Starting with FreeBSD
Written by Guillermo Garron
Date: 2015-01-14 22:00:00 00:00
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