I’ve been talking to on
your web server? Some kind of Linux?” I
asked. (His kids teethed on little penguin
toys…he had a five-box LAN in his
house…these days I’d call him an
übergeek… )
“No, that’s a little more ‘hard-core’.
Probably a-BSD. Maybe FreeBSD. Why?”
Hard-core? (Brief shiver)…I swallowed hard
and gave him an overview. He told me I
should do something about the situation
(besides letting this server spew viruses all
over the place) and that an open-source OS
like FreeBSD would probably be just the
thing I needed. “You can read everything
you need to know on the ‘Net.” So, with
at least a bit of trepidation, I pointed a
browser at www.freebsd.org. “All you need
is a pair of freshly formatted floppies and
these instructions.…”
I went home and read up a bit (I grabbed
the entire FreeBSD Handbook in .rtf format.)
I printed several pages. I formatted the
floppies and read the instructions.
The next day I was back. I found, in an
upstairs closet at Big Church, an old clunker
that wasn’t up to modern specs. It booted,
and had a rather small HDD, but it didn’t
clack too much and the fans sounded OK.
I managed to stick a NIC in it and cable it to
their switch. Booting from the floppy,
holding tight to a couple of pages I’d
printed from the online Handbook, I
clunked away though sysinstall. If I
remember correctly, it took two, maybe
three attempts to navigate the menus
correctly — it was a little different than I
was used to, but the alternative was paying
thousands of dollars to someone who didn’t
even care to come and check up on the
machines they had installed and (apparently) hadn’t been there for 10 months.…
To make a long story shorter, once I
navigated the installation menu properly,
FreeBSD installed itself. I found myself in

a rather familiar CLI environment. In less
than a day, we had SMTP and POP3
capability inside the building. Then we
moved the HTTP service to this little
clunker. Now Brenda’s financial app would
work better because she wasn’t sitting on an
overworked box with no resources. Later we
started in-house DNS to ease the load on the
ISP and router. As a bonus, all this was
accomplished with free software and
hardware that was waiting for the dumpster.
That was almost three years ago. Today, that
church hardly ever calls me with problems,
and when they do, they’re never serverrelated. I do think I’ve proactively changed
every piece of hardware on that box, as parts
have become available, and as their website
has grown way past the size of the original
HDD, but the server still bears the same
name, and today provides even more services
both to the LAN and the outside world.
As for me, I still have that part-time ministerial position, but also have a growing
business in networking, troubleshooting,
and web application programming that has
added substantial income to the family
budget, and given me some direction for
that career path crisis.
This is no testimony of “what FreeBSD
can do for your Fortune 500 shop”. Frankly,
unless I become a better businessman, I’ll
never make a killing. But there are lots of
little problems everywhere that people need
good tools to solve, as well; I found a good
tool in FreeBSD.
I imagine FreeBSD can offer the same things
to anyone that it offered to me, and even
much more. But I know that because of its
stability, excellent documentation, helpful
user community, highly versatile design
(and of course its cost), FreeBSD was a
seminal force in this growth in both my
life and the life of Big Church. Guess what
pretty desktop I’m writing this on?
C’mon, you already know!!
(*names changed to protect the naive
[except for me])
12

You Haven’t Had E-mail Since When? FreeBSD saves a dot-org, and maybe me, too!, continued

Kevin Kinsey owns DaleCo, S.P.
(www.daleco.biz), a small consulting ﬁrm
located near the equally small town of Jasper,
Missouri, where he lives with his wife,
children, and one cat. Starting in 2001 with
two customers and little experience in the
industry (other than hanging around the
back room of a local ISP), the company
continues to experience slow yet steady
growth. Prior to “Y2K”, Kevin had an 11-year
career in public education, teaching vocal
and instrumental music in 3 Missouri school
districts. He claims to have no free time (and
therefore no hobbies); one of his life goals is
to convert his brother (an NT system administrator) into a vocal FreeBSD advocate.

