This article originally appeared in the June 2003 issue of the Dæmon News Online Magazine. This is a cleaned-up version of the article with minor style edits and made it HTML5 compliant; else, the content has not been changed.
Author: Roderick Smith
Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Osborne
Pages: 912
ISBN: 0-07-222409-6
A couple of years ago, there were only a handful of books on FreeBSD. Two of those are still considered the must-reads for anyone learning or using FreeBSD: The FreeBSD Handbook and The Complete FreeBSD. Today, there are several more books available, dedicated to FreeBSD or have included coverage on FreeBSD. In this month's book review, I will be taking a look at one of the recently released titles that bills itself as "The Complete Reference" to FreeBSD. My goal for this book review is to pick through it's nits and find out if it lives up to its name or not.
The version of FreeBSD that is focused in the book is 5.0-RELEASE, which is included with the book on a single CD, though almost all of the information and instructions provided are also applicable to the 4.x versions of FreeBSD. The audience that the author is targeting with this book is primarily those who have not worked with FreeBSD or another UNIX or UNIX-like operating system and want to learn how to setup and administer a FreeBSD workstation or setup a server running FreeBSD. Below is the table of contents for the book, which you can refer to while reading the review.
Part I - FreeBSD Installation
|
Part IV - Servers
Glossary |
The book is broken into six parts progressing from starting with FreeBSD to some more advanced topics such as security and getting a workstation or server ready for use in a development or production environment.
Before jumping into the meat of the book, there is one thing that the author does in the book that irked me a bit and could irk some people as well. Instead of using the de facto standard domain names example.com, example.org or example.net (as described in RFC 2606, the author uses three currently unregistered domains (luna.edu, pangaea.edu and threeroomco.com) throughout the book. This could cause problems if/when those domains do become registered but mostly if the reader decides to actually use those domains in their own setup.
The first part of the book provides a brief introduction to FreeBSD, along with how it can be used
and how it compares with other operating systems (UNIX-like or not), the requirements for the
OS, and the installation process. In chapter one, the
author goes into a fair amount of high-level information on hardware supported by FreeBSD, but for
some reason does not mention wireless networks. Chapters two and four cover installing FreeBSD on
a system and making it work with other operating system installs including a very brief look at the
FreeBSD boot loader, reading disks and file systems created/used with another operating system.
Also covered in chapter four is running applications under emulation or compatibility layers. The
author covers the more basic portions of the installation process since only the Standard
installation option is covered; installing over a network connection and setting up XFree86 using
xf86cfg is briefly discussed.
Chapter three covers what happens after the reader boots into the newly (and hopefully working)
install of FreeBSD by providing some information on what the boot messages are saying, logging into
the system and su-ing to root, and covering the basic commands such as ls and cp
as well as a high-level walkthrough of the
GNOME environment (which is the chosen
graphical, or desktop, environment in the book), and how to properly shutdown a system.
Part II introduces FreeBSD system administration to the reader by covering some of the more key
topics like setting up users, programs and building a custom kernel. Chapter five describes some of
the more common configuration files, using text-editors (vi and gedit are covered, though vim/gvim
are not mentioned), system information commands like df, ps, kill and
nice/renice, using pipes and redirection, and mentions of graphical system
administration tools (like Webmin). Chapter six discusses what a kernel is and does for a system,
creating startup scripts, user login and a rough overview of
PAM, and scheduling jobs using
at and cron. On the topic of startup scripts, the author covers how to start up
programs using /etc/rc.local then tells the reader that rc.local is deprecated
and the reader should setup rc.d scripts under /usr/local/etc/rc.d instead. To me, the
time spent covering /etc/rc.local is wasted and the author should have just mentioned it
and referred the reader to use rc.d scripts instead.
Partitions and directory structure are the two main topics for chapter seven. The first half of
the chapter covers creating and labeling new partitions (either by using sysinstall or
command line tools (fdisk, disklabel and newfs), and
mounting/unmounting file systems (NFS is mentioned,
but not CIFS/SMBFS for Windows/Samba file share. The second
half of the chapter is dedicated on the topic of FHS, which provides a guideline of how
directories should be used and how the file system and directories should be laid out, and how
it relates to FreeBSD.
