Here's how you create the install floppies from the 4.3 CD: For a normal CDROM or network installation, all you need to copy onto actual floppies from this directory are the kern.flp and mfsroot.flp images (for 1.44MB floppies). Get two blank, freshly formatted floppies and image copy kern.flp onto one and mfsroot.flp onto the other. These images are NOT DOS files! You cannot simply copy them to a DOS or UFS floppy as regular files, you need to "image" copy them to the floppy with fdimage.exe under DOS (see the tools/ directory on your CDROM or FreeBSD FTP mirror) or the `dd' command in UNIX. For example: To create the kern floppy image from DOS, you'd do something like this: C> fdimage kern.flp a: or d:\tools>fdimage -v -f 1.44M d:\floppies\mfsroot.flp a: Assuming that you'd copied fdimage.exe and kern.flp into a directory somewhere. You would do the same for mfsroot.flp, of course. If you're creating the boot floppy from a UNIX machine, you may find that one of the following: dd if=floppies/kern.flp of=/dev/fd0 dd if=floppies/kern.flp of=/dev/rfd0 dd if=floppies/kern.flp of=/dev/floppy work well, depending on your hardware and operating system environment (different versions of UNIX have totally different names for the floppy drive - neat, huh? :-). Going to two installation boot floppies is a step we definitely would have rather avoided but we simply no longer could due to general code bloat and FreeBSD's many new device drivers in GENERIC. One positive side-effect of this new organizational scheme, however, is that it also allows one to easily make one's own kern or MFS floppies should a need to customize some aspect of the installation process or use a custom kernel for an otherwise unsupported piece of hardware arise. As long as the kernel is compiled with ``options MFS'' and ``options MFS_ROOT'', it will properly look for and boot an mfsroot.flp image in memory when run (see how the /boot/loader.rc file in kern.flp does its thing). The mfsroot.flp image is also just a gzip'd filesystem image which is used as root, something which can be made rather easily using vnconfig(8). If none of that makes any sense to you then don't worry about it - just use the kern.flp and mfsroot.flp images as described above. FDIMAGE - Write disk image to floppy disk Version 1.5 Copyright (c) 1996-7 Robert Nordier Usage: fdimage [-dqsv] [-f size] [-r count] file drive -d Debug mode -f size Specify the floppy disk format by capacity, eg: 160K, 180K, 320K, 360K, 720K, 1.2M, 1.44M, 2.88M -q Quick mode: don't format the disk -r count Retry count for format/write operations -s Single-sector I/O -v Verbose

quick and dirty way that works on the FreeBSD boxes i have access to : ascending : ls -alt | sort +4 descending: ls -alt | sort +4 -r

*** Install FreeBSD on Promise FastTrak *** 1. Dump the image file "kern.flp" to a floppy disk. Mark this disk as "A". e.g. dd if=kern.flp of=/dev/rfd0 2. Dump the image file "mfsroot.flp" to a floppy disk. Mark this disk as "B". e.g. dd if=mfsroot.flp of=/dev/rfd0 3. Insert disk "A" in to floppy drive, insert FreeBSD CD into CDROM drive. Boot machine. Please make sure that floppy disk boot first. 4. When system prompt "Please insert MFS root floppy and press Enter", insert disk "B" and press "Enter". 5. When the machine beep and prompt "Boot [kernel] in X seconds...", press any key (except "Enter"). 6. Type "load ft.ko" to load the module. Type "boot" to go on booting. 7. Start to install FreeBSD. The system may give a warning that the version of FreeBSD CD does not match the version of floppy and ask if you want to retry any way, doesn't matter, press "Enter" to go on installation. 8. When the installation finished, DO NOT reboot the machine. Press Alt-F4 switch to console mode. 9. Copy the file "ft.ko" from disk "B" to "/modules" (please mount first). Change directory to the directory which "kp" resides (on floppy B) and type "./kp" to patch the kernel files. 10. Unmount disk "B", insert disk "A", then mount it. Copy "kernel.gz" from disk "A" to "/". Type "gunzip kernel.gz" to unzip the kernel. Unmount disk "A". 11. Reboot system. 12. Recompile the FreeBSD kernel. 13. Reboot. DONE!

Sounds great, but it didn't work!

