Your instructor may indicate some updates or changes to these exercises. Due to timing issues the exercises were printed before full testing could take place on the local lab machines.
Exercises
1.) Initial login, virtual terminals, command line manipulation [Top]
The first time you login on your system after installation you will be presented with a prompt that looks something like this:
FreeBSD/i386 (pcN.presanog.org.bt) (ttyv0)
login:
At this point you can enter in "root" and, when prompted, the password we gave you in class for the root account. Once you are logged in you can work with an additional 7 virtual terminals if you wish. Actually, you can login from any virtual terminal you want at any time. To do this simply press:
ALT-FN
With "FN" being anything from the F1 to the F8 key. By default you are in ttyv0 which corresponds to the ALT-F1 keyboard sequence. Go ahead and login and then press:
ALT-F2
and login again. Feel free to do this on F3, F4, F8, etc. as you wish. You can cycle through each terminal session easily. This is an extremely useful technique when you wish to do more than one thing at the same time, but you are not using a graphical interface. Since we are loading the mouse daemon (mouse support) you can, also, copy and paste text between your virtual terminals. To do this go back to your initial login terminal by pressing:
ALT-F1
Try typing in the command:
$ clear
and pressing ENTER. Note that your screen clears and goes to the top. Now, you can easily recover your last command by pressing the UP-ARROW key on your keyboard once. Get used to doing this as it can be very useful if you have entered in a long command and made a mistake. You can press UP-ARROW to get the command back, then you can use the LEFT-ARROW to move your cursor to where the mistake is and correct it, then simply press ENTER to reissue the command. Note, you do not need to go back to the end of the command line before pressing ENTER.
In any case, you've pressed UP-ARROW once and should have the command "clear" visible. Now take your mouse and highlight just the command using the left mouse button. Without doing anything else with your mouse now press:
ALT-F2
to get to one of your other terminal sessions. Now just press the middle mouse button once. What happened? The text "clear" should have pasted on to your command line. Now you can press ENTER to execute the command. You can use this same trick to copy and paste in to editor windows, long and complex commands, between applications in a graphical environment, etc.
One final useful tip when working in your terminal sessions. As you type each command it is being saved in to a file called your "history file". This has a very useful purpose. Go back to your original login terminal pressing:
ALT-F1
and type the command:
$ history
You should see a list of commands you have entered in earlier. This list is probably short and it will even include incorrect commands you may have typed in. To quickly and immediately recover and execute a prior command make note of the number in the left-hand column next to the command and then just type:
$ !N
Where N is the number. So, if "clear" had been the second command, and you typed in:
$ !2
Then clear would appear on the command line very quickly and immediately execute. During the week you are going to be typing in some long and complex commands. The use of history can save you considerable time. If you press the UP-ARROW key repeatedly you can scroll through the previous commands you have entered beginning with the last command. Give it a try.
2.) Use /stand/sysinstall and pkg_add to install lynx, bash, and joe [Top]
For this exercise you need to be logged in as root.
FreeBSD has a large collection of preconfigured binary packages for each release that can be installed in a number of ways, including:
/stand/sysinstall (don't use this now).pkg_add pkg_delete pkg_infoYou can read about each of these package commands using the "man" command, i.e.:
Remember, the pkg utilities under FreeBSD are very powerful as they can resolve dependencies, let you test installation before actually installing software, and keep track of what is installed with utilities to query the package database and assocated files.$ man pkg_delete
$ man pkg_add
For our first package we are going to install a text-based web browser called lynx. We'll use the /stand/sysinstall program to install lynx from the first disc of the FreeBSD CD-ROM installation set.
First,you can see if lynx is already installed on your system. Use the pkg_info command to do this. To get an idea of what packages are installed and what the default pkg_info output looks like type:
$ pkg_info | more
You'll notice a pause while your machine prepares to show
all the packages installed, in alphabetical order. Press space to
scroll down the list, or ctrl-c to stop the list.
Now to check for just the lynx package type:
$ pkg_info | grep lynx
or
$ pkg_info lynx\*
If you don't understand what "grep" is doing type "man
grep". In exercise 10 we are going to go in to detail about the use of "grep", and the pipe facility represented above by the "|" character.
If lynx is already installed, for purposes of this exercise, first remove the package from our system (it's good practice!). You can do this by typing:
$ pkg_delete lynx-2.8.5
Now type again:
$ pkg_info | grep lynx
And, assuming that lynx is now not installed you should just get your prompt back.
Now to install lynx using the FreeBSD install CD-ROM do the following:
Insert the FreeBSD Disc 1 Installation CD in your machine's CD-ROM drive.and enter in the root password if requested to do so. Now you need to mount the CD-ROM. That is, you need to let the operating system know that there is a CD-ROM in your CD-ROM drive and you need to tell it where to view the files. This is different than Windows and we will discuss this in more detail during the week. Note that you can automate this process if you wish, but for purposes of a server machine you may not want to do this to keep CDs from automatically mounting and executing code.
Be sure that you are logged in as the root user, or type:
$ su
The command to mount the CD-ROM is:
$ mount /cdrom
To prove to yourself that your cd-rom is now visible and usable you can type:
$ ls /cdrom
Now start the "sysinstall" utility by typing:
$ /stand/sysinstall
At this point you take the following steps in the sysinstall menu system to choose the lynx package and install it:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/acd0 660384 660384 0 100% /cdromIf you don't see the "/cdrom" entry, then type:
$ mount /cdrom
again to make sure your CD-ROM is correctly mounted.
Installation of bash
Now let's install the bash package using a single command. As your FreeBSD CD-ROM is mounted under /cdrom, and as your instructor knows where the bash package resides on your CD, you could install bash by typing:
$ pkg_add /cdrom/packages/shells/bash-2.05b.007_2.tbz
But, rather than doing this, let's do this a bit differently. First use the cd (Change Directory) command to change to the initial cd-rom directory. Then we'll change to the directory /cdrom/packages/All. The "All" directory contains a list of all packages available to be installed on the cd-rom. It has the advantage that if you use pkg_add installing from this directory that if there are dependent packages that are needed, then they will be found and installed as well. So, first do:
Now let's look for the bash package. We can use the ls command to do this with a wildcard. You'll be practicing and learning much more about these basic system commands in a few more exercises. OK, so do:$ cd /cdrom
$ cd packages/All
$ ls bash*
You should see bash-2.05b.007_2.tbz on your screen. This is how you know the exact name of the package you want to install. In addition, once you have installed and are using the bash package it will be easy to use command completion to figure out complicated filenames like these. You'll see more of this in exercise 7. So, now that you know you want to install the package called bash-2.05b.007_2.tbz, and you are already in the directory where this file resides, then you can simply type:
$ pkg_add bash-2.05b.007_2.tbz
and the bash package will be installed. By the way, bash is an alternate shell environment that you can use which has more features than the default shell sh. We'll setup your own user account to use bash a bit later. Notice the file extension of "tbz" on the file bash-2.05b.007_2.tbz, this means that the file is actually a group of files that have been compressed and saved as a single file.