Chapter eight covers working with files on a system, including managing ownership and permissions
(which includes a table of commonly used octal numbers used with chmod and a brief on
SUID, SGID and sticky
bit), basic file operations, creating soft and hard links, searching for text within files and
backing up files. On the topic of backing up, the author mentions some forms of backup media and the
use of tar. The author only mentions dump and cpio and doesn't provide
any information on how to use either; also the lack of coverage on tools for tape drives and working
with tape drive device nodes in FreeBSD seems to make the backup section quite lacking.
Chapter nine takes a look at printing in FreeBSD, including a look at the line printer dæmon (LPD), print queues (local or remote), an overview of PostScript and print filter GhostScript, and printing from different applications. The author also provides some insights on what kinds of printers to avoid due to lack of support outside of Windows. As far as sharing printer queues to other systems, the author only touches on adding hosts to the LPD access list, but not how to share printers to Windows systems using Samba until chapter eighteen; even then, the coverage is quite limited.
User management is the topic of chapter ten, which includes a look at what makes up users and groups,
add, removing and changing user accounts either by using included tools like sysinstall,
adduser and rmuser, or manually hacking /etc/master.passwd. The author also
covers working with groups and where they come in play with file and directory permissions. For some
reason, the author failed to mention the vipw utility when the master password file was
discussed. The vipw allows you to edit /etc/master.passwd using the editor set in the
EDITOR environment variable, and runs consistency checks on the file right after you save and
exit out of the editor. If the file passes the check, it will then replace /etc/master.passwd
with the edited version and update the user database.
In chapter eleven, the author writes about installing, uninstalling and maintaining software by using
built-in components and facilities (ports and packages) or portupgrade. Installing packages via
sysinstall and MD5 checksum is also covered; but not some of the tools included with the
portupgrade package like pkg_deinstall, portinstall and portversion
(pkgdb is discussed only to "fix" the package database).
The author covers installing and updating the kernel source files, kernel load and boot options, loading and unloading kernel modules, and compiling a custom kernel in chapter twelve. Although the author does provide some good reasons to build a custom kernel, but the kernel configuration file coverage is limited to basic syntax examples. Also, the author does cover how to load a different kernel at boot time, no mention is made on how to replace a bad kernel with a previous kernel build once the system has finally been booted.
Chapter thirteen provides an overview of window managers, configuring the XFree86 X Windows server
(including how to run multiple instances of XFree86), and getting additional fonts or font types setup.
The author spends a fair part of the chapter covering the pieces and syntax of the XFree86 configuration
file, XF86Config (which is more than what can be said about the kernel configuration file), but
no mention of the XFT configuration file, XftConfig.
In Part III of the book, the author goes into the networking side of FreeBSD. Chapters fourteen and
fifteen target connecting a FreeBSD system up to a local or dial-up networking respectively. The first
part of chapter fourteen is an overview of networking hardware, routing, and a comparison of several
common network protocols. The rest of the chapter covers setting up a network interface (either
statically or dynamically with DHCP),
configuring network routes, and resolving hostnames by using provided
DNS servers or adding hosts to the system's host file,
/etc/hosts. The author gets into configuring a system to dial up to the Internet via an
ISP by using an application called X-ISP or by
configuring the PPP dæmon, as well as setting
up PPPoE (required by quite a few
DSL providers).
For some reason, I think chapter sixteen is kind of a filler; it contains various topics that could have
been integrated in previous chapters (like the discussion of
TCP/IP ports and connections,
and using netstat to help pinpoint possible network configuration issues) or deferred until the
next chapter on firewalls and routers.
Chapter seventeen, as mentioned above, is on the topic of setting up a firewall on a FreeBSD system. The
author starts off with an explanation of the purpose of a firewall or a proxy and what it is not meant to
do, thwart attacks from inside, and the different types of firewalls. The rest of the chapter covers
setting up IPFW (IPFilter is mentioned and provides a URL to the project's page but isn't discussed any
further) and the NAT dæmon (natd).
Overall, the author gives enough for the reader to start experimenting with IPFW rules, but doesn't
provide any insight on setting up a true IPFW firewall for a network which would reflect a real-world
rulesets. I found the amount of information lacking, mostly for those who are just beginning to learn IPFW.