13

A FreeBSD Success Story

(and DragonflyBSD too)

by Scott Robbins
When I first came to my company, which
I’ll call Astral (name changed to protect the
guilty), great changes were underway. The
company had outsourced IT prior to the
arrival of my boss and myself. Users,
running Win9x, could do whatever they
wished with their computers. I spent most
of my time in the first few weeks simply
reinstalling totally borked systems.
Neither my boss nor myself were big
Microsoft fans. Although I have various MS
certs, both he and I preferred various flavors
of Unix and its clones. He works in our NJ
warehouse and I was responsible for the
NYC side of things.
Although my *nix experience had begun
with Linux, at some point FreeBSD became
my O/S of choice. I had wide latitude in
what I did on the NYC side, so long as I
kept my users happy. So, I began investigating what I could move to FreeBSD.
My job can involve anything from helping
a user put the taskbar back at the bottom
of the screen to rebuilding a crashed server.
We are using an NT4.0 domain, and the
servers are aging and having more and
more problems.
Additionally, a more than adequate box
from four years ago soon becomes outdated.
The two gigs of storage space for one of the
companies on a server was rapidly filling.
The half gig of the C: drive was nowhere
near enough as printing jobs got larger, and
users would receive error messages about
there not being enough disk space to
complete a print job.
Due to the nature of the business and
financial constraints (one of my mentors
once said that the top two OSI layers are
politics and money) we often had to use
a band-aid approach. However, as things
became a bit calmer and people saw that
we not only knew (more or less) what we

were doing, but also saved the company
a good deal of money, we had a little
more freedom.
One of the first steps was to take some of
the file sharing off of the NT servers and put
them on FreeBSD boxes running Samba.
This was easy enough and successful. Even
using older discarded MS workstations,
reinstalled with FreeBSD, freed a great deal
of space on the servers.
Next, with a bit of trepidation, I began using
CUPS (sometimes said to stand for Can’t
Usually Print Stuff). However, it went quite
well. It was fairly straightforward, allowing
the MS boxes to use their client drivers.
Our company works in fashion. We must
store a great many images of dresses. Again,
space had been an issue, and I migrated
many of these directories successfully over
to the BSD boxes.
At present, future plans involve having two
somewhat more powerful boxes as servers
(one is already in use as a print and file
server) and having them back up the images
to each other using rsync. The file and print
serving are both completely transparent to
the users. We will shortly be moving the
DHCP server over as well.
I have a couple of other older, discarded
boxes sitting on our various subnets. (Astral
is actually an umbrella company. Each
division has its own showroom and
production room, all in different buildings
on different floors). These are very handy
when I have to reinstall a user’s machine
or transfer their files when I upgrade a
computer. Our network is old, and transfers
are far faster when copying between two
machines on the same subnet.
For a very small time investment, we have
found FreeBSD has saved us a great deal
of money and time. I have even been a bit

14

A FreeBSD Success Story (and DragonflyBSD too), continued

daring, running 5.2.1 with no problems
whatsoever on some not at all mission critical
servers. I’m able to indulge myself enough to
have my own personal workstation running
FBSD 5.2.1, and only have to turn on an MS
box to walk a user through something or to
test our one particular custom application.
Having heard some interesting things about
DragonFlyBSD, I have been playing with it
on a few test boxes. As each release was a
small download and quick burn, I simply
put the latest one on CD as it’s released.
I’m still just playing with DragonFly and
had no plans to use it in a production
environment at this point. It’s more of a new
toy than anything else. I like it, but am still
a bit unfamiliar with it, and run into often
amusing problems, such as installing it with
the defaults, then following the README’s
instructions for updating without realizing
that my /home partition (where it’s putting
source) is only a few hundred megabytes.
However, its live CD came in handy recently.
Like many sys/net admins in an
environment where most users are running
MS, we have our problems with spyware,
viruses and the like. A partner had opened
an ecard from his daughter, clicked on
something, and was suddenly deluged with
popups. At times, such problems have been
cured by installing the latest MS service
packs, so that’s what we tried to do.
Upon downloading and installing the first
set of critical updates, his computer failed
to boot. Ok, we’ll boot it in safe mode and
remove the update. No good. It would
power up, then restart. Trying safe mode
with command prompt also brought no
joy. It seemed as if he might lose all files
on the computer.

15

Enter DragonFlyBSD-1.0A_REL live CD.
I used it to boot his laptop (a moderately
new Toshiba Satellite) without problem.
DragonFly had no trouble detecting the
builtin ethernet, and using dhclient brought
me onto the network. I was then able to
mount his C: drive with mount_ntfs and
from there, was easily able to copy his
important documents and outlook.pst file
over to one of our FreeBSD samba servers.
From there, it was a simple matter to use the
machine’s recovery CD, reinstall the O/S, and
replace his files from the samba box.
While this isn’t anything amazing, I did find
it nice that I’d already put DragonFly into
production use, in a manner of speaking.
Scott Robbins is a Junior systems/network
adminstrator for a mid-size Manhattan
fashion company. Although Microsoft
certified, he far prefers working with Unix,
and desperately hopes to find a job as a
Junior Unix Adminstrator. His web pages,
with clear (though sometimes mistaken)
explanations of various aspects of *nix:
at home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu

BSD In a Microsoft Office
by Joe Warner
After being introduced to the FreeBSD
operating system back in March of 2000, I
was so amazed with it that I wanted to find
a way to use it in the office where I work.
Two years before that, I had gotten my feet
wet with Linux, mostly tinkering with
Caldera and Red Hat. I was impressed with
Linux as well. So much so, that I joined a
local Linux Users Group (www.sllug.org). It
was during one of our user group meetings
that I was introduced to FreeBSD. During
the meeting, CDROM sets of FreeBSD 3.4
were handed out and I was lucky enough
to get one!
The very next day, I installed FreeBSD on
an old pc at home and was immediately
amazed. The overall configuration and
layout of FreeBSD, from the installation
choices to the directory and file structure,
were in a really logical order. Everything
about it just seemed to make more sense.
One of the things I was most impressed
with was how easy it was to install applications from the vast ports collection. I also
liked how FreeBSD gives you the choice of
which applications you want as part of the
base install. Some OSes seem to include a
lot of applications during the install process
that you may or may not have interest in
using. This can be especially troublesome
if you have an old pc with a small hard
drive. I like the idea of installing just the
core operating system and then having the
choice of going back and installing what
I want. I mean, who really needs fifteen
different text editors, when two or three
will do?
After tinkering with FreeBSD at home for a
while, amidst all the noise and distractions
that go with a family setting, I decided to
see if I could install it on an unused pc at
work. The logic being that I would have the
chance to learn more about BSD/UNIX at

work, since, like most of us in this day
and age, this is where I spend the bulk
of my time.
As luck would have it, I was able to locate
an older Compaq Deskpro pc that wasn’t
being used. It was a 200 MHz machine
with 64megs of RAM and a 4 gig hard
drive. It turned out to be the perfect choice.
FreeBSD 3.4 installed easily on it, using the
entire amount of space on the hard disk.
During the install process, I was given the
choice of either manually creating the
necessary partitions or selecting ‘A’ and
letting FreeBSD do it automatically. Since
I had only installed FreeBSD once before,
I decided to let FreeBSD do the dirty work.
Before I knew it, I had a powerful, stable
and functional operating system at my
fingertips!
After spending a week or two of exploration, I discovered that the famous and
powerful Apache web server was already
running! I stumbled into this when I
pointed the web browser on another
workstation to the IP address I had given
my FreeBSD system. I was immediately
overwhelmed with excitement and fascination when I saw the Apache welcome
screen. This discovery spawned a great
idea. Previously, our office had never
implemented the creation of a local
intranet. I knew that the use of corporate
intranets were wide spread and anticipated
the need for such a useful source of help
and information in our office.
I immediately set to work, creating web
pages with the use of Netscape Composer,
that contained helpful information that our
users could draw upon when they needed
it. I was amazed at how fast it was to access
these pages through a web browser, rather
than accessing the same information locally,
from a file server or email database. This
16

BSD In a Microsoft Office, continued

was especially apparent while dialed into
our network remotely.
A few months after I put FreeBSD/Apache
to work, news came from upper management
that there was an interest in employing the
use of intranets at all the remote field offices.
Other web servers and content soon sprang
forth and now we have a fully functioning
intranet in place and more and more of our
employees are showing interest and becoming
involved. We have more than a few employees
now who are acting as content publishers and
are creating and maintaining sections of our
intranet themselves. There are also more than
a few employees and co-workers who are now
interested in the BSDs and wish to learn more.
The Apache web server (http://www.apache.org)
was a great find, but it was hardly the end
of many discoveries I would make and ideas
I would come up with. After more reading,
research and tinkering, I had an FTP server
running and after a few days, had a Samba
server (http://www.samba.org) running as
well. This proved to be invaluable, since
now, I can create web pages from any
workstation on our network and copy
them directly to the web directory on
my FreeBSD system!
Acceptance and interest in the various
BSD Operating Systems, and what they are
capable of, was growing. Not only were coworkers in my department taking notice,
but my managers as well. Just the cost
saving factors alone that come with the use
of BSD, and other Open Source operating
systems and applications, are hard not to
take notice of.
Our division had recently moved to a brand
new building in an industrial section of our
city. The building was constructed from the
ground up with our business needs in mind.
Everything in the building has a spacious
and contemporary look and feel, including
a state of the art data center that can be
seen through large glass windows from one
of the main hallways. Our network is fast,
at 100 megabits.
17