Installation of joe
Later today we'll be practicing the use of the "vi" editor, which is not as friendly as the optional "joe" editor. There are reasons for this, which we'll explain. But, for later exercises let's install "joe" right now, but this time we'll install from our local workshop server. If the server name is different than what is shown below your workshop instructor will let you know.
To install the "joe" editor from the local workshop server you can simply type the following:
$ pkg_add ftp://noc.presanog.org.bt/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5.3-release/All/joe-2.8_5.tbz
This will download and install the joe 2.8_5 package to your machine from the local workshop server.
Do a little bit of exploring about what you have just installed by entering the following commands:
$ man lynx(we'll discuss man a bit later)
$ man bash
$ man joe
$ pkg_info lynx-2.8.5
$ lynx www.freebsd.org
'q' (to 'q'uit lynx)
$ joe
ctrl-c (to abort, you can say "no" to saving data)
3.) Use pw to create a new userid that you will use instead of root [Top]
First login to your computer if you have not already done so. Login as userid "root" using the password given at the start of class and that you used while installing FreeBSD.
Now that you are root you can create a new user account on your machine. If more than one person is using your machine, then be sure that you create an account for each and every person.
To create or remove a user account you should use the "pw" command. To get a feel for the power and complexity of this command take a look at its man pages:
$ man pw
So, first pick a username that you want to use. For example, use your first name, last name, a combination of both, or whatever you prefer. For purposes of this example we use username. So, to add a new user to your system type:
$ pw useradd username -m
This creates the user username. The "-m" says add a new home directory of /usr/home/username and copies files from /usr/share/skel to the new user's home directory.
Next you need to set the password for the new userid, otherwise you won't be able to use the account properly. To do this use the passwd command like this:
$ passwd username
You will be prompted to enter in a new password, then to enter it again to verify. You need to pick a secure password. Note, as root you are allowed to pick any password you want, but you need to pick a secure password for your new account. Here are some quick guidelines to picking a secure password:
So, finally, let's change your new user's password using the command:
$ passwd username
4.) Use pw to add, remove and update a user account [Top]
Now that you've created a new userid using the pw command we'll use the same command to first add and remove an account. So, first create a temporary account like this:
$ pw useradd username -m
You can see that the new user account exists:
$ ls /usr/home/username
Now let's remove the account you just created:
$ pw userdel username -r
The "-r" says to remove the user's home directory. When you delete a user from your system there may be other directories and files that contain information about the user, for instance /var/mail.
Now let's make a change to the userid that you created in the previous exercise. By default the shell that is assigned to new users is /bin/sh. For normal users the bash shell is usually much nicer to use. To set your new account to automatically use the bash shell each time you login you can edit the user password file directly or you can use the pw command again. We'll edit the user password file after we practice using the vi editor. For now, let's update your account from the previous exercise (username) to use the bash shell using this command:
$ pw usermod username -s /usr/local/bin/bash
Note: username refers to the user name you chose for your own user account, not the account we just deleted.
The "-s" option when using "pw usermod" says to indicate the location of the shell you wish to use with the accout being modified. The bash shell resides in /usr/local/bin/bash.
We'll be stressing this in several places, but once you log in again as this userid and are using the bash shell (you can just type bash at any time as well to open this shell) you can take advantage of its advanced command completion features. For instance, if you FreeBSD cd-rom is still mounted in your machine's cd-rom drive you can try doing the following:
$ exit (to logout of our shell)
$ Login: username
$ ls /cdrom (press the right tab key twice, what happens?)
$ cd /cdrom/packages/All
$ ls ba* (press the tab key twice, what happens?)
$ ls bash (press the tab key twice, what happens?)
The behavior you see is called command completion and it is a powerful to that you can use to make working in Unix (and Linux) much easier. We are going to use command completion throughout the week.
5.) General job control (ctrl-c, ctrl-z, bg) [Top]
For this exercise you need to be logged in as root.
When you wish to stop an active process in your shell you can use the keyboard combination "ctrl-c". If this does not work, then you may want to try "ctrl-z". The ctrl-z sequence will suspend the process allowing you to place it in the background using the bg (BackGround) command. Generally this command is most useful if you are running in a graphical and have started a service that has locked you out of a shell window. Here are some examples to try to demonstrate these concepts:
$ cd /
$ ls -R (starts to recursively show contents of all directories on your system)
press CTRL-C (aborts the output)
In addition, when you type "man command" you can press the "q" key to exit from viewing the man pages. The same goes for "less" as well.
Now let's start a process in your shell to requires you to use ctrl-c to end the process:
$ tail -f /var/log/messages
In this example you are viewing the end of the main log message for your system with data appended to the output as the file grows. That is, if a message is generated and placed at the end of the log file you will see this message interactively appear on the screen. This is a very useful tool when you are trying to debug problems on your system. You can open one terminal window (as root, or with an account that can run privileged commands), type "tail -f /var/log/messages", start a process in another terminal window and then view the end results in the window where the tail command is running.
Now to end the "tail -f" process press ctrl-c to abort the output. In this case "q" or "ESC" will not work. You need to know about ctrl-c to do this.
6.) Create a file and use vi to edit the file [Top]
For this exercise please login as your username. Type "whoami" if you are not sure if you are logged in as root.If you are logged in as root, then type:
Now we are going to open an empty file and write something in it.$ exit
$ Login: username
The vi editor uses "modes"
This is a critical point. The vi editor has two modes. These are:
Now let's do the following:
$ cd /home/username
$ touch temp.txt
$ vi temp.txt
Now you are in vi. Press the "i" key to switch to input mode.
Type something like, "VI is great! I think I'll be using vi from now on instead of Microsoft Word."
Press ENTER to add lines. Type some more stuff, whatever you like.
Here is a short list of vi commands:
Open: vi fn, vi -r fn, vi + fn, vi +n fn, vi +/pat fn Close: :w, :w!, :wq, :wq!, :q, :q! Movement: h,j,k,l, w, W, b, B, :n Editing: i, o, x, D, dd, yy, p, u Searching: /pattern, ?pattern, n, N
OK, let's save the file that you are in. To do this do:
Press the ESCape key to get in to command mode
Press ":" to get ready to issue a file command
Type "w" and press ENTER to save your file.
Press ":" to get back to the prompt to issue a file command
Press "q" to quite the file
Instead of the multiple steps you could have type ":wq" to write and quite at the same time. If you need to quit a file without saving it after you've made changes, then you press :q!. For many people this is the most important command to remember in vi :-).
