freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 395, Issue 10

[Jeffrey McFadden]

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 6:00 AM, <freebsd-questions-request at freebsd.org>wrote:

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> Matthew Seaman wrote:


> Message: 9
> Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 09:34:02 +0000
> From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: very small network
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Message-ID: <4EFED70A.8080005 at infracaninophile.co.uk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> On 31/12/2011 04:12, Jeffrey McFadden wrote:
> > I bought into FreeBSD with a DVD of PC-BSD.  It's great, but the PC-BSD
> > user manual is not up to the level of the FreeBSD manual.  In the latter
> I
> > have found, as you all suggested, all the necessary information.
> >
> > I haven't set the network up yet but I expect to be able to run both
> server
> > and client NFS on each machine to enable networking both ways.  They are
> > all laptops of one sort  or another (Asus eee, Toshiba Satellite, late
> > model Sony Vaio)  and it sort of depends on where I sit which machine
> needs
> > to be client and which server, if that makes any sense.
>
> Perfect sense.
>
> One thing I'd expect PC-BSD to have (or at least to make easy to enable)
> is Apple-esque zeroconf networking.  That means you should be able to
> plug a new build machine into your network, and it will discover other
> machines on the net and give you the ability to mount filesystems, or
> print to attached printers, and all without having a designated central
> controlling server.  I take it this is the sort of thing you mean by
> setting up your network?
>

As I look, yes, PC-BSD does have such a thing, and it has a "network
browser" built into it, too.  It almost looks like it is designed to use
Samba even between BSD machines; does this make sense?

>
> This is a very attractive model as it is very simple from the user point
> of view.  You don't necessarily need to have any dedicated servers,
> although such things as a DHCP server are still useful (I suspect your
> broadband router probably has that function).  On the other hand, it is
> probably a bit harder to set up than a strict client-server setup with
> dedicated servers.
>

It is attractive, but I don't see any way to configure exported filesystems
other than going back to NFS, which is all right, but I'm trying to
understand what this other option might mean to me.

>
> The key software requirement here is to set up multicast DNS.  There are
> a number of packages in the ports to do this -- mDNSresponder, howl, but
> what I'd recommend is avahi as it is best integrated with other software
> packages.  For the shared networking thing, you can use samba between
> FreeBSD machines, but you'll need to build samba from ports since the
> AVAHI option isn't enabled by default.
>

As you may know, PC-BSD has a system they call PBI (Push Button
Installation) to install pre-built packages via a "software manager" app on
the system.  Needless to say, it does not offer all 23K+ ports.  There is a
.PBI version of Samba; I wonder if it has Avahi enabled by default.

>
>        Cheers,
>
>        Matthew
>

Thanks for the help,

Jeff

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