A few months after we moved into our new
building, one of my managers voiced the
need for some kind of network monitoring
software or tool that we could employ to
monitor the health of our network and
identify problems. He was considering
the purchase of an expensive, hand held
monitoring tool that would cost thousands
of dollars. I told him that I probably already
had some kind of network analysis software
on my FreeBSD machine and asked him to
give me a little time to find out. I also told
him that if I was able to find something that
would do what we wanted, we could save
our office and the company a lot of money.
He agreed and I was soon searching the
ports collection on my FreeBSD machine
for just such a utility.
It didn’t take me long to discover that I
already had access to powerful network
analysis utilities like The Ethereal Network
Analyzer (www.ethereal.com) and Snort
(www.snort.org).
I decided to start with The Ethereal Network
Analyzer because it was the most GUI of the
utilities that I had found and was a more
tangible and suitable way to present
network analysis information. Most of my
managers and co-workers use Windows NT
and have never had exposure to UNIX
terminal screens or UNIX shell access, much
less the BSDs or even Linux.
During my first attempt at using Ethereal to
monitor our network, I was able to immediately identify a problem and report it so that
corrective action could be taken. I noticed
that one of our Lotus Notes Domino
Servers, running on the IBM iSeries
platform, was sending out a barrage of
network announcements. I immediately
went to our Lotus Notes Administrator and
asked if he was aware of any problems. He
said he hadn’t heard of any and just when I
was about to leave, one of our employees
that was engaged in development on the
server came in and said that she was unable
to log on. It turned out that the problem

was with the TCP/IP configuration and was
soon corrected.
Right away, my managers could see that
this was a useful and powerful utility to
have in place and I still receive requests all
the time to identify possible problems and
collect information on individual nodes
on our network.
Recently, I and other members of our
department had reason to believe that an
intruder was trying to gain direct access to one
of the nodes on our network via telnet or by
using a port sniffer. I used Snort to effectively
capture packet information from this node.
After monitoring the suspicious activity for
a couple of weeks, it was determined that the
attempts were coming from a node with an
invalid IP configuration and not an intruder.
When I first had the idea of finding ways
to use Open Source operating systems and
software at work, I thought I’d have a very
difficult time doing this, since our office has
been a Microsoft/IBM shop for years and
these platforms and associated software
are what our employees are used to using.
I never intended to recommend the
replacement of these platforms in favor
of the BSDs or Linux but rather to employ
and integrate the use of these platforms in
a more cost effective and productive way.
For those of you who are considering
employing the use of FreeBSD, NetBSD,
OpenBSD or BSD/OS in your office or
company, I would recommend that you
install it on an available pc. Explore the
huge number of applications, (currently
over 10,500) in the ports collection and
the many uses these powerful and unique
operating systems have to offer. Start with
things that are tangible and easy to see the
benefits of and understand.

When I first started using FreeBSD, I was
so amazed and taken with it that I could
be heard preaching the BSD gospel almost
every day. Keep in mind that most people
will continue to use whichever operating
system or application they are comfortable
with. Don’t be such an advocate that people
become afraid to even mention the words
“FreeBSD”,”NetBSD”, “OpenBSD” or “BSD”
around you. Remember, the louder you are,
the harder it can be to hear you. The phrase,
“Action speaks louder than words”, certainly
applies here. Quietly learn about the BSDs,
how to use them, and offer the amazing
demonstration when the opportunity
presents itself. Soon, that old pc running
one of the BSDs will be the honey that
attracts the bees!
Joe Warner is a Technical Analyst for
Siemens Medical Solutions Health Services
Corporation and has been using FreeBSD
as a server and desktop since October of
2000. Joe has lived in Salt Lake City, Utah
for most of his life and enjoys *BSD,
computing, history, and The Matrix.
Excerpted from Daemon News: BSD in
a Microsoft Office
www.daemonnews.org/200103/adventure.html

18

Museum Guardian
by John Richard
I was contracted to analyze and improve a
network for a non-profit museum after they
had received a small government grant for
IT. As most people are aware, most nonprofit organizations are usually non-profit
by function rather than by design, therefore
the budget was minimal to non-existent.
After getting the lay of the LAN, I found
very serious security problems, caused by a
complete lack of knowledge and experience
with IT at this organization.
In my report to the manager, I pointed out
that having a MS server with no firewall,
connected to an “always on” broadband
internet connection was a bit risky to say
the least. Having thousands of credit card
numbers in a completely open shared folder
fell under the “very bad thing” category.
After explaining the risks of openly available
shopping on the museums dime, smelling
salts were used to revive her.
I explained that at a minimum, the first
thing required was a rock solid firewall.
“That sounds very expensive. We can’t
afford something like that now” she said.
“Give me a day and it will be in place”
I told her.
I had found an old but functioning Pentium
166 box on the premises, not being used.
“What will this cost?”
“Nothing” I told her.
A new FreeBSD disciple was instantly born.
An additional NIC that I had found in the
PC parts graveyard (museums never throw
things out) was installed and FreeBSD was
easily installed on the old machine. With a
quick kernel rebuild, a few setting changes,
and an ipfilter rulebase that I don’t leave
home without, the museum had a free, solid
firewall. I also made the FreeBSD box the
internal DNS, and DHCP server, as the
existing unit went down more often than
the stock market.
19