Below is a more complete vi cheat sheet. In addition you will be receive a vi summary book as part of the book package for this workshop.
vi Cheat Sheet Open: vi filename (fn=filename) vi -r filename Recover a file from a crashed session vi + filename Place the cursor on last line of file. vi +n filename Place the cursor on line "n" of file. vi +/pat filename Place cursor on first occurrence of "pat"tern Close: :w Write the file to disk. Don't exit. :w! Write the file to disk even if read/only. :wq Write the file to disk and exit. :wq! Write the file to disk even if read/only and quit. :q Quit the file (only if no changes). :q! Quite the file even if changes. Movement: A Move to end of line, change to insert mode. h Move 1 space backwards (back/left arrow). j Move down 1 line (down arrow). k Move up 1 line (up arrow). l Move 1 space forwards (forward/right arrow) w Move cursor to start of next word. W Same as "w". b Move cursor to start of previous word. B Same as "b". :n Go to line number "n" in the file. Editing: i Enter in to input mode. o Add a line below cursor and enter in to input mode. x Delete character (del key in some cases). D Delete line from right of cursor to end of line. dd Delete entire line. u Undo last edit or restore current line. p Put yanked text before the cursor. yy Yank current line. Searching: /pattern Search for "pattern" in the file going forwards. ?pattern Search for "pattern" in the file going backwards. n Find the next occurrence of pattern found forwards. N Find next occurrence of patter found backwards. Copy/Cut and Paste nyyp Copy n lines to buffer, paste below cursor nyyP Copy n lines to buffer, paste above cursor nddp Cut n lines and copy to buffer, paste below cursor nddP Cut n lines and copy to buffer, paste above cursorNow let's go back in to the file you were just editing. To do this type:
$ vi temp.txt
Play with moving around. Move your cursor to a line with text and
see what happens when you go in to command mode (ESCape) and use "w" or
"W" or "b" or "B" - remember, to get in to command mode press the
ESCape key.
Now press "/" and type a word that is in your document, then press ENTER. What happens?
Do the same, but press the "?" key at first. Use ESCape to start in command again again if necessary.
To save your file press the ":" key and next type "w" and enter
To exit and save do:
:wqTo exit and not save anything (lose all changes you have made since the last save) do:
:q!But, try to save your file for later use. Practice saving, exiting, opening a file in vi again, etc.
7.) Using vipw to edit a user entry [Top]
You need to be logged in as root for this exercise.
When you log in as root, or one of the userids you created on your box you are automatically given a "shell" in which to work. There are many different shell environments under Unix and each one has its own unique set of features and commands. The root user should log in using the "csh" shell (located in /bin/csh). This is to ensure that a shell is always available to this account if there are problems and not all filesystems can be mounted. The general user, however, can take advantage of some more powerful shell programs, such as bash. Bash (under FreeBSD) resides in the /usr/local/bin directory. This directory may not be available if there are problems at system boot time, thus it is not recommended that you switch your root account to use bash.
One of the nicest features of bash is (remember?) "command completion" - This allows you to type some piece of a command then press the tab key to complete the command. If there is more than one possibility you press the tab key twice in rapid succession and all possible completions will be displayed. When we were installing bash from /cdrom/pkgs/editors and the filename was "bash-2.05b.007_2.tbz" this feature can be very useful. If you are using the bash shell, then rather than having to type "bash-2.05b.007_2.tbz" exactly, you could have simply typed:
$ pkg_add /cdrom/packages/All/bash
and pressed the tab key to complete the command. In
addition, you can press tab twice to see all possibilities in a
directory, which can be useful when trying to decide if you are in the
right place.
Earlier we switched your account to use the bash shell, but let's look at another way to do this. In addition, at this point you could change the name associated with your username, and other items as well. Rather than use the "pw usermod" command we are going to use "vipw". This command will open the file /etc/passwd using the vi editor, but with a wrapper process that prevents other users from updating the file while we are editing it. This is important because if two people on your system tried to edit /etc/passwd at the same time, then it could become corrupted, which could cause problems for everyone attempting to log in to your system.
So, let's edit /etc/passwd using the vi editor:
$ vipw
Now you will be in the /etc/passwd file. You can scroll down to the line that contains your username entry to get ready to make some changes. The line will look something like this:
username:$1$swefo/qx$IUYRRAD09DAAD.:1001:0::0:0:User &:/home/username:/usr/local/bin/bash
In this case notice that the name position does not contain any real meaningful information. We could change this to read:
username:$1$swefo/qx$IUYRRAD09DAAD.:1001:0::0:0:New User:/home/username:/usr/local/bin/bash
In addition, note that the last entry on this line is ":/usr/local/bin/bash" - this indicates that the bash shell will be used for this account. If you wanted to switch this account back to using the "sh" shell you could change the line to read:
username:$1$swefo/qx$IUYRRAD09DAAD.:1001:0::0:0:New User:/home/username:/bin/bash
To exit from the /etc/passwd file issue the vi command:
:q (to quit if no changes made)
:wq (to write changes and quite)
:q! (to quit and not save changes if any made)
It is your choice whether you wish to use the vipw or the pw command to manipulate your user's accounts.
Now, assuming you left the shell for your account as /usr/local/bin/bash, log out as the root user and log back in using your userid. You can either type logout or exit to do this.
Try playing around a bit with bash. For instance, type:
$ ls /
Then hit the tab key twice quickly to see all the
directories under the root or "/" directory. We'll be stressing the use
of command completion repeatedly throughout the week. This is one the
largest timesavers available to you when using the Unix command-line
environment.
8.) Getting help using manpages, docs, and the FreeBSD Handbook [Top]
Now that you have FreeBSD up and running you probably want to have a way to figure out how to use it when there are no instructors around, or other FreeBSD-knowledgeable people. First and foremost, make it a habit to read the man pages (MANual pages) for the commands that you use. You might be surprised at some of the things these commands can do! In any case, as you have seen, when in doubt about what a command does, or how it works simply type:
$ man command
Optionally, you might find some additional information for some commands typing:
$ info command
And, to get information about both these commands type:
After this there is a large amount of documenation available to you in serveral ways. For instance, if you look in:$ man man
$ info info
/usr/share/doc
you will find multiple FreeBSD articles in various languages available to you. In addition, the FreeBSD Handbook is available here under /usr/share/doc/handblook. If you wanted to start reading the FreeBSD Handbook from your local har drive you could either point a web browser to the file /usr/share/doc/handbook/index.html, or you could type the command:
$ lynx /usr/share/doc/handbook/index.html
Go ahead and type this command now to get a feel for what
information is available to you in the FreeBSD Handbook. Now let's look
at the FreeBSD FAQ by typing:
$ lynx /usr/share/doc/faq/index.html
After this, have a look at some of the available articles by doing:
Finally, there are several papers available as well. Try:$ cd /usr/share/doc/en/articles
$ ls
$ ls /usr/share/doc/papers
If you have a network connection, then you can go to http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html
for even more information. Become accustomed to the idea of using man
to get specific information about commands, and then using these
additional resources to get an overview of entire sub-systems of the
FreeBSD operating system.