The focus of Part IV is on common server services including file, mail, web and other network services found in most networks, some of which can be fairly transparent. The first chapter of Part IV, eighteen, takes a look at setting up three of the most common file server services: FTP, NFS, and Samba, a file service that is not only used for serving files to Windows machines, but also other UNIX-like servers. The coverage for the three services is rather limited to how to enable the FTP service included with FreeBSD, setting up and limiting access to NFS shares/exports, and getting a basic Samba server running. I was surprised that the author did not cover how to chroot FTP logins, setting up Samba to act as a WINS name server for Windows clients, and no mention or look at Samba's web adminstration tool (or SWAT).
In chapter nineteen, the author covers the topic of mail servers, from SMTP to POP3 and IMAP, and a tiny bit on Procmail. Interestingly enough, the author uses the term "push" to describe SMTP servers and "pull" to describe POP3 and IMAP servers. Nonetheless, the amount of detail that the author goes into for either is rather minimal, mostly when it comes to Sendmail. The main Sendmail configuration file can be one of the hardest to understand and the author only touches on domain names that the server receives, how to allow domain-specific relaying, and telling Sendmail to block messages based on the message header contents and/or if the sender is listed in any blackhole lists. Procmail coverage is also thin and only two basic rules are mentioned; even with the thin coverage, the author does not list any online resources for Procmail recipes and tutorials. In the remaining part of the chapter, the author shows the reader, once installed, how to enable the University of Washington's POP3 and IMAP dæmons and how to use Fetchmail. It's disappointing that there isn't any look at setting up and configuring more secure alternates to Sendmail and UW's POP3 and IMAP software (like Postfix or Qmail for Sendmail and popa3d or Courier IMAP for UW's package).
Web servers, or the Apache web server specifically, is the topic of chapter twenty where the author goes into the basic configuration of an Apache server (running Apache 2.x, though what the author does cover also applies with the more stable Apache 1.3.x release). The author only covers enough of the Apache server configuration in order to get a very minimal setup running; nothing on hosting multiple sites, nothing on how to get Perl or PHP scripts working (there is no mention of PHP). The author wraps up with a breakdown of a very minimal HTML file, explaining some commonly used tags, and some words on building web pages that aren't browser-centric and how to test for "portability" and accessibility of such pages.
The author writes about login and X authentication servers in combination with connecting to servers
remotely. First up is Telnet, where the author goes into the uses for the rudimentary (and insecure)
protocol for logging into remote machines. Thankfully, the author does provide some insights on how to
restrict Telnet access using available mechanisms in FreeBSD (like firewalls and TCP wrappers); though
the author doesn't go in-depth into some additional uses of Telnet like testing SMTP servers or how to
actually get data from web or FTP servers. After Telnet, the author goes a bit into
SSH login and basic SSH configuration. The last section of the
chapter covers X login mechanisms like xauth and
XDMCP, and using VNC for graphical login
sessions for running X applications.
Chapter twenty-two takes a look some additional servers that are commonly used but (most) do not quite fit in with the other chapters in Part IV. First up is ISC's DHCP server where the author looks at what DHCP is used for and it's advantages, getting a DHCP server configured and up and running, and assigning static IP addresses (also known as "reservations" in Microsoft terminology). Something that wasn't touched upon but would be nice to see are WINS options that are used with Windows clients; also, the author provided the following command to find a MAC address of an interface:
dmesg | grep "Ethernet address"
An easier and shorter command would have been:
ifconfig -a
The next section of the chapter is on setting up the base system's BIND DNS server to act as both a caching name server and an authoritative name server for any domains. The information present should be enough to get the reader started and to understand the syntax of the files; the author refers the reader to DNS and BIND, 4th Edition by Albitz and Liu for further reading. The last section of the chapter covers setting up a local NTP server to get and provide "accurate" time to a local network, and setting up separate X font server for other X clients or X window servers. I think the X font server section should have been with the rest of the X Windows server content, in chapter thirteen. Also, the author provided a web page address on page 541 to a list of stratum (or level) 2 servers for NTP, but the link is a dud. The correct link should be http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/clock2a.html, and not http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/clock2.htm.
Part V of the book takes on how FreeBSD can be used as a user's workstation, including a look at common applications and tools such as office suites, multimedia players and graphic editing tools. Chapter twenty-three takes on the task of explaining desktop environments and window managers to the user. As stated earlier in the book, GNOME is chosen as the desktop environment of choice and is covered in fair detail. KDE and XFce are also mentioned as other popular choices, but both are left up to the reader to experiment with and learn.