I created an IPSEC tunnel to my home
systems using open source software from
the FreeBSD ports collection, and was able
to securely administer the network from
the comfort of home, when needed, by
installing Samba, also from the ports
collection, on the FreeBSD box.
The little sentry functioned flawlessly and
has continued to do so. My only concern
was that one of the volunteer janitorial staff
would throw out the machine due to its
appearance. The server closet was just that,
a closet, and with the ugly little box being
mounted on what appeared to be a milking
stool, it did not come across as impressive
to the untrained eye, even though it was
the guardian for the museum. A large sign,
complete with skull and crossbones reading
“FIREWALL. Do Not Touch on Pain of
Death” fixed that problem.
Without the free availability, functionality,
and stability of FreeBSD, a costly alternate
solution would have been required,
possibly causing the cancellation of
wine and cheese parties.
FreeBSD saved the day.
Incidentally, the credit card numbers were
immediately secured.
John Richard, commonly known as JR, now
works for an ISP in the Kingston Ontario
area, attempting to remove the speedbumps
from the information highway. When not
driving his wife and kids up the wall with
geek-speak, he is usually riding his Harley,
or fixing something for someone.

OpenBSD Saves the Day
by Jan Peterson
My company had recently been acquired.
We were a small software development
company and had been using CVS for our
source code management. Our new parent
company was larger, with an existing web
presence that they intended to integrate
our catalog system into. They were using
Perforce for their source code management,
and mandated that we hook into their
system (i.e., the repository would be located
at their site, in San Diego, and we would
have to check files and work spaces in and
out over the WAN from our offices in Salt
Lake City).
Since we already had a T-1, it was deemed
overly expensive to put in a point-to-point
link. It was decided that a VPN was the best
solution. The new company’s IT/Networking
team was convinced that putting a Cisco
PIX in place at our office was the best
solution (they were a Cisco shop and
already had PIXes for their own firewall).
They immediately started looking at
different PIX models and Cisco’s VPN
technologies, with an eye towards being
able to ship us a configured unit we could
just drop in place (replacing our existing
FreeBSD based firewall at the same time).
Their estimate on a time frame was four to
six weeks.
My developers were anxious to get working
in the new source management system as
soon as possible (with pressure coming from
their new bosses who had mandated that we
cut over within two weeks). They turned to
me to find an interim solution that we could
get running in a hurry. I immediately
suggested an OpenBSD solution using the
IPSEC functionality that was built in to the
OS (this was around the time of OpenBSD
2.7). I got approval from my management,
grabbed my corporate AMEX, and headed
down to CompUSA.

I bought a couple of HP Pavilion desktop
computers (no monitors, keyboards, or
mice) for about $800 ($400 each) and
headed back to the office. In a matter of a
few hours, I had OpenBSD installed on both
machines and was playing with the IPSEC
configurations. One quick phone call later
and FEDEX was on it’s way to pick up a box
containing one configured HP Pavilion. One
day in transit and the box was in San Diego.
I got a call from the parent company’s
network guy the next day. He had received
the machine and set it up right under his
desk (where he could keep an eye on it).
With another hour or two of fiddling with
configurations to get both endpoints talking
to each other, and getting each internal
network routing the appropriate subnets
to each other, we were able to bring up the
IPSEC link and our developers were able to
check their stuff into Perforce on the other
end of the link.
Mission accomplished, thanks to OpenBSD!
We had an IPSEC tunnel in place using
3DES and automatic key exchange.
The company did end up dropping $30k
on a PIX for our location, and ultimately
brought up a “supported” VPN connection.
It only used single DES (the 3DES option on
the PIX was “too expensive”), relied on static
keys, and took six weeks to implement, but
obviously it was superior because it cost a
lot of money. The OpenBSD boxes were
retired and I believe they ended up as
home workstations for internal developers.
Personally, I would have stuck with the
OpenBSD solution. It was fast, cheap, and
it worked. Normally, you only get to pick
two of those!
Jan L. Peterson is a professional system
administrator with 16 years of experience
working with multiple Unix versions (and
the occasional Windows machine). Laid off
20

OpenBSD Saves the Day, continued

from his last job when the company was
acquired by a direct competitor, he has spent
the last couple of years as a consultant. More
about Jan can be found at
http://www.peterson.ath.cx/~jlp/.