9.) Practice with basic filesystem commands [Top]
Be careful in this exercise. Running as root means that you can easily damage your system, so we ask that you log out of your root account and log in as your own user account instead.
If you are not sure of a command ask the instructor or helpers before continuing.
The first command that we are going to use is man, this is short for "man"ual. Read about each command to see the range of options that exist. We've already been using man, but now we'll practice some more:
Many of the basic commands we'll be practicing are built in as part of your shell environment (that is you won't find a binary file for cd). To read about commands like cp, cd, ls, mv, rm in more detail you can just type:
$ man builtin
And, for a command like ls you can type:
$ man ls
And, even for a built-in command you can just type "man commandName", or something like:
$ man cd
and this will open the "builtin" man page for you.
If you have problems exiting from "man" press the "q" key. Also, you can use the keyboard arrows to move around in the descriptions.
As we move around directories an extremely useful command is pwd, which return the working directory name you are in. So, if you get lost just type:
$ pwd
We'll do this from time to time as we use directory commands.
Now we are ready to practice a bit with the commands:
$ cd /
$ pwd
$ ls
$ ls -la
$ cd /tmp
$ cd ..
$ pwd
$ cd tmp
What's going on here? If you don't understand, ask.
$ cd (take you back to your home directory)
$ pwd
$ touch text.txt
$ cp text.txt new.txt
$ mv text.txt new.txt
What's happening now? If prompted to overwrite, respond
"y". Note that "userid" is the name of the user account you created in
the first exercise.
$ cp text.txt /home/username/.
$ cd ../home/username
Now play with the use of the tab key. For example, in /home/username
start to type the first part of the command "cp text.txt text.txt.bak"
- then, type:
cd (to return to our home directory)
$ cp te
$ cp text.txt te
$ cp text.txt text.txt.bak
The tab key makes life much easier. Now type:
$ cd
$ mkdir tmp
$ mv text.* tmp/.
$ ls
Finally, we are going to remove the directory that contains the two archives.
$ cd tmp
$ rm *
$ cd ..
$ rmdir tmp
You can force this using a command like this:
$ rm -rf tmp
The use of "rm -rf" is very dangerous!, and,
naturally, very useful. For example, if you are "root" and you type "rm
-rf /*" this would be the end of your server. This commands says
"remove, forcibly and recursively, everything" - Or, if you start in
the root directory (/), remove all files and directories without asking on the entire server. If you want to use "rm -rf *" always take a deep breath and check where you are first (really, do this!):
$ pwd
First this says in what directory you are. If you are mistaken, then
you have the opportunity to not remove files that you might really
need.
10.) Command pipes and grep [Top]
There are a few items that you are going to be using during the week, and which you may have already seen in use, that are important to understand. The first item is the concept of command pipes. The other item is the use of the search facility grep. First let's talk about grep.
The grep command allows you to search for items in files, or in output from another command. For instance, to see all instances of the string "pop" in the file /etc/services (lists services and corresponding tcp/udp ports) you can type the command:
$ grep pop /etc/services
And you should see each line in the file that contains the string "pop" (including substrings of "pop") displayed.
If you want to check for all occurrences of the string "ssh" in all files in a directory you could do something like:
$ grep ssh /etc/rc.d/*
Scroll through the list of output and you'll see that the file /etc/rc.d/sshd (startup script file) is the only file with this string in it. Note that when you do a wildcard search on files, then files that contain the string are indicated in the left-hand column of the output.
Now maybe you are looking for more than one word in a file. Or, perhaps, you figure you need more than one word to make your search unique. For instance, each time you login on your machine you get a welcome message that starts out with the text "Welcome to FreeBSD". Perhaps you are wondering where this message comes from. Well, as much of your initial system configuration is done by files located in /etc/ this might be a reasonable place to look. So, to search for the file with this string you could type:
$ grep "Welcome to FreeBSD" /etc/*
and you will get back:
and now you know that the string resides in the file /etc/motd. Type:/etc/motd:Welcome to FreeBSD!
$ man motd
to read about this file, known as the Message Of The Day file, or "motd".
Remember when we did "grep ssh /etc/rc.d/*"? Did you notice that the results filled more than a screen in your terminal? Well, let's use the concept of the pipe facility to help us out. The pipe facility is the ability to take the output of one command (or stream of information) and "pipe" it to another command. For instance, the output from "grep ssh /etc/rc.d/*" can be "piped" to the more command so that the screen will pause as the results are being shown. The pipe facility is accessed using the symbol "|" (usually above the "\" character). So, if you do:
$ grep ssh /etc/rc.d/* | more
Now your output will pause and you'll have an easier time seeing what is happening.
Remember when we did the following in the second exercise?:
$ pkg_info | grep lynx
Now you should understand better what this is doing. But, if you are not sure do this:
$ pkg_info | more
And, you'll note that there is a long list of packages installed on your machine. The use of the "| more" let's you view them one page at a time. But, if you were just trying to figure out if something by the name "lynx" was installed, then using pipe with grep to seach the output of the "pkg_info" command can make your life much easier. So, the command "pkg_info | grep lynx" is simply searching the output of the pkg_info command for the string "lynx" and only displaying results with "lynx". Thus, when you type this command you should see something like:
which is really useful. Now you know the correct name for the lynx package installed is "lynx-2.8.5" and you know what it is.$ lynx-2.8.5 A non-graphical, text-based World-Wide Web client
So, now that you have the correct name you can get the detailed package information quickly by typing:
$ pkg_info lynx-2.8.5
If you just type "pkg_info lynx" this won't work as pkg_info wants either the exact name, or the form "pkg_info lynx\*".
We'll use grep and pipes through the week. For instance you'll see us discussing commands that output lots of data. Getting a handle on this data is often done using pipes and commands like grep, more, etc.
Remember, as usual, if you want to know more type:
$ man grep
11.) Installation of software using ports [Top]
For this exercise you need to logged in as root.
