Chapter 16 Miscellaneous Questions

FreeBSD only appears to use more swap than Linux. In actual fact, it does not. The main difference between FreeBSD and Linux in this regard is that FreeBSD will proactively move entirely idle, unused pages of main memory into swap in order to make more main memory available for active use. Linux tends to only move pages to swap as a last resort. The perceived heavier use of swap is balanced by the more efficient use of main memory.

Note that while FreeBSD is proactive in this regard, it does not arbitrarily decide to swap pages when the system is truly idle. Thus you will not find your system all paged out when you get up in the morning after leaving it idle overnight.

The simple answer is that free memory is wasted memory. Any memory that your programs do not actively allocate is used within the FreeBSD kernel as disk cache. The values shown by top(1) labeled as Inact, Cache, and Buf are all cached data at different aging levels. This cached data means the system does not have to access a slow disk again for data it has accessed recently, thus increasing overall performance. In general, a low value shown for Free memory in top(1) is good, provided it is not very low.

Symlinks do not have permissions, and by default, chmod(1) will not follow symlinks to change the permissions on the target file. So if you have a file, foo, and a symlink to that file, bar, then this command will always succeed.

% chmod g-w bar

However, the permissions on foo will not have changed.

You have to use either -H or -L together with the -R option to make this work. See the chmod(1) and symlink(7) manual pages for more info.

Yes, you can use emulators/doscmd, a DOS emulation program, available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection.

If doscmd will not suffice, the add-on utility emulators/pcemu emulates an 8088 and enough BIOS services to run many DOS text mode applications. It requires the X Window System.

See the Translation FAQ in the FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer.

The FreeBSD.org mail system implements some of the stricter Postfix checks on incoming mail and rejects mail that is either misconfigured or is potential spam. Your mail might bounce for one of the following reasons:

• The email is being sent from a known spam domain or IP block.

  The FreeBSD mail servers reject email from known spam sources. If you have service through a company or domain who generates or relays spam, please switch to a service provider who does not.

• The body of the email only contains HTML.

  Mail should be sent in plain text only. Please configure your mail user agent to send plain text.

• The mailer at FreeBSD.org cannot resolve the IP address of the connecting host back to a symbolic name.

  Working reverse DNS is a standard requirement for accepting mail from a host. Set up reverse DNS for your mail server's IP address. Many home services (DSL, cable, dialup, etc.) will not give you this option. In this case, relay your email through your service provider's mail server.

• The hostname given in the EHLO/HELO part of the SMTP exchange cannot be resolved to an IP address.

  A fully qualified, resolvable host name is necessary in this part of the SMTP dialogue before mail will be accepted. If you do not have a host name that is registered in the DNS, then you should use your service provider's mail server to relay your mail.

• Your message had a message ID ending with the string “localhost”.

  Some mail user agents generate bad message IDs which will not be accepted. You will need to persuade your mail user agent to generate a valid message ID or else configure your mail transfer agent to rewrite them.

While FreeBSD does not provide open access to any of their servers, others do provide open access UNIX® systems. The charge varies and limited services may be available.

Arbornet, Inc, also known as M-Net, has been providing open access to UNIX systems since 1983. Starting on an Altos running System III, the site switched to BSD/OS in 1991. In June of 2000, the site switched again to FreeBSD. M-Net can be accessed via telnet and SSH and provides basic access to the entire FreeBSD software suite. However, network access is limited to members and patrons who donate to the system, which is run as a non-profit organization. M-Net also provides an bulletin board system and interactive chat.

Grex provides a site very similar to M-Net including the same bulletin board and interactive chat software. However, the machine is a Sun™ 4M and is running SunOS™.

SUP stands for Software Update Protocol, and was developed by CMU for keeping their development trees in sync. We used it to keep remote sites in sync with our central development sources.

SUP is not bandwidth friendly, and has been retired. The current recommended method to keep your sources up to date is CVSup

He does not have one, and is just called “the BSD daemon”. If you insist upon using a name, call him “beastie”. Note that “beastie” is pronounced “BSD”.

You can learn more about the BSD daemon on his home page.

Perhaps. The BSD daemon is copyrighted by Marshall Kirk McKusick. You will want to check his Statement on the Use of the BSD Daemon Figure for detailed usage terms.

In summary, you are free to use the image in a tasteful manner, for personal use, so long as appropriate credit is given. If you want to use him commercially, you must contact Kirk McKusick. More details are available on the BSD Daemon's home page.

You will find eps and Xfig drawings under /usr/share/examples/BSD_daemon/.

MFC is an acronym for “Merged From -CURRENT”. It is used in the CVS logs to denote when a change was migrated from the CURRENT to the STABLE branches.

It stands for something in a secret language that only members can know. It does not translate literally but it is ok to tell you that BSD's translation is something between, “Formula-1 Racing Team”, “Penguins are tasty snacks”, and “We have a better sense of humor than Linux”. :-)

Seriously, BSD is an acronym for “Berkeley Software Distribution”, which is the name the Berkeley CSRG (Computer Systems Research Group) chose for their UNIX distribution way back when.

Principle of Least Astonishment. It means that as FreeBSD evolves, changes visible to the user should be kept as unsurprising as possible. For example, arbitrarily rearranging system startup variables in /etc/defaults/rc.conf violates POLA. Developers consider POLA when contemplating user-visible system changes.

A repo-copy (which is a short form of “repository copy”) refers to the direct copying of files within the CVS repository.

Without a repo-copy, if a file needed to be copied or moved to another place in the repository, the committer would run cvs add to put the file in its new location, and then cvs rm on the old file if the old copy was being removed.

The disadvantage of this method is that the history (i.e. the entries in the CVS logs) of the file would not be copied to the new location. As the FreeBSD Project considers this history very useful, a repository copy is often used instead. This is a process where one of the repository meisters will copy the files directly within the repository, rather than using the cvs(1) program.

The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.

The longer and more complete answer is that after a very long argument about whether sleep(1) should take fractional second arguments, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@FreeBSD.org> posted a long message entitled “A bike shed (any color will do) on greener grass...”. The appropriate portions of that message are quoted below.