5.0-RELEASE missing info
Roger Merritt
mcrogerm at stjohn.ac.th
Wed May 21 04:07:57 PDT 2003
I hope I'm sending this to the right list. If not, please tell me
(suggest?) a more appropriate list.
Because of a power supply problem that is taking a long time to fix, I
recently had to set up a replacement server (gateway for a LAN). Naturally
I chose to set up FreeBSD. Since it was urgent and ordering a CD by mail
would take at least a week, I downloaded by ftp. Hope I don't have to do
that again soon. Anyway, I followed the instructions in the Handbook, which
pointed me to
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/5.0-RELEASE/floppies/. OK,
I noticed that "5.0-RELEASE" in there, but I've seen a number of comments
in this list that 5.0 is going to be the next STABLE so figured I might as
well go ahead.
OK, so I successfully installed 5.0-RELEASE by ftp. Then I went to
/usr/src/sys/i386/conf to set up my kernel configuration file. To my
astonishment, there was no LINT file. Instead there was something called
NOTES! And you know what? NOTES does not show a single network option.
Luckily the man page for natd (which I need to use) mentions that you have
to recompile the kernel with "options IPFIREWALL and options IPDIVERT", or
I could have gotten the options from my 4.8-STABLE configuration file, but
there was nothing in the GENERIC configuration file or in NOTES to tell me
whether or not these options were acceptable.
So after sweating for a while I went ahead and added options IPFIREWALL,
options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE, and options IPDIVERT at the end of my
configuration file and compiled and installed the new kernel and IT
WORKED!!! But I'm still irked by the fact that there is NO mention of what
networking options are available or necessary. In my case, I've installed
FreeBSD several times over the last few years and have learned about the
need to recompile the kernel, but how are newcomers going to find out about
this? The sysinstall script gives the impression that the firewall is
enabled during installation, but in fact it's not. You get a GENERIC kernel
with no way to send packets out -- deny by default!
Does this seem like something that should be brought to somebody's
attention, or am I just over-dramatizing things?
--
Roger
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