Client-side networking tools and applications are the topics of chapter twenty-four. The author lightly touches on the basic concepts and minimal configuration hints of e-mail clients (although many of the popular clients are mentioned, like Mutt, Evolution, Pine, Sylpheed and KMail, but it's left up to the reader to do the research), web browsers, file access clients (including FTP and Secure FTP, as well as connecting NFS and Samba/Windows shares), and remote shell clients (Telnet and SSH). After reading through the chapter, it seems that the author presents just enough to pique the reader's interest in the programs, but not enough to get the reader started with at least one e-mail client or web browser. Also, there is no mention of using PGP or GNU Privacy Guard, or GnuPG for short, for digitally signing or encrypting e-mail messages.
The sole topic of chapter twenty-five is office tools, OpenOffice.org in particular. The author starts off with a run-down of the contents of the GNOME Office, KDE's KOffice and the OpenOffice.org suite, some additional tools like LaTeX, and some gotchas with office tools under FreeBSD (as well as UNIX in general) such as font and printing quirks. The rest of the chapter goes into the use of OpenOffice.org's word processing, spreadsheet, graphics and presentation components. The author does an okay job with covering the basics of each of the components, but doesn't go into some of the known quirks (to US/Canada users) of the defaults used in OpenOffice.org, such as changing between OpenOffice.org's default page size from ISO A4 versus US Letter and changing between centimeters and inches.
Chapter twenty-six is dedicated to graphics tools ranging from The GIMP for bitmap graphics editing to Xfig for vector image creation, creating plots with Gnuplot, Dia for diagrams, and working with PostScript and PDF files. The amount of coverage dedicated to The GIMP seems a bit too much and could have been trimmed down a bit and provided links to online tutorials and manuals for The GIMP (in particular, The GIMP Manual is a must read for those interested in learning the program).
The last chapter of Part V, twenty-seven, takes a look at multimedia (both listening and recording)
and a bit at the gaming side of FreeBSD. The first thing that is covered in the chapter is finding if
your sound card is supported under FreeBSD (the author refers the reader to the HARDWARE.TXT
file included in any install medium), setting up the sound devices and tweaking the volume settings.
The author then goes into using cd2mp3 (available from the Ports collection) to copy tracks
from CD into MP3 format, provides a couple of short lists of MP3 and other audio/video players, and
overview of some common audio/video file formats (including their
MIME types). The last part of the
chapters goes into a brief look at command-line and X11-based games, and mentions the possibility of
playing some Windows games using an open sourced Windows
API compatibility layer called
Wine.
Part VI, the last main section of the book, takes on the topic of maintaining a system, be it a
workstation or a server, once it is up and running. Chapter twenty-eight is on the topic of both
automated and manual routine maintenance and starts off with a look at FreeBSD's newsyslog
tool that is used to not only rotate the system's log, syslog, but other application logs. Next up
in the chapter are how to deal with temporary files that programs can leave behind, removing unused
programs, and monitoring and enforcing resource usage. The author provides steps on how to setup
quotas, using renice to reduce a process' priority level, and setting up swap files. The
last section of the chapter covers updating programs using portupgrade and a basic run-down
of how to make world. A couple of tools and configuration files that the author didn't, but
should have, covered that are used in monitoring and limiting resource usage include: vmstat
to view resource and virtual memory usage, /etc/login.conf to limit resource usage on a
per-user (rather, per user class) basis, and sysctl to increase or decrease the number of
sockets, file handles, and many other system wide resource pools.
Although FreeBSD is a relatively secure operating system, keeping a system (mostly one that is publically available and provides many services) secure is still a rather hefty task. In chapter twenty-nine, the author provides some information on a couple of common system attacks, finding applications that have open sockets and removing them if necessary, and different ways to limit access to a server. One access limiting mechanism that the author covers is TCP Wrappers, which provides a way to restrict or allow certain connections to specific hostnames, IP addresses or subnets and to specific services that support TCP wrappers. The amount of information is enough to get the reader started with it, but doesn't mention some of the pitfalls associated with using TCP wrappers. The rest of the chapter focuses on providing tips for creating secure passwords (but no mention of authentication mechanisms that does away with passwords like One-Time Passwords or other challenge mechanisms that are available for both regular and remote SSH login sessions), detecting intrusions and using Tripwire to help with the task, and what should be done after an intrusion occurs.