21

A FreeBSD Implementation
by Travis Stevenson
A bit of history, I’ve been using FreeBSD
since 2.0 got released. I started on my quest
of all things BSD when I was working for
Clark Development (PCBoard BBS Software)
in 1994. I worked in sales and software
duplication. When the development team
started talking about TCP/IP, I wanted to
learn what it was. I jumped on Aol and
starting searching for TCP/IP. I found a lot
of entries for UNIX but nothing that could
help me and then I typed in the magical
words ‘TCP/IP unix pc’ and I found Linux.
I spent the next few days downloading 17
floppies of Slackware and installed it. It was
very exciting. The first thing I noticed was
the lack of trumpet winsock, I was so niave.
I couldn’t figure out how to get on the
Internet. I jumped back into Win3.1 and
learned how to connect to the Internet.
This went well, but I wasn’t happy.
Linux worked but I thought there was
more. It crashed a couple of times and I was
unhappy with the response of the system
when I went to untar packages. Then I went
back to Aol, started searching for more pc
based unix’s and the next thing I found
was FreeBSD. I went to Walnut Creek
and learned all I could about FreeBSD. This
was a very exciting time. I decided that I
needed to purchase the cd’s this time. I then
spent many days and nights learning about
this operating system. Testing my knowledge,
breaking things that I couldn’t fix and then
trying again. I also starting learning about
a lot of opensource software that was
available and started to implement them.
This was a very knowledgable time for
me and put me on my start of a profession
that I didn’t believe was available for me
at that time.
Jump 3 years. I started working for a
company that developed software for the
lumber industry. I was originally hired to

transfer patches and updates to customers
sites. I transfered from my job to a R&D
one from a comment that I made about
Linux, I told them it was terrible. They then
asked me what I prefer, I said ‘FreeBSD’;
this surprised them and after a few days
they asked me if I would like to join the
team.
Even though the product line ran on AIX
and SCO, they were very much into
Windows and wanted all of us to be
MCSE’s. Which we became. Fortunately,
our IT department was very much into
Linux and open source. Unfortunately,
the company wouldn’t let us use it. So we
slipped it in where we needed it. I was
the only FreeBSD user in the department,
everyone else favored Linux so I got voted
out pretty quickly. I learned a lot things
about SCO and AIX during this time and
plenty on how windows should work.
The success:
5 years ago I was working for a small school
district in Wyoming when I got a job for a
major convienent store chain in the intermountain west. They just got connected to
the Internet and had implemented Linux
on the firewall. Since I had a lot of great
opportunities to learn the tools needed to
create a firewall, I stripped it out in the first
week and changed it to FreeBSD 4.3. The
company was a big AS400 shop and had
started on a couple of projects that would
have utilized Windows gateway products to
connect to the AS400. I balked at this and
said that this could be done with FreeBSD.
IBM had released Linux odbc drivers for the
AS400 that spring and I had attempted to
make it work. Unfortunately I didn’t have
the patience to get apache/php/AS400 odbc
working in Linux emulation so I gave in
and installed Red Hat. But I wasn’t about
to install Linux on the servers that faced
22

A FreeBSD Implementation, continued

the Internet so I created a proxy that would
handle all the requests and send them back
to the web servers.
During this time we had implemented all
the firewalls, vpn’s and web servers on
FreeBSD. The CTO had wanted to implement
these in a span of year. I had accomplished
this in months. The usability of FreeBSD
on our network was set. Then two things
happened that pushed the usage of FreeBSD
from the perimeter to internal processing
and both were related to Microsoft.
One of which was running NT4 to handle
the extraction of flat files databases. This
server would cause us a lot of grief in the
middle of processing data. Under heavy
loads, the server would stop responding
and we would have to reboot. The stores
that were connected would have to be
notified that they would need to resend.
This was time consuming and very interruptive. I then researched perl’s capabilities
of extracting dbase files and created a
solution that allowed the stores to submit
information to the FreeBSD server where it
would extract the information and submit
it to our financial system. This solution was
golden: the uptimes of the servers went to
months and we didn’t have to tell the stores
to resubmit. Since the beginning we have
turned this scenario into a a very powerful
and scalable mechanism for submitting
and prepping information. We also incorporated perl’s XML support to process
Openoffice spreadsheets that get sent
through this mechanism. All of this is
running on FreeBSD.
We had a typcial Microsoft Domain, PDC,
BDC and two Exchange servers. I had
started to look into Samba-TNG as a
domain controller solution. It was received
well but it was viewed as being unnecessary.
Then came Microsoft licensing 6.0. We did
an audit on our licensing and found that we
were short. We decided that we needed to
look at alternatives. Our solutions were
Samba-TNG, LDAP, Cyrus, IMAP, Postfix
23

