BSD Hacks

Chapter 7. Going Beyond the Basics

Introduction

Have you ever wondered what modifications a web or mail administrator makes to her servers? Maybe you’re curious about what policies other administrators use to implement bandwidth control? How do busy administrators manage the log data from a server farm?

Perhaps you’ve contemplated using the Expect scripting language. However, there’s a good chance you’ve never thought of using eesh, a totally undocumented but useful scripting utility.

This chapter also includes two hacks on the emergency repair process, as many users prefer to hope that they’ll never need an emergency repair kit. Instead, learn to overcome your fear of the inevitable and master the art of repairing before the emergency.

Tune FreeBSD for Different Applications

Know how to tune and what to tune on your FreeBSD system

As an administrator, you want to tune your server systems so they work at peak efficiency. How do you know what to tune? The answer depends heavily upon the system’s function. Will the system perform a lot of small network transactions? Will it perform a small number of large transactions? How will disk operations factor in?

How you answer these and other questions determines what you need to do to improve the performance of your systems. This hack starts with general optimizations and then looks at function-specific tunables.

Optimizing Software Compiling

A good place to start is with software compiling, as you want to compile software and updates as efficiently ...