Even with over 8000 ports in the FreeBSD Ports collection, there are many other
applications and programs that, although available in source form and will run on FreeBSD, are not
in the collection and needs to be compiled "by hand". The author provides some instructions
on how to compile software using the configure tool and with make, as well as a
look at what languages, compilers and development environments are in chapter thirty. Most of the
short chapter is dedicated to getting MLVWM,
which is also available in Ports, prepped for compiling, compiled and installed. I am not sure if this
chapter is really worth the pages that it takes up; on one hand, the explanation of what compilers are
and what some of the commonly-used tools to build programs is informative and warranted... but the
author should have also taken a look at building a program from scratch using the GNU C compiler,
gcc (or just cc in FreeBSD), and provide troubleshooting tips either instead of
complementing the build and installing of a program using just configure and make.
The sole topic of chapter thirty-one is writing shell scripts for the Bourne shell, /bin/sh
in FreeBSD. The author starts off with an explanation of and a comparison between compiled and
interpreted code, along with mentions of some of the most common scripting languages (such as Perl and
Python). The rest of the chapter looks at how to write Bourne shell scripts, including how to use
command line arguments, different constructs like if/fi and case/esac,
and using functions. I think this chapter is one of the better chapters in the book, as it explains one
of the best features of UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems and covers much of what the reader needs to
understand Bourne shell scripting; though it shouldn't be taken as a complete and concise reference for
Bourne or other Bourne-like shell scripting for those looking at learning all of the nuances and hacks
available.
Chapter thirty-two, the last chapter of the book, wraps up the book with ways to troubleshoot issues and quirks that can arise with a system. The chapter starts off with a list of some resources available to learn and find out more information related to FreeBSD and other applications, online resources for help (such as communities, newsgroups and mailing lists). Something that I would like to have seen in that section are terms for netiquette and examples of how and how not to ask for help in mailing lists or newsgroups. The remainder of the chapter goes into trying to find and narrow down problems with either hardware or software, some tools to test out finicky hardware (memory, or RAM in particular), and some hints on setting up a secondary install of FreeBSD. Unfortunately, how to use the FreeBSD fixit floppy is not covered or tips on how to increase the verbosity or debug levels of some common or key programs and services.
After reading through the entire book, I found that the book leaves a lot to be desired from something that is billed as The Complete Reference, even for people just starting to learn FreeBSD. There are many places that the author seems to skip over any detailed explanation or breakdown of key configuration files, or even providing the reader with something more than a completely bare-bones setup (case in point: configuring Apache). Then there are topics that are just completely missing from the book; some of those topics include:
sysctl control options or tuning application settings
for heavy-duty servers or workstations.tar and controlling tape drives and tape autoloaders.One may say that adding those topics would have made the book much longer than it already is (the book is definitely no lightweight book), but I think it should be manageable since the book has a lot of fluff and filler material that could easily be removed. On the topic of the book's length, the book is definitely not geared or should be used as a portable reference book; not only for it's size and weight, but just that the book doesn't have as much detail or coverage as say Essential System Administration or The FreeBSD Handbook.
With the qualms that I have with the book and the lack of coverage or detail presented in the book, it is
hard for me to recommend this book to those interested in learning FreeBSD, much less to anyone with
experience in other UNIX or UNIX-like operating systems. Instead, for those wanting to learn UNIX and
FreeBSD, I would recommend two books in place of FreeBSD: The Complete Reference:
A Practical Guide to the UNIX System, Third Edition by Mark G. Sobell (which
covers the BSD side of UNIX in general, including shell scripting and more in-depth tutorial on vi
and EMACS) and The Complete FreeBSD by Greg Lehey or
The FreeBSD Handbook by the FreeBSD Documentation Project. Michael Lucas'
Absolute BSD would also be a good replacement. For those wanting a more
advanced reference, Æleen Frisch's Essential System Administration, 3rd
Edition along with either Greg Lehey's book or The FreeBSD Handbook.
Article copyright © 2003–2010 Linh Pham. All rights reserved. Re-production of portions of this work, or its entirety, requires permission of the copyright holder.