Starting with FreeBSD

Starting with FreeBSD on Digital Ocean

I have received an email today telling me that I am now able to install FreeBSD on DigitalOcean, of course I have inmediately headed to D.O. and created a new droplet and have chosen FreeBSD.

I have read a lot of good things about FreeBSD, and now that it is available on Digital Ocean I will start experimenting with it a little bit more than before.

I will be posting on this section of the site some of my discoveries, and on tips section small but useful tips I surely will be discovering about FreeBSD operating system. Let's now see what were the first steps preparing the server to work with it.

After login in, with the freebsd account as required, I discovered that I have sudo powers on that account.

The first steps for me in every new system I install is to put all the tools I normally use:

• vim
• htop
• iftop

Htop on freeBSD

To install htop I had to go over these steps

sudo pkg install htop

Then I needed to modify the /etc/fstab file and add this line. linproc /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw,late 0 0 so,

sudo echo "linproc /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw,late 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

Finally run this command.

sudo mkdir -p /usr/compat/linux/proc; ln -s /usr/compat /compat; mount linproc

Well, I now have htop installed.

Install vim on FreeBSD

Another must have of my tool belt is vim, this was a simple one.

sudo pkg install vim

Install iftop on FreeBSD

It is now turn of iftop, this is a tool I use a lot to monitor who is connecting to my system and on which ports, and how much bandwidth it is using.

sudo pkg install iftop

I can now monitor the traffic on my server with:

sudo iftop -i vtnet0 -pP

And I will on realtime the information about who is connecting to my server, on which port, and at what speed.

Install vnstat on FreeBSD

I use vnstat to monitor the bandwidth consumed on my VPS server over a month, so I can be sure not to exceep my quota.

sudo pkg install vnstat

vnstat cannot be used right away, it needs some configuration, so, let's do it.

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/vnstat

sudo vnstat -i vtnet0 --create