The ports collection, which we installed during the FreeBSD install, is larger than the packages collection available on the first FreeBSD install cd-rom. As of December 2004 there were over 12,000 ports available! The FreeBSD Handbook has an excellent discussion of using Ports in section 4.5. In a nutshell these are the key points to remember about ports:To do this you should edit the file /etc/make.conf and add the following two lines to the end of the file:
MASTER_SITE_BACKUP=ftp://noc.presanog.org.bt/pub/FreeBSD/ports/distfiles/${DIST_SUBDIR}/
MASTER_SITE_FREEBSD=yes
Now that this is done we are going to install the following port:
$ cd /usr/ports
$ make search name=lsof
This will output something like:
Port: lsof-4.72.2
Path: /usr/ports/sysutils/lsof
Info: Lists information about open files (similar to fstat(1))
Maint: obrien@FreeBSD.org
B-deps:
R-deps:
From this you can see that the lsof utility resides in /usr/ports/sysutils/lsof. So, to install lsof on your system you do the following:
$ cd /usr/ports/sysutils/lsof
$ make
$ make install
Make will download the lsof source (hopefully from our local server!), and then compile the source. "Make install" will place the compiled binary files in the appropriate directories on your system and update the appropriate configuration files if necessary. You can issue the single command "make install" instead.
You can now type:
$ man lsof
For more information. Finally, if you want to deinstall a port once it is installed, for instance lsof, you would do the following (please don't do this):
$ cd /usr/ports/sysutils/lsof
$ make deinstall
And, if you decided that was a mistake, you can now do the following to reinstall a port (after it's been installed once):
$ cd /usr/ports/sysutils/lsof
$ make reinstall
If you do a "make clean" then "make reinstall" will no longer work for that port.
12.) Installing two more packages (gmake, unzip) [Top]
For this exercise you need to be logged in as root.
During the week we will need two additional packages to do our work. The two packages we need are:
If you want to learn more about these three packages you can type:$ pkg_add ftp://noc.presanog.org.bt/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5.3-release/All/gmake-3.80_2.tbz
$ pkg_add ftp://noc.presanog.org.bt/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5.3-release/All/unzip-5.51.tbz
$ man gmake
$ man unzip
13.) Searching for more information about your system [Top]
If you want to see the contents of a file there are three typical ways to do this:
$ catEach of these commands has it's own features:
$ less
$ more
Test this using the three commands using them with an informational file like:
$ cd /etc
$ cat motd
$ more services
$ less services (you can exit with "q")
Try looking at some more files, for instance, fstab,
rc.conf, termcap, etc. If you don't understand what you are looking at,
then use the "man" command. For example, type:
$ man fstab
$ man rc.conf
$ man termcap
Finally, there is one other useful command for looking inside files. First login on your machine as root (you can login and logout if you are not root, or you could use a virtual terminal and just log in as root there...).
Now, as root, type:
$ tail /var/log/messages
This will show you the last few lines of your main logfile on your system. This can be really useful if you just want to see what the last thing written to a file was. Your file /var/log/messages will get very large over time, so if you used cat, less, or more to view this file for new messages this could become very time-consuming. Now, even more fun is to do the following:
$ tail -f /var/log/messages
Now press ALT-FN (say "F3") to go to one of your virtual terminals. Login as root on this terminal. Now go back to your original terminal where you typed the command tail -f /var/log/messages. You should see a message on the screen saying that root just logged in. The "-f" option means, "output appended data as the file grows" - or, you can watch each new item as it's written to the end of a file. This is incredibly useful when you are trying to debug problems and you need to see what happens in your logfiles in real time.
Don't forget to log out of your other terminal window.
If you have any questions ask the instructor or one of the class helpers.
14.) Using sudo for privileged commands [Top]
When you created your own user account username you did not place it in the wheel group. This means that you cannot become the root user from your username using the command su. This is a useful thing to be able to do if you don't want to have to logout and log back in each time you need to be root. In addition, the change we are going to make to the "sudoers" file, which controls access to the sudo command is based on your username being in the wheel group. So, the first thing you need to do is be sure you are logged in as root:
$ exit
Login: root
Now we are going to use the pw command to make a change to your username account make it a member of the wheel group. The wheel group is a special group in Unix that allows members to become root. To do this type:
$ pw usermod username -G wheel
The "-g" indicates "group".
Once your user is a member of the wheel group you can use the su (Substitute User identity) command to become another user without having to login and logout of your session.
To practice this you need to login as your username account now:
Now you can practice using su.$ exit
$ Login: username
$ su - root
If you skip the "-" option, then you won't execute the
root login scripts. In general you can type "su user", or "su - user",
and switch to any user's environment.
Now let's drop back to your standard user account and try to do something that requires privileges:
You should get the message,$ exit
$ less /etc/master.passwd
"/etc/master.passwd: Permission denied" - Now try running the same command like this:
$ sudo less /etc/master.passwd
You noticed that this did not work, right? First we need to add a package called "sudo" to your machine, then we need to configure the file /etc/sudoers to allow you to use this facility. Let's get the package installed first. We'll use pkg_add and we'll get it from our local server:
$ pkg_add ftp://noc.presanog.org.bt/pub/FreeBSD/packages/All/sudo-1.6.8.1.tbz
Now we need to configure the file /etc/sudoers so that you can use this command:
$ visudo
This is a special utility to edit the /etc/sudoers file using vi, but to lock the file so that no one else can edit it while you are using visudo. So, remember your vi commands and scroll down the screen until you find the following lines in the file:
(Note/hint: there are other ways of finding this line in vi. You could search for something using "/".).## root and users in group wheel can run anything on any machine as any user #root ALL = (ALL) ALL #%wheel ALL = (ALL) ALL
Now, once you are here, just make one, small change. Remove the "#" symbol (it's a comment symbol) from in front of "%wheel". Once you do this save and quit from the file. So, your file should now look like:
And, to save and quite it's:## root and users in group wheel can run anything on any machine as any user #root ALL = (ALL) ALL %wheel ALL = (ALL) ALL
:wqThat's it. You are now ready to run "sudo" as a general user (or, at least a general user in the wheel group). Make sure you exit from the root shell you are in:
$ exit
And, now as a general user, try issuing the command:
$ sudo less /etc/master.passwd
You will be prompted for a password, and the first time you use sudo you'll receive a warning. The password you should enter will be your user account's password. This is different from Linux.
Type this in, and you should be able to view the
/etc/master.passwd file even though you are running as a standard user.
Try doing this again ("less /etc/master.passwd") and you'll notice that
you are no longer prompted for the root password. You can issue any
privileged command (pretty much) without needing a password at this
point. Once you login and logout again, then you'll have to enter a
password the next time you use sudo.
sudo is very useful to allow you to do system administration tasks on your machine without needing to be logged in as root. This can help to protect you from making mistakes running as root, which can be costly.
15.) File and directory permissions* [Top]
*Reference: Shah, Steve, "Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide", 2nd. ed., Osborne press, New York, NY.
