hm…

Well, seriously it’s been a weird few months.

At home I now run ONE machine 24/7 which is a mac mini, makes a change from a multitude of quad xeons racking up the electricity bill, I must admit watching the meter go round and round is quite daunting. I must get to sell all my surplus hardware at some point before it becomes worthless.

I seem to be at a random stage in life, where I am de-cluttering, deleting old files I no longer/will never ever use and refreshing things, I think I need this for my own sanity more than anything? after all a minimal uncluttered life is a happy one apparently. Simple is the way forward, minimal wires/stress free setups. Apply this logic to the entire household and everything is good!

I really need to review my server hardware as I have lots and need to virtualise the remainder of my servers to put my green stamp on it.

At the moment it rather does feel like I am having a midlife crisis.

How to install an SNMP Server with FreeBSD ( made easy )

My preference is using Net-SNMP which is included in ports, start by fetching the latest ports tree;

# portsnap fetch
# portsnap extract

Then head over to the port location and install
# cd /usr/ports/net-mgmt/net-snmp
# make install clean

Copy the sample configuration over to a working configuration if you need some examples
cp /usr/local/share/snmp/snmpd.conf.example /etc/snmpd.conf

Or to work straight out of the box, you can have a quick and dirty configuration containing; ( obviously changing community and bits ) **default is 32**

e.g. rocommunity testcomm:32
Syntax;
rocommunity community:bits

Now to make the snmp server start at boot time;

snmpd_enable=”YES”
snmpd_conffile=”/etc/snmpd.conf”

Without rebooting start the SNMP server;
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/snmpd start

you can test by using;

snmpwalk -v1 -c public 127.0.0.1

FreeBSD Concerns

I have concerns in regards to FreeBSD starting to become a “user friendly” OS, my first gripe was when FreeBSD 10-RELEASE was announced/released which meant “pkg” became the global command instead of pkg_*

Although I understand it is trying to make things easier, it makes me feel dirty, it makes me feel as if it is heading towards the user friendlyness of a typical “Linux” OS, with a full blown easy to use package manager which results in people using more precompiled binaries and not utilizing ports.

Using precompiled binaries means people are going to become more lazy by the day and run applications with more flaws in and features they are not going to use, the end issue being poorly optimised applications.

FreeBSD Ports… who needs to stay up pressing return on prerequisites?

So, you compile a port that is going to take *all* night or even longer and the dreaded “options” keeps appearing after every prerequisite towards a port.

Before compiling the port if you type “make showconfig-recursive” it will present all the options before you compile, so now after you have decided the variables during compiling, you can leave it going without worrying you need to keep going back and pressing return.

It really appears to save substantial amounts of time, I just wish the command was a little more advertised, who knows… maybe there is a lack of people who realize this exists or are like me and guilty of not reading man pages.