and ftp/http server for freebusy schedules—
all running on FreeBSD with the services
built around LDAP. It was immediately
approved. We rolled this out in three
weeks with great success.
Since then the success of this has helped in
the creation of a very structured and stable
network where we have authentication
servers, file servers and processing servers,
email servers and database servers all running
on FreeBSD. We still have Windows servers
for Microsoft-only solutions that we can’t
remove and we also have Linux servers. But
even those Windows servers have to authenticate against our FreeBSD servers.
2002 was a difficult year for conveniant
stores as people traveled less. We felt it
financially as I’m sure other companies had.
During this time we were able to increase
the services of our network infrastructure
at only the cost of hardware. This has been
shown as a great value to our company and
will continue to have a place on our network.
For all of the network services that we
provide, we picked FreeBSD for the security,
stability, ease of OS upgrades and the amount
of software that can run on it. With the
ports tree available it has proven to be an
unbeatable solution.
Travis Stevenson is the manager of the
network infrastructure at Maverik Country
Stores in Afton, Wyoming. Over the last 8
years he has administered UNIX and UNIXbased systems and Windows administration.
He currently acts as chief network engineer
and security architect and is a die hard
FreeBSD user.

Open Source Software in Co-operation Ireland
by Mike Doyle
I am the Network Administrator for a charity
that employs roughly 60 staff spread over
4 offices in various parts of Ireland, (Dublin,
Belfast, Armagh and Cork) and also has a
fundraising office in New York. While all
of our end-user computers are PCs running
various versions of Microsoft Windows, we
make considerable use of Open Source
software on our servers.
Our First Experience: email

The first project that introduced Open
Source software into Co-operation Ireland
was setting up a server to serve email to all
staff. We did this towards the end of 1997—
prior to this only two members of staff in
the entire organisation had email access, and
introducing email for all members of staff
was the first “major” project I undertook as
Network Administrator. I evaluated several
commercial mail server applications for
Windows NT, and decided that they were
all prohibitively expensive given my budget,
and our ISP recommended that I look at
FreeBSD. So, I installed FreeBSD 2.2.5 on
a spare computer that was available (it had
a Pentium 90 processor, 32 MB RAM, and
1 GB hard disk space). We used (and still
use) Sendmail as the MTA, and Qpopper as
the POP3 server software. This enabled me
to give each and every member of staff email
without spending large amounts of money.
Expanding our use of Open Source
Software

In 1998 I added two extra packages to the
mail server. The first was Apache, which
allowed us to have an internal website. This
has been a very useful tool as that allows us
to store reference documents that all staff
members need access to in a central location.
The second application installed on the
server, which in time provoked the eventual
upgrade to a server with a larger (2 GB)

hard disk, was Squid, a web proxy server
package. This allowed me to let all the staff
in our Dublin and Belfast offices (which
were connected by ISDN routers) to share
the outbound Internet connection to view
external web pages.
Multi-user Databases over a WAN

Co-operation Ireland had a database that,
when I joined the company, was implemented in Microsoft Access, and was
replicated between the offices in Dublin
and Belfast using scripts to merge changes
between the two copies. This was far from
an ideal solution, and sometimes the replication procedure lost information.
I was tasked with finding a solution to
this problem, and the solution I came up
with used some of the software already
described (Apache), and two more open
source packages: the PHP scripting
language and the PostgreSQL database
software. Using these tools, I was able to
re-implement the database application so
that there was a single database server,
and all the users connected to it using
web-browsers on their desktops. Perl is
also used for some coding tasks (for
example importing/exporting data to
the databases).
File servers for branch offices

Our branch office in Armagh was too small
for the budget to supply a file server. For a
long time the two or three staff members in
Armagh (or Monaghan originally) kept their
files on their own hard disks. A couple of
years ago, I built a server for this office
(again using a PC that was too old for
desktop use) using Samba to provide file
and print sharing. This server also used
one of the two firewalls that comes as part
of FreeBSD to allow all the staff in Armagh
to share an Internet connection. Once again,
24

Open Source Software in Co-operation Ireland, continued

all of the software installed on the server
in Armagh was installed using the FreeBSD
ports system.

news and events sections of the website
up to date. (The discussion forum software
is phpBB).