Adding a disk with FreeBSD: 12.3.2 Using Command Line Utilities 12.3.2.1 Using Slices This setup will allow your disk to work correctly with other operating systems that might be installed on your computer and will not confuse other operating systems' fdisk utilities. It is recommended to use this method for new disk installs. Only use dedicated mode if you have a good reason to do so! # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rda1 bs=1k count=1 # fdisk -BI da1 #Initialize your new disk # disklabel -B -w -r da1s1 auto #Label it. # disklabel -e da1s1 # Edit the disklabel just created and add any partitions. # mkdir -p /1 # newfs /dev/da1s1e # Repeat this for every partition you created. # mount -t ufs /dev/da1s1e /1 # Mount the partition(s) # vi /etc/fstab # Add the appropriate entry/entries to your /etc/fstab. If you have an IDE disk, substitute ad for da. On pre-4.X systems use wd. 12.3.2.2 Dedicated Adding A Disk to FreeBSD This bit documents the process of adding a new disk to a FreeBSD system. Let's say, for example, that we have a server which has one system disk that contains some four partitions. However, the /usr directory is nearly full, so we have decided offload /usr/home onto a new disk. The current disk is on primary/master on the first IDE chain. It's device id is /dev/ad0. We are adding a drive to the slave possition of that same chain. It is /dev/ad1. Make sure you have the right device before you issue these commands. Don't want to be wrong! fdisk -BI ad1 disklabel -w -B ad1s1 auto disklabel -e ad1s1 newfs /dev/ad1s1c Now we mount the new disk under a temp directory to copy the data over. mount /dev/sd1s1c /mnt cp -Rpv /usr/home /mnt When it's done, check the data, make sure you got everything and that there were no errors. Then unmount the drive from it's temporary place (/mnt). And clear out /usr/home to get the space back on that device. umount /mnt rm -rf /usr/home/ mkdir /usr/home Now simply edit /etc/fstab and put/in or edit the entry for /usr/home. Then 'mount /usr/home' and you are done.

David Chaplin-Loebell (dloebell) Your post inspired me to write out a list of my hard-won FreeBSD knowledge. I'm no expert, but I've had FreeBSD servers for almost three years now and I've learned a few things. Hopefully they're useful for others: FreeBSD (and the ports collection) use the /usr/local tree more consistently than other Unixes I've dealt with. For example: - Config files for locally-installed software live in subdirectories of /usr/local/etc/ -- there's one subdirectory for each package. - Similarly, startup files for locally-installed daemons live in /usr/local/etc/rc.d -- note that many ports will install a ".sample" file in this directory; only files ending in ".sh" are actually run at startup. - Docs for locally installed packages go in /usr/local/share/doc The nice thing about all this is you rarely have to mess with /etc, and that's good because /etc files are routinely replaced in system upgrades. (There's a tool called mergemaster that helps deal with this, but it's a pain to use, and it's better to simply minimize modifications of files in /etc). I know I mentioned cvsup and portupgrade earlier, but I'll reiterate: every FreeBSD system needs these two tools. There's a good article on portupgrade here: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2001/11/29/Big_Scary_Daemons.html CVSUP is a bit harder to find a good explanation for. It's easy once you build a proper config file, but figuring out what to put in that config file the first time can be a bit confusing. I suggest: *default host=cvsup2.FreeBSD.org *default base=/usr *default prefix=/usr *default release=cvs *default tag=RELENG_4_8 *default delete use-rel-suffix src-all ports-all tag=. This says: get the latest sources in the 4.8-RELEASE tag, and the latest ports. I prefer to track 4.x-RELEASE on my machines (I'll move to 5.x-RELEASE when the FreeBSD team declares it "production" ready.) Some admins seem to prefer tracking FreeBSD 4-STABLE, but in my mind this changes too often to use on production servers. If you prefer to track -STABLE, simply replace RELENG_4_8 with RELENG_4. Subscribe to the FreeBSD security alerts mailing list at http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-security-notifications so you know when you need to upgrade your system. If you read only one section of the FreeBSD manual, read about how to do system upgrades. Basically, you cvsup your sources, do a make buildworld, make buildkernel, make installkernel, reboot, make installworld, mergemaster. But of course there are details, and if you're running an internet server you should know how to do this. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html FreeBSD has many useful options that can be controlled by editing /etc/rc.conf. In particular, this file is used for enabling and disabling built-in subsystems like Sendmail, sshd, nfs, etc. If you deal with perl, do yourself a favor and install the /usr/ports/lang/perl5, then type use.perl port. This means that you will use the version of perl installed from ports, not the version that is part of the FreeBSD system. The version installed with the system is 5.005_03, very outdated, and not easy to upgrade. Do this BEFORE you install any Perl modules from CPAN. When possible, install everything from ports. Don't install things by any other method unless the port doesn't work or is unavailable. (In particular, installing perl modules using the CPAN module seems to get me in trouble whenever I do it. I almost always discover that the module I needed was available in the FreeBSD ports collection after all). On a server, I generally want only the command-line version of a tool, not the X11 version. For example, if you go into the emacs port directory and type "make install", it will, by default, build X11 before it builds emacs, and build an emacs binary with lots of X11 stuff in it that you don't need. In most ports, you can disable this behavior by typing make install WITHOUT_X11=1