FreeBSD 8.0 - New Installation

I performed a FreeBSD 8.0 installation on my AMD64 CPU machine starting on April 26, 2010.

This is an incomplete description I'm keeping for my own reference.

Preparation

In December, 2010, I prepared an installation DVD of FreeBSD 8.0 for the amd46 platform. In April, 2010, I installed two identical Western Digital Caviar Green 640 GB hard drives with the eventual plan to mirror them.

BIOS

I didn't need to adjust the BIOS settings for initial installation.

The BIOS provides the ability to select a priority order of boot devices, which I kept at DVD, hard drive, and floppy drive (I still have one of those). The BIOS provided the ability to select a priority order among all optical drives (kept the existing order) and hard drives (kept the existing order, which appeared to be based on the numbering of the SATA ports - I kept SATA 1 for the existing hard drive with FreeBSD 7.0, and used SATA 2 and 3 for the new drives.

Initial Installation of 8.0

Inserted installation DVD, rebooted, chose choice 1 (normal boot) in FreeBSD boot menu. Selected United States in the countries menu. In the main installation menu, chose Custom but that looked more advanced than I wanted to try. Back to the main installation menu, chose Standard.

Setting up Drives

I had the choice of drives ad4, ad6, and ad8. I chose ad6 for the installation - that is one of the new 640GB drives.

At first I tried to add the following partitions:

/ (root)
swap
/tmp
/var
/usr
/usr/ports
/usr/obj
/home
/work

However, the partition numbering system broke down for /home and /work, providing partition names of X and Y, respectively. This looked like an indication that sysinstall would not handle more than 7 partitions on a drive.

Sure enough, when I attempted to complete the installation and reboot, the boot aborted because it was not able to handle the X and Y partitions.

Then, I tried the following partitions:

/ (root) - ad6s1a
swap - ad6s1b
/tmp - ad6s1d
/var - ad6s1e
/usr - ad6s1f
/home - ad6s1g
/work - ad6s1h

This worked once I completed the remainder of the installation process.

Network Setup

I chose, as before, the nfe0 device which has had support for it in the kernel since 7.0.

Ports and Packages

I forgot to note all of the packages I installed. Included:

portaudit
portinstall
python
ruby
subversion

I could not install linux_base_f10_10_2.

I typically install by building from source, so I installed a minimum number of packages.

Users and Groups

I added myself as a user, in a group with my name (what happens when leave the group name blank), and added myself to the wheel group.

I set the root password.

Creating RAID 1 Mirror

My main two resources for creating a pair of mirrored disks were:

The latter resource was the primary one.

FreeBSD 4.9 - New Installation

Here are the details on how I prepare a new installation of FreeBSD (based on 4.9) on a machine intended for use as a workstation (not a server, so I install X).

Booting the FreeBSD installation CD

Configure your machine so you can boot off the CD, then do so to enter the installation program

Kernel Installation

Skip the Kernel Configuration
Choose Standard Installation
Partition the disk(s) - use entire disk for FreeBSD unless you are dual-booting, then retain the boot disk for the existing operating system, and use the other disks for FreeBSD

Disk Partitioning

Enable soft updates on all partitions except swaps and root
Create root partition and give it 512MB
Give swap partition(s) twice the size of RAM. If you have two SCSI disks, split swap equally between the two disks, each having a size equal to the amount of RAM.
Define partition for /tmp - it may be useful to size /tmp to be twice the size of a CD, plus a little bit, if you are going to be doing level 0 dumps and making ISOs of them for eventual burning onto a CD for backup.
Define partition for /home
Define partition for /var - this gets to be earlier since the data here is changing more often
Define partition for /usr - this partition deserves at least 4 GB especially if you don't create a separate partition for /usr/ports
Define a partition for /usr/ports - this should be at least 4.5 GB if you want to build some seriously large apps like OpenOffice
Think about defining a partition for /usr/obj, since this directory tree will be changing due to kernel and tool rebuilds
Create a separate partition for each jail
Create partition(s) for the remaining space

On Distributions, choose ALL for workstations, choose SERVER for servers
Choose yes when asked if you want to install the ports tree
Exit to the previous form
Choose which medium to use in order to install FreeBSD (CD/DVD by default)
Confirm disk writes

Post-installation Setup

This isn't post-installation in the way I'm listing my web pages. This involves after the initial generic kernel is installed, but still within the same invocation of the FreeBSD installation program.

Configure Ethernet
- Card
- No IPv6
- No DHCP
- Set host with FQDN
- Set domain
- Set IPv4 gateway
- Set name server (can set only one right now)
- Set static IPv4 address of this machine
- Set netmask
- Leave extra options blank
Bring the Ethernet interface up
Don't designate/setup this machine as a network gateway
Don't activate inetd
Don't permit anonymous FTP
Don't set up as an NFS Server
Don't set up as an NFS Client
Don't set a default security profile (use moderate security)
Customize system console settings (like the screensaver)
Set time zone
- CMOS clock not set to UTC
- 1 America (N/S), 45 United States, 16 Pacific Time
- Say PDT looks reasonable
Enable Linux binary compatibility
System has a non-USB mouse
1. Enable/run mouse daemon
2. Ensure mouse moves in test
Don't do X Server configuration here. Do it later, after exiting the installation program, else failure to configure X will kill post-install phase of the installation program.