The most difficult part of building a server with FreeBSD, the Unix-like operating system, is arguably software installation and configuration. Finding the software is easy enough; getting everything up and running is another thing entirely. The only option for many people has been to hire a consultant.
Building a Server with FreeBSD 7 is for those of us who prefer to build our own server. If you're a small business owner looking for a reliable email server, a curious Windows administrator, or if you just want to put that old computer in the closet to work, you'll learn how to get things up and running quickly. Then, once you have a working system, you can experiment, extend, and customize as you please.
You'll learn how to install FreeBSD, then how to install popular server applications with the ports collection. Each package is treated as an independent module, so you can dip into the book at any point to install just the packages you need, when you need them. The book's modules cover topics like:
Running common FreeBSD admin commands and tasks
Managing the FreeBSD ports collection
Installing third-party apps like Apache, Courier-IMAP, SpamAssassin, CUPS, Cyrus SASL, MediaWiki, and WordPress
Setting up MySQL, NTP, ISC DHCP, ISC BIND DNS, PHP, OpenLDAP, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and OpenVPN
Building a Server with FreeBSD 7 will have you up and running fast, with minimum hassle. (Just be sure to send the money you save to the Unemployed Consultant Foundation.)
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Just follow ...:
Read it, follow it to the word and you have a working system. It is that simple.
As a Mac user I felt somewhat left out...:
This really is a very good book especially if you wish to build a server to provide services to Windows clients. I wish there was coverage for installing Netatalk and Avahi or other such zero configuration networking protocol to serve Mac clients. After all, FreeBSD is a UNIX type OS and Mac OS X is UNIX as well. With the rapid growth of the Mac OS in the last couple of years coverage of services to better work with the Mac would have been appreciated.
Good quick reference:
A good quick reference, and ties in well with the topics presented in Absolute FreeBSD (2nd ed) by M Lucas. But Lucas has a much better writing style, and gets across his technical info in a better way, by explaining why things work the way they do. Building a Server with FreeBSD 7 is kind of the quick and dirty, do this, do this, done. And although it has helped me set up FreeBSD on my first try as a competent server, I'm still trying to find out why the book tells you to do certain things and how... more info
A quick and Dirty Guide to FreeBSD:
I was initially very impressed by this book until I ran into a problem with the phpbb3 installation. Like so many other Tech books I'm learning to live with authors who don't actually don't try out the instructions in there own book. Notably you cannot successfully run the application phpBB3 the way it's laid out in the book. I was able to Google a solution to the problem, but then why buy the book? If Mr. Hong doesn't want to go into the details of a what "PHP" is or in this case php5-extensions, I'm ok... more info
