Recommended reading: FreeBSD for production server use

[Nico Meijer]

Hi David,

> Try "Unix System Administration", from O'Reilly. It's a huge book but 
> it's very readable and covers FreeBSD.

Thanks for the tip. I love huge books. It's what "vacation" is made for.


> But it's not a "cookbook", in 
> that it won't give you recipes for success. You will need to apply the
> 
> principles you've learned by yourself. After all, every system is 
> different.

Indeed, but I'm sure there are documents/books on ways to keep a server
running "current" / "stable" (I don't mean -CURRENT or -STABLE) that are
(more) FreeBSD specific.

Perhaps some real questions would clear things up.

Let's say I run a production status FreeBSD 4.8 server. Do I track
RELENG_4_8? Do I track -STABLE (RELENG_4, I believe)? (My bet is on
RELENG_4_8)

Let's say I use ports on that server. 'ports' has no cvs tag, as opposed
to OpenBSD's ports system. Do I cvsup my ports tree regularly? If so, do
I issue 'portupgrade -ar' every now and then? That, for instance, would
upgrade my 'mod_php4' to version 4.3.3-RC1. Being "RC1", it is not
intended for production use. OTOH, my Apache would now be a patchlevel
5, which would seem good to me, at first glance (didn't check what the
changes were from p4).

[For configuring and setting up Apache, I would read Apache docs and
books. Maintaining Apache on FreeBSD is a somewhat different ballgame.]

Let's say I run ipfw on that server? Will 'ipfw add check-state' and
accompanying 'ipfw add allow tcp from [whatever] to me via [interface]
port [number] setup keep-state' rules a) work (verified, it does) b)
hold up under heavy network load?

These are the types of questions I would like to see answered. Be it
electronically or on paper. Ooh! My googling (they now officialy hate it
when you say that ;-) turned up something:
http://www.zenspider.com/Admin/Updates.html. Some more pointers. :-)

I hope I clarified some. I'm generally not out for a FreeBSD reference
per se (I currently don't care for running it on my workstation), I'm
out for "(a) FreeBSD server reference(s)".

Thanks a bunch... Nico

P.S. I'm not looking for the answers here (even though they'd be
appreciated), I'm looking for ways of finding the answers.