Install some useful applications

Written by Greg King Friday, 27 November 2009 00:00

Now that our FreeBSD system is built, lets add some usefull applications to it... Now I know you loved that EDIT program, but there is a new sheriff in town called NANO! Nano is an update to the old PICO email editor that became popular with the PINE text based email client. Pine was cool in it's day, but was buggy, and not very feature rich. Nano gave pico one huge feature.. Search and Replace!

Install NANO

# portinstall editors/nano
# rehash

Now, that wasn't too hard, was it? By the way, we give the command 'rehash' after an install so that the path variable is updated. This way we can use NANO right away... otherwise you would have to log out and log back in before you could use it.

Install Network Time Protocol Daemon (NTPD)

NTPD let's us syncronize our time against the atomic clock. It is very easy to set up and can come in handy at times!

# portinstall net/ntp

To ensure the NTP server is started at boot time, add the line ntpd_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf and to synchronize your clock when the machine boots up, add ntpdate_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf.

# echo 'ntpd_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf

NTP is configured by the /etc/ntp.conf file in the format described in man ntp.conf.

# cat << EOF > /etc/ntp.conf

at the ? prompt, paste

server time.nist.gov prefer
server ntp2.usno.navy.mil
server bonehed.lcs.mit.edu

driftfile /var/db/ntp.drift

restrict 192.168.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 notrust nomodify notrap
EOF

Add restrict (edit IP for your network) if you only want to allow machines within your own network to synchronize their clocks with your server, but ensure they are not allowed to configure the server or used as peers to synchronize against.

To start the server without rebooting your machine, run ntpd:

# ntpd -p /var/run/ntpd.pid

Install Figlet

Figlet is a fun little application that lets you form letters out of characters. I use it for my login banner as I have several systems and sometimes forget which one I logged into. Using figlet, you can input test and get output

# figlet like this                                                                     
 _ _ _          _   _     _     
| (_) | _____  | |_| |__ (_)___ 
| | | |/ / _ \ | __| '_ \| / __|
| | |   <  __/ | |_| | | | \__ \
|_|_|_|\_\___|  \__|_| |_|_|___/

# portinstall misc/figlet

>>>Figlet-fonts Installation:

This port installs around 150 fonts for the figlet(6) program. Most of these are better suited for demonstrating the level of boredom somebody reached rather than regular use.

# portinstall misc/figlet-fonts

Figlet can print in a variety of fonts, both left-to-right and right-to-left. Figlet comes with several fonts. Also, many other fonts are avaiable, including Hebrew, Cyrillic (Russian), and Greek.

There is also a "Figlet Home Page" on the Worldwide Web. WWW: http://www.figlet.org/

Check-out the man page for figlet's usage and more than you'll ever want to know...

# man figlet

I don't have the SAMBA installation instructions here. However, I had a problem attempting to write to samba directories. The error (on Windows) was 0x80070021 . The solution was to edit the smb.cnf file and add the following line in the [global] section

strict locking = no

FreeBSD Configuration