SysAdmins' Chronicles

Just if you missed it, FreeBSD 6.4 (if you’re still on the 6 series of releases) was released two days ago. Checkout the release notes here.

FreeBSD by default runs three sets of periodic scripts that outputs a volume of information about your system's current state. The output of these scripts are sent to the root account's mailbox. If you are like me and have a number of FreeBSD servers, its a pain to go check this mailbox on each machine. Well here is an easy fix to send the output of the scripts to any email address.

Edit /etc/periodic.conf and add:

daily_output="ben@domain.com"
daily_status_security_output="ben@domain.com"
weekly_output="ben@domain.com"
monthly_output="ben@domain.com"

To test that this is working run: periodic daily as root. The security run output should arrive in your mailbox.

Most of the performance benefit in FreeBSD is gained by switching from the default 4BSD scheduler to the ULE scheduler. This scheduler was introduced to FreeBSD in version 5. Since its induction to FreeBSD it has seen many improvements. By the end of this guide you will be booted into FreeBSD 7 and using the ULE scheduler.

cd /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf
cp GENERIC CUSTOM
ee CUSTOM

There are two things to change in this file then we can move to compiling and installing the new and improved kernel.

ident        CUSTOM
options       SCHED_ULE

Thats it! once that is done running the following commands and reboot.

cd /usr/src
make kernel KERNCONF=CUSTOM

This is a surprisingly simple process. I just upgraded my development system and it took me about 10 minutes to be completely back up and running. As of FreeBSD 6.3 the freebsd-update utility supports upgrading to new binary releases. All of this can be done in one simple step.

freebsd-update upgrade -r 7.0-RELEASE

Enjoy!

This is a monumental day for FreeBSD users. The long awaited version 7.0 of FreeBSD has finally arrived. There are many great improvements like 350% - 1500% performance increase with SMP machines. Read the release notes for more details.

-Ron

In FreeBSD 6.2, you could add the polling option in /etc/rc.conf for a given interface or specify it manually when using ifconfig. This enabled device polling if you enabled it when recompiling your kernel. In FreeBSD 6.3 polling is no longer an option for ifconfig. So, make sure it is not specified in /etc/rc.conf for your network interfaces, otherwise when you restart, your network interfaces will not have an IP address set. Thus, leading to a rather annoying walk over to the server room.

When upgrading from FreeBSD 6.2 to FreeBSD 6.3 with freebsd-update (detailed here) and using a custom built kernel, there is one extra step to be fully upgraded. After you follow the three steps from the instructions and reboot for the second time, you will be unpleasantly surprised to see that you are still using a 6.2 kernel. In fact all you need to do now and go rebuild your customized kernel, install it and reboot. Now you will have a customized 6.3 kernel installed.