New user - small file server questions and quick GUI question

[Kaya Saman]

>
> The most common cause is that either hald (sysutils/hal) or dbus (devel/dbus) 
> isn't running. Xorg needs them both to detect mouse and keyboard. Add 
> dbus_enable="YES" and hald_enable="YES" to rc.conf to get them to start 
> automatically.
>   

We'll see what the issue actually is - as I mentioned I kinda stuffed 
this question in without any proper log or tty output to support 
anything I mentioned which is quite ad-hoc and not recommended on 
mailing lists of this caliber unless wanting to irritate the participants.

Just need to clear up my notebooks drive first before setting up the VM 
environment to test!

>   
>
> I agree with Adam Vande More's opinion that UFS2 is the way to go on such a 
> low memory system. UFS2 also works well with large disks (1+ TB) if you tune 
> the newfs parameters a bit (mainly to shorten the fsck time). With geom(8) 
> you can do all kinds of mirroring/striping if you're into RAID. With regards 
> to stability, UFS2 was before the import of ZFS the only filesystem widely 
> used. It is very well tested, and in my opinion, very stable. In fact, I 
> can't remember ever having a UFS2 filesystem go bad to the point I couldn't 
> repair it anymore. If you're expecting lots of power outages, it may be 
> worthwile to set up journaling using gjournal(8), which will reduce fsck 
> times considerably, at the cost of reduced streaming write speed (which will 
> halve unless a dedicated journal disk is used).
>   

I agree also and thank you guys for your opinions! As mentioned I know 
UFS1 from Solaris 9 on my SPARC systems and have never had any issues 
with it at all.

"Hang on what are these things called slices and this wacky naming 
convention I thought disks where labeled hdax or sdax according to the 
partition...." :-P sorry internal joke!

>   
>
> That won't be a problem. To illustrate, FreeBSD on a 256MB (i386) machine has 
> about 211MB memory free just after startup. To be safe you could configure a 
> large swap, so the system won't kill the memory hogs as soon as it runs out 
> of memory.
>   

Yeah I reckon large swap also! Usually round 2 or 3 times amount of 
memory but for everyday generic use I find about 1.5 - 3 gigs is enough. 
This is the good part of static filesystems I find over ZFS is that the 
swap space is easily tunable without editing ZFS pools or other.

>
> NFS, BIND, SNMP (bsnmpd) and NTP come with the OS and are installed by 
> default. Samba can be installed from ports.
>   

Hmm.... I will need a bit of assistance for the ports part as I'm kinda 
used to Debian backports through the Apt repos but BSD ports is 
something quite different. I'm sure there's plenty of documentation on 
the web to find out how to install and implement!

bsnmpd sounds to me more like snmpx from Solaris in terms of that it is 
different from opensnmpd. Not a problem won't be doing any SNMP 
monitoring right now as I don't have anything to monitor as my router 
isn't even my beloved Cisco at the mo. When I have more memory I will 
play around with SNMP monitoring software if available for BSD, and my 
all time favorite: Cacti.

>   
> Good luck!
>
> Pieter
>   

Thanks a lot Pieter!!!!

--Kaya