If you look at files in a directory using "ls -al" you will see the permissions for each file and directories. Here is an example:
drwxrwxr-x 3 hervey hervey 4096 Feb 25 09:49 directory -rwxr--r-- 12 hervey hervey 4096 Feb 16 05:02 file
The left column is important. You can view it like this:
Type User Group World Links owner group size date hour name d rwx rwx r-x 3 hervey hervey 4096 Feb 25 09:49 directory - rwx r r 12 hervey hervey 4096 Feb 16 05:02 file
So, the directory has r (read), w (write), x (execute) access for the user and group. For world it has r (read) and x (execute) access. The file has read/write/execute access for the world and read only access for everyone else (group and world).
To change permissions you use the "chmod" command. chmod uses a base eight (octal) system to configure permsissions. Or, you can use an alternate form to specify permissions by column (user/group/world) at a time.
Permissions have values like this:
Letter Permission Value R read 4 W write 2 X execute 1
Thus you can give permissions to a file using the sum of the values for each permssion you wish to give for each column. Here is an example:
Letter Permission Value --- none 0 r-- read only 4 rw- read and write 6 rwx read, write, and execute 7 r-x read and execute 5 --x Execute 1
This is just one column. Thus, to give all the combinations you have a table like this:
Permissions Numeric Description
equivalent
-rw------- 600 Owner has read & execute permission.
-rw-r--r-- 644 Owner has read & execute.
Group and world has read permission.
-rw-rw-rw- 666 Everyone (owner, group, world) has read & write
permission (dangerous?)
-rwx------ 700 Onwer has read, write, & execute permission.
-rwxr-xr-x 755 Owner has read, write, & execute permission.
Rest of the world has read & execute permission
(typical for web pages or 644).
-rwxrwxrwx 777 Everyone has full access (read, write, execute).
-rwx--x--x 711 Owner has read, write, execute permission.
Group and world have execute permission.
drwx------ 700 Owner only has access to this directory.
Directories require execute permission to access.
drwxr-xr-x 755 Owner has full access to directory. Everyone else
can see the directory.
drwx--x--x 711 Everyone can list files in the directory, but group
and world need to know a filename to do this.
Now lets practice changing permissions to see how this really works. As a normal user (i.e. don't login as root) do the following:
$ cd (what does the "cd" command do when you do this?)
$ echo "test file" > read.txt
$ chmod 444 read.txt
In spite of the fact that the file does not have write
permission for the owner, the owner can still change the file's
permissions so that they can make it possible to write to it:
$ chmod 744 read.txt
Or, you can do this by using this form of chmod:
$ chmod u+w read.txt
The forms of chmod, to add permissions, if you don't use octal numbers are:
$ chmod u+r, chmod u+w, chmod u+x
$ chmod g+r, chmod g+w, chmod g+x
$ chmod a+r, chmod a+w, chmod a+x
Note that "a+r" is for world access. The "a" is for "all", "u" is for "user", and "g" is for "group".
Now, change the file so that the owner cannot read it, but they can write to the file...
$ chmod u-r read.txt
Or, you can do something like:
$ chmod 344 read.txt
You probably noticed that you can use the "-" (minus) sign to remove permissions from a file.
Finally, there is a concept that when you execute a file you normally execute it using the permissions of the user who does this. For example, if the user "carla" types "netstat", the netstat programs runs with their privileges. But, if you want netstat to always run with the permissions of the owner or of the group of the netstat program, then you can configure the "SetUID" or "SetGID" bit. You can do this using chmod. However, remember that this can be a bad idea from the viewpoint of security...
To do this add a "4" to the chmod octal to set the SetUID, or a "2" to set the SetGID bit.
As an example, you could do:
$ chmod 4755 /usr/bin/netstat
Naturally you would need to be root to do this, or you would have to use the "sudo" command.
And, to set the SetGID bit it would be:
$ chmod 2755 /usr/bin/netstat
After you do "sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/netstat" the permissions on the file would look like this:
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root kmem 106344 Feb 23 16:42 /usr/bin/netstat
Note the "s" in the owner column.
And, after you issue the command ""sudo chmod 2755 /usr/bin/nestat" the permissions look like this:
-rwxr-sr-x 1 root kmem 106344 Feb 23 16:42 /usr/bin/netstat
Note: This is for example only. Setting netstat to run with SetUID or SetGID bit set as shown would be a very bad idea. So, if you have done SetUID or SetGID, then please unset these bits for netstat like this:
$ chmod 0755 /usr/bin/netstat
and now you would see:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root kmem 106344 Feb 23 16:42 /usr/bin/netstat
16.) Commands - programs - shell - path [Top]
For this exercise we want you to run as a user other than root. So, if you are root do this:
$ su - user
What do you think the "-" does? (hint: "man su", and we talked about this earlier)
When you type a command or the name of a program the system looks for something with that name using in the directories specified in your PATH environmental variable. Or, if the command is a built-in shell program (such as "cd", see "man builtin"), then it will execute the command without needing to use the PATH variable. To see your what your PATH is set to, do this:
$ printenv PATH
The PATH variable is configured when you login to your account in the file ".profile" in your home directory.
To see how this works let's create a shell script that will run a simple command, but which resides in a directory outside your PATH statement ("user" here is the name of your own userid).
$ cd /home/user
$ mkdir scripts
$ cd scripts
$ vi hello.sh
Now in the file add these lines:
#!/bin/sh # echo hello
Remember to save and exit the file (:wq). And, to ensure that you can execute the file use the command:
$ chmod u+x hello.sh
Remember that this is using chmod to set the eXecutable bit for the user only.
Now we are going to add the /home/user/scripts directory to our login profile PATH statement.
$ cd /home/user
$ vi .profile
Look for the line that reads (more or less - could be different on your machine):
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:....:$HOME/bin; export PATH
and change it so that at the end of the PATH statement you add:
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:....$HOME/bin:$HOME/scripts; export PATH
Save the file and now do the following:
$ hello.sh
$ . .profile
$ hello.sh
What just happened? You changed the PATH statement to
include /home/user/scripts, but when you tried to run the script in
/home/user/scripts it didn't work. This was because you had not
actually updated the PATH variable in your shell. When you did ".
.profile" you executed your user profile again, which updated the PATH
variable with your new PATH variable. You can verify this by typing
"printenv PATH" again.
You may have noticed the "$HOME/bin" item in the PATH. As you can see FreeBSD has the concept that you may wish to have your own personal bin directory for executables, so normally the "hello.sh" script might reside in /home/user/bin, but for purposes of this exercise we used /home/user/scripts.
