I've been doing some networking homework (at home, obviously), to improve my understanding of *nix systems in that area. I honestly wanted to set up a working gateway / server / media station kind of thingy on my hardly-ever-used desktop box. I have a small home LAN consisting of one desktop and two mobile boxen, so I thought converting the desktop into a powerful firewall system was a nice idea. Picked up FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE and here's how it went...

First of all, installing FreeBSD is not that hard. But being a Linux guy, it was a bit awkward. Unix systems have a slightly different approach to partitioning, and device names are also quite different in BSDs. For example, what I used to call /dev/sda1 would in a BSD become /dev/ad1s1 (can't even imagine how all this looks to a Windows user with no *nix experience; FYI, those are the names for the first partition on the first hard disk). And on /dev/ad1s1 there are what Unix guys call partitions, but those partitions all reside inside what Linux guys call a partition (and Unix guys call a slice). Confused yet? I know I was...

Package management is great for server systems. It is the same thing as EBUILDs in Gentoo (probably because EBUILDS are based on FreeBSD ports). I like the idea of being able to compile your own stuff for the server with a little bit of automation. It is quite important for server software not to contain anything you won't be using, to minimize the number of exploitable components.

Then I hit a few potholes. USB keyboard and mouse were all acting weird (as in not working some of the time, especially after boot). Sound was not working either, and my cheap (as in redefines cheap) ehternet card was not recognized either.

You might be wondering why a server has to have a sound card... Well, the reason for this is quite simple. We are talking home LAN, and the only machine that has a good speaker system attached to it is my desktop. So it's was kind of logical that it'd have to serve as a media station as well. If I could afford to throw money on yet another PC, I'd probably go for an older model with no sound and set that up as a gateway, but this way, I had to create a multi-purpose system.

To conclude, BSD is clearly not meant to be run on budget hardware and is not meant to be used by amateurs. I thoroughly enjoyed being exposed to very knowledgeable people in the BSD camp, but my hardware was not compatible, and I had to make a shameful retreat from my project (for now). I am now in the process of setting up an Arch-Linux-based server on the same system, so stay tuned. I'll explain step by step how I set things up.