Web Calendar

Factors influencing choice of software

Another project implemented using Open
Source software has been the roll-out of a
web-calendar for all members of staff. Again,
we are using a package called SWebCal to
implement, free of charge, a feature that is
offered as part of commercial groupware
applications. (It is offered, in addition to
email, as part of both Lotus Notes and
Microsoft Exchange, either of which would
cost a large amount of money for an organisation our size.)

In some cases (e.g. using Samba for file
serving) there is simply a choice of the
commercial software and one Open Source
alternative. In other cases (for example
selecting PostgreSQL as the database server)
there are other choices available. In these
cases ease of installation, quality of on-line
documentation, and even the recommendations of other users on the FreeBSD mailing
lists have helped me to make up my mind
about what to use. I originally selected
PostgreSQL over MySQL after evaluating
them because the HTML documentation
for PostgreSQL was better structured. Even
now almost 5 years later, I still feel that the
biggest differentiating factor between these
two products is the quality of the documentation! My choice of FreeBSD over Linux
was originally based on the recommendation
of an outside “expert”, but I have since used
SuSE and RedHat Linux for various tasks
and always come back to FreeBSD as my
preferred platform given a choice.
As the Network Administrator for a charity,
cost has always been a factor influencing
my decisions, however the tool (hardware
or software) has to actually “get the job
done”, and to do so without wasting my
time, or demanding too much of my users
who are not prepared to learn to use Unix
themselves. We still use commercial
software for many tasks. It would be hard
to quantify an exact cost saving that has
been made, since certain of the tasks that
I use Open Source software to accomplish
would have been ignored or cancelled if
they could not have been carried out at such
a low cost, while others would have been
regarded as critical enough that they would
have been implemented some other way.
The primary advantage of Open Source
software is the cost. The second advantage
is that most of this software is documented

The arrival of DSL, and the
implementation of a VPN

In 2002, DSL became available in Dublin,
and in 2003 it became available in Armagh.
We moved from having a leased line
between our Dublin and Belfast offices to
having a VPN over DSL between these two
offices. When we were able to connect the
Armagh office using DSL, we were able to
extend the VPN to include this site as well.
Once again, the software (Racoon for key
exchange and IPSec for the encrypted
network connections) was distributed along
with FreeBSD. (By this stage, when I rolled
out the VPN to Armagh, FreeBSD had
reached version 4.7. It is currently on
version 4.10).
Again, Co-operation Ireland have been able
to use otherwise obsolete equipment and free
software to implement a solution that would
have cost a large amount of money to build
using off-the-shelf commercial tools.
Public Website

Our external website is hosted on a server
located at our ISP. This server uses Red Hat
Linux (since that is supported by the ISP),
PostgreSQL, Perl and PHP to provide a
dynamic website that includes a discussion
forum for a school project, and an in-house
content management system to keep the
25

extremely well, and this documentation is
available on-line and easy to ﬁnd. While
the quality of the documentation varies, I
have found the on-line documentation for
FreeBSD itself, and for PHP and PostgreSQL
to be of exceptional quality. Samba, Apache
and Perl all have very good online resources
to help an administrator to accomplish any
necessary task, but I personally found
navigating these documents to be a little
slower. To be fair though, much commercial
software comes with downright unhelpful
online help, and so in every case where I am
using Open Source software, the quality of
the documentation has also been a bonus.
Another added factor for selecting Open

Source software has been the speed and
quality of responses to requests for help
posted to the various mailing lists.
(Commercial software usually requires
expensive maintenance contracts to be taken
out for technical support.) Michael Doyle
graduated from University College Dublin
with a B.Sc. in computer science in 1993.
For the past seven years, he has been the
Network Administrator for Co-operation
Ireland, a charity involved in the peaceprocess in Northern Ireland. He lives in
Dublin, Ireland with his wife and infant
daughter. In his spare time (not that he
has much these days) he plays the guitar
and sometimes writes music.

26

BSD Resources
The FreeBSD Project

freebsd.org
The OpenBSD Project

openbsd.org
The NetBSD Project

netbsd.org
BSD DevCenter.

onlamp.com/bsd
DaemonNews

daemonnews.org
BSD Newsletter

bsdnewsletter.com
Putting BSD to work for you

bsdatwork.com
BSD Resources

bsd.reedmedia.net
BSD Forum

bsdvault.net

27

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