Finally, if you want to change something like the PATH for everyone you can do this in two ways. One, you could update /etc/profile with a new PATH statement. This means that everyone on your system will see this change as soon as they login the next time. Or, you can change /usr/share/skel/dot.profile so that all new accounts have the new PATH, but previous users will not see this change. In both cases changes like this should not be done lightly. When setting up a server with many users you will probably want to think about what directories your users need to have in the PATH from the beginning and update /usr/share/skel/dot.profile before creating initial user accounts.
In addition, you can run the "hello.sh" script by typing "/home/user/scripts/hello.sh" at any time.
To finish up we are going to change how the "rm" command runs to make it "safer" (in my opinion). Here are the steps:
$ vi /home/user/.profile
Go to the end of the file and type an "o" (add a line after the cursor and put you in to input mode). Then type:
alias rm='rm -i';
Now exit and save the file (:wq). After that type:
$ touch temp.txt
$ rm temp.txt
$ . .profile
$ touch temp.txt
$ rm temp.txt
And, what happened? Now the "rm" command asks you before you erase a
file if you are sure you want to do this. If you don't like this you
can remove the alias in the .profile, re-run .profile, and leave things
as they were. Note, you can always just use "rm -f" to force remove
files and skip the prompt. My advice is to leave the "rm" command in
interactive mode - you are likely to be very thankful for this at some
point in the future.
17.) Use top to see the state of your system [Top]
If you want to see what processes are using how many resources, then use the command:
$ top
Notice that not only do you get to see what's running, but you get to see a bunch of system information as well at the top of the screen. For instance, on my laptop running KDE this is some of what I might see:
That's a lot of information, but top will very quickly give you a feel for your overall system state, what's using most of your resources, whether you have a user who is hogging your cpu, another your memory, etc. Pay special attention to things like load averages and RAM usage.last pid: 2707; load averages: 0.17, 0.26, 0.19 up 0+01:43:52 01:16:24 47 processes: 1 running, 46 sleeping CPU states: % user, % nice, % system, % interrupt, % idle Mem: 98M Active, 104M Inact, 55M Wired, 20M Cache, 47M Buf, 91M Free Swap: 700M Total, 700M Free PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND 2421 root 96 0 27988K 19980K select 0:14 0.24% 0.24% Xorg 2699 root 96 0 28792K 19388K select 0:01 0.10% 0.10% kdeinit 2476 root 20 -76 13456K 8680K kserel 0:09 0.00% 0.00% artsd 2506 root 96 0 36344K 26120K select 0:06 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2504 root 96 0 10444K 8644K select 0:04 0.00% 0.00% emacs 2488 root 96 0 28724K 20116K select 0:03 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2467 root 96 0 26904K 17772K select 0:03 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2480 root 96 0 32100K 20392K select 0:03 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2499 root 96 0 28792K 19276K select 0:02 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2484 root 96 0 26228K 17576K select 0:02 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2486 root 96 0 27044K 18636K select 0:01 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2267 root 96 0 1232K 688K select 0:01 0.00% 0.00% moused 2498 root 96 0 27736K 18428K select 0:01 0.00% 0.00% korgac 2491 root 96 0 25692K 17140K select 0:01 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2494 root 96 0 25160K 16240K select 0:00 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2483 root 96 0 24836K 15896K select 0:00 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2458 root 96 0 24020K 14412K select 0:00 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2461 root 96 0 23408K 13836K select 0:00 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2464 root 96 0 24844K 15132K select 0:00 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2500 root 5 0 2388K 1852K ttyin 0:00 0.00% 0.00% csh 2057 root 96 0 1784K 1188K select 0:00 0.00% 0.00% dhclient 2700 root 20 0 2272K 1624K pause 0:00 0.00% 0.00% csh 2432 root 8 0 1640K 1112K wait 0:00 0.00% 0.00% sh 2414 root 8 0 1612K 1184K wait 0:00 0.00% 0.00% login 2100 root 96 0 1312K 812K select 0:00 0.00% 0.00% syslogd 2416 root 5 0 2276K 1680K ttyin 0:00 0.00% 0.00% csh 2489 root 96 0 24836K 14780K select 0:00 0.00% 0.00% kdeinit 2481 root 8 0 1312K 708K nanslp 0:00 0.00% 0.00% kwrapper 2422 root 8 0 2652K 1640K wait 0:00 0.00% 0.00% kdm 2233 root 8 0 1356K 964K nanslp 0:00 0.00% 0.00% cron 2419 root 96 0 2332K 1168K select 0:00 0.00% 0.00% kdm 2707 root 96 0 2256K 1416K RUN 0:00 0.00% 0.00% top 2353 root 5 0 1280K 832K ttyin 0:00 0.00% 0.00% getty 2415 root 5 0 1280K 832K ttyin 0:00 0.00% 0.00% getty 2303 root 5 0 1280K 832K ttyin 0:00 0.00% 0.00% getty 2307 root 5 0 1280K 832K ttyin 0:00 0.00% 0.00% getty 2304 root 5 0 1280K 832K ttyin 0:00 0.00% 0.00% getty 2306 root 5 0 1280K 832K ttyin 0:00 0.00% 0.00% getty 2305 root 5 0 1280K 832K ttyin 0:00 0.00% 0.00% getty
Load averages are listed for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes. Numbers from 1.0 to less are generally OK. If you start to see consistent load averages around 2, or above, then your machine is very busy and you probably need to consider tuning one of your subsystems, improving hardware, buying a new machine, or checking for inefficient use of resources.
Several other ways to see load averages and machine usage include:
$ w
$ uptime
$ procinfo (Linux only)
Try using "w" and "uptime" and read the man pages for these commands.
18.) Process startup and the RC system [Top]
This is a rather complex topic. But, in a nutshell, under FreeBSD 5.3, when your machine boots processes (that is daemons or services) are configured and/or started like this:
$ man rc
Then, you should probably read this again...
Now, if you want to start a process each time your machine boot you generally add an item to /etc/rc.conf to indicate this. For instance, if you wanted to enable the ssh daemon (server) each time your machine started then you would add the line:
to /etc/rc.conf. If you look at /etc/defaults/rc.conf you'll see that sshd is not enabled in this file by default. By enabling sshd in /etc/rc.conf this overrides the setting in /etc/defaults/rc.conf. In addition, if you look in /etc/rc.d/ you'll find an sshd script file that starts this service.sshd_enable="YES"
To see how sshd is enabled initially do this:
$ grep sshd /etc/defaults/rc.conf
You should see something like:
These are the lines in /etc/defaults/rc.conf that deal with the ssh daemon. When you specified to enable the ssh daemon in /etc/rc.conf the lines that read:sshd_enable="NO" # Enable sshd sshd_program="/usr/sbin/sshd" # path to sshd, if you want a different one. sshd_flags="" # Additional flags for sshd.
became active. So, if your ssh program was not "/usr/sbin/sshd" for some reason, then in /etc/rc.conf you could add:sshd_program="/usr/sbin/sshd" # path to sshd, if you want a different one. sshd_flags="" # Additional flags for sshd.
to override what's in /etc/defaults/rc.conf.sshd_program="/new/directory/sshd" # new path to sshd
You could just put everything in /etc/defaults/rc.conf, but you don't want to do this. If you upgrade your system it's almost certain that /etc/defaults/rc.conf could be overwritten. In addition, this file is large and it would be hard to see the changes you had made if you were to do them in /etc/defaults/rc.conf.
To start a service manually you can use it's startup script by hand. For instance, try typing:
$ /etc/rc.d/sshd
What is returned on the screen? It should be something like:
So, you could typeUsage: /etc/rc.d/sshd [fast|force|one](start stop restart rcvar keygen reload status poll)
$ /etc/rc.d/sshd status
to see if ssh is running. If it is, then try:
$ /etc/rc.d/sshd stop
to start the service. Now type:
$ /etc/rc.d/sshd start
to restart the service. Note the startup script option "reload" - This would let you make changes to the ssh configuration file(s) and then reload the service without actually stopping it so that it reads the new configuration. Note that already connected clients would not see this new configuration change until the logoff and log back in again.
Finally, remember, that if a startup script in /etc/rc.d has not been enabled in /etc/defaults/rc.conf or /etc/rc.conf, then even if you manually invoke it the script will not run. You will not get any indication of this other than the service not starting (i.e. use "ps -aux | grep servicename" and you won't see it started).
At this point take a closer look at /etc/rc.d/
$ ls /etc/rc.d
and use "man" to read about some of the services. If you want to try and start and stop some of these services feel free to do so now, but remember you'll need to add 'servicename_enable="YES"' in /etc/rc.conf for the service to start.
19.) Processes and stopping them [Top]
For this exercise please be sure you are logged in as root.
If you would like to see what is running on your system, then you use the "ps" command (ProceSs). For example, to see everything running on your system for all users, and even items running that are detached type:
$ ps -aux
If you find something that you wish to stop (maybe your
web browser session has hung), then you can look for the process ID
number, and you can issue a "kill" command to stop the process. This is
a very powerful feature of UNIX. If you need to kill a process for another
user then you must have privileges to do this, usually root. The example we are going to use is to kill an account login in another terminal. We'll be going back and forth from one terminal to another and we'll use tail, /var/log/messages, and ps for this exercise. First, let's start an interactive tail command our /var/log/messages file:
$ tail -f /var/log/messages
Now switch to a second terminal and log in again as root:
Switch back to your original login terminal where the interactive tail command is running by pressing ALT-F1. What do you see. You should see something indicating that root logged in on terminal ttyv1. More specifically the entry will look basically like this:ALT-F2
Login: root
OK, now break out of the tail -f process by pressing "CTRL-C". Now let's find the process ID of this new login session. To do this type:Jan 10 17:21:05 localhost login: ROOT LOGIN (root) ON ttyv1
$ ps -aux | grep login
If you had just typed "ps -aux" you would have seen all processes and then you may have figured out that the "login" process of your other root login can be found by looking for the login keyword.
Now we are going to kill the login shell of your other root login on ttyv1. But, how do you know which process to kill. You probably saw something like this when you did "ps -aux | grep login":
These look almost identical, but note the process IDs. One is 1060 and the other is 1061. This should be your clue. Your first root login will have a lower process ID number than your next root login. In addition, if you had waited and started other processes before logging in your second root login, then the process ID numbers might be separated by more than 1. So, in this case you will want to stop the process ID 1061. Note: Naturally on your system the actual process ID numbers will almost certainly be different. Now, to stop process UD 1061 do this:root 1060 0.0 0.3 1612 1308 v0 Is 17:22PM 0:00.03 login [pam] (login) root 1061 0.0 0.3 1612 1308 v1 Is 17:22PM 0:00.03 login [pam] (login)
$ kill 1061
Now go back to the other terminal and see if the process has been ended. That is press ALT-F2 and see if the "Login:" prompt appears. If it does, then you just forced the user off the system. If the "Login:" prompt does not appear, then you may need to use a more forceful kill command in the form:
$ kill -9 1061
But, be careful this shuts down the process
without giving it any chance to save data, remove lock files, or
generally clean up. I.E. you could lose or corrupt data.
In general, if you do:
$ ps -aux | more
And you see items running that you do not want to have run each
time you boot, then you can, generally, edit /etc/rc.conf and override
the setting that starts this service (see /etc/defaults/rc.conf). You
can stop the service immediately by using the "kill" command. If you
are testing a configuration file for a known running service (say the
Apache web server) you can, often, tell the service to restart
reloading the configuration file, but to reload using the same
parameters it originally used to start. This can be very useful if the
service requires a complex set of parameters to restart. The command to
do this is:
$ kill HUP nnnn
Try using the ps command. See if there is anything you can
stop by using the kill command. Note, you could cause all sorts of
interesting behavior if you do this with running services that you
need. I suggest doing this exercise as your standard user, not root,
and then starting some program, finding it using "ps -aux | grep
progname" and then using kill to stop it.
Finally, some programs spawn many processes when running. Web browsers are an example of this. It can be time-consuming to kill each process one-by-one until you have completely shut down the program. An alternate command is "killall" which will kill processes by name. Naturally you have to be a bit careful with this as you could shutdown something unexpectedly, but if you have 20 processes all called "Mozilla" that you want to stop, then you can simply type:
$ killall mozilla
I suggest reading the man page ("man killall") about this command before using it regularly.
20.) Disk partitions: how to view your disk [Top]
First, make sure you are logged in as your user and not as root.
Now in a terminal lets look at the partitions. Type:
$ df
$ df -h
What difference did you see between "df" and "df -h". How
can you see what your swap contains (note it was not listed using
"df")? Use this:
$ swapinfo
If you want to see more detailed information about your disk slices you can use the "fdisk" command. As a general user you are not allowed to run this program, so you must use sudo. Try this by typing:
$ sudo fdisk
Be careful with fdisk as you can remove slices, partitions, etc.
If you are interested in how much space files are taking up in a directory or a group of directories you can use the "du" command. Try it out by typing:
As usual you can get more information by typing "man du".$ du
$ du -h
Now that you've seen these methods for viewing disk information, you should be able to understand the output of the disklabel command a little better. The disklabel command is really the proper way to view the status of partitions in your FreeBSD slice at it will show you all your FreeBSD slice information no matter if a partition is mounted or not. In some cases this is critical if you are trying to troubleshoot problems and not all partitions have mounted. So, if FreeBSD resides on the slice /dev/