Network Administration with FreeBSD

278 Pages·2008·6.6 MB·English

by  Babak Farrokhi

Network Administration with
FreeBSD 7
Building, securing, and maintaining networks with the
FreeBSD operating system
Babak Farrokhi
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Network Administration with FreeBSD 7
Copyright © 2008 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: April 2008
Production Reference: 1070408
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847192-64-6
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Nilesh Mohite ([email protected])
Credits
Author Project Coordinator
Babak Farrokhi Abhijeet Deobhakta
Reviewer Indexer
Roman Bogorodskiy Hemangini Bari
Acquisition Editor Proofreader
Rashmi Phadnis Nina Hasso
Technical Editor Production Coordinator
Della Pradeep Aparna Bhagat
Editorial Team Leader Cover Work
Mithil Kulkarni Aparna Bhagat
Project Manager
Abhijeet Deobhakta
About the Author
Babak Farrokhi is an experienced UNIX system administrator and Network
Engineer who worked for 12 years in the IT industry in carrier-level network service
providers. He discovered FreeBSD around 1997 and since then he has been using it
on a daily basis. He is also an experienced Solaris administrator and has extensive
experience in TCP/IP networks.
In his spare time, he contributes to the open source community and develops his
skills to keep himself in the cutting edge.
You may contact Babak at [email protected] and his personal website at
http://farrokhi.net/
I would like to thank my wife, Hana, for being the source of
inspiration in my life. Without her support and patience I could not
finish this project.

Next I'd like to thank the Technical Reviewer of the book, Roman
Bogorodskiy ([email protected]) for his thorough review, great
suggestions, and excellent notes that helped me to come up with the
chapters even better.

I also want to thank PACKT and everyone I worked with, Priyanka
Baruah,Abhijeet Deobhakta, Rashmi Phadnis, Patricia Weir, Della
Pradeep and others for their patience and cooperation. Without
their help I could not turn my scattered notes into a professional
looking book.
About the Reviewer
Roman Bogorodskiy lives in Russia, Saratov. He is a student of the Mechanics
and Mathematics faculty at the Saratov State University. At the time of writing, he
was working on a diploma project. He is working as a Software Engineer in the one
of the biggest ISPs of his hometown. He takes part in various open source projects
and got his FreeBSD commit bit back in 2005.

Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: System Configuration—Disks 7
Partition Layout and Sizes 7
Swap 9
Adding More Swap Space 10
Swap Encryption 12
Softupdates 12
Snapshots 13
Quotas 15
Assigning Quotas 16
File System Backup 18
Dump and Restore 18
The tar, cpio, and pax Utilities 22
Snapshots 23
RAID-GEOM Framework 24
RAID0—Striping 24
RAID1—Mirroring 26
Disk Concatenation 27
Summary 28
Chapter 2: System Configuration—Keeping it Updated 29
CVSup—Synchronizing the Source Code 30
Tracking –STABLE 31
Tracking –CURRENT 33
Ports Collection 34
Tracking Ports 34
Portsnap 35
Security Advisories 36
VuXML—Vulnerability Database 37
Table of Contents
CVS Branch Tag 37
Customizing and Rebuilding Kernel 38
Rebuilding World 40
Binary Update 42
Recovering from a Dead Kernel 43
Summary 45
Chapter 3: System Configuration—Software Package Management 47
Ports and Packages 48
The Legacy Method 48
Software Directories 49
Packages 49
Ports 51
Package Management Tools 55
Portupgrade 56
portinstall 56
pkg_deinstall 57
portversion 58
pkg_which 59
portsclean 59
Portmaster 60
Summary 60
Chapter 4: System Configuration—System Management 63
Process Management and Control 63
Processes and Daemons 64
Getting Information about Running Processes—ps, top, and pgrep 65
Sending Signals to Running Processes—kill, killall, and pkill 67
Prioritizing Running Processes—nice and renice 68
Resource Management and Control 69
System Resource Monitoring Tools—vmstat, iostat, pstat, and systat 69
Process Accounting 72
Summary 73
Chapter 5: System Configuration—Jails 75
Concept 75
Introduction 76
Setting Up a Jail 77
Configuring the Host System 78
Starting the Jail 80
Automatic Startup 81
Shutting Down Jails 82
Managing Jails 82
[ ii ]
Table of Contents.
Jail Security 84
Jail Limitations 85
Summary 85
Chapter 6: System Configuration—Tuning Performance 87
Tweaking Kernel Variables using SYSCTL 88
Kernel 89
SMP 91
Disk 92
File limits 92
I/O Performance 92
RAID 93
Network 94
TCP Delayed ACK 94
RFC 1323 Extensions 95
TCP Listen Queue Size 95
TCP Buffer Space 95
Network Interface Polling 96
The /etc/make.conf file 97
CPUTYPE 97
CFLAGS and COPTFLAGS 98
The /boot/loader.conf file 98
Summary 99
Chapter 7: Network Configuration—Basics 101
Ifconfig Utility 101
Configuring IP Address 106
Configuring Layer2 Address 107
Configuring IPX 107
Configuring AppleTalk 108
Configuring Secondary (alias) IP Addresses 109
Configuring Media Options 110
Configuring VLANs 112
Advanced ifconfig Options 113
Hardware Offloading 114
Promiscuous Mode 115
MTU 116
ARP 116
Static ARP 117
Monitor Mode 118
Configuring Fast EtherChannel 118
Default Routing 119
Name Resolution 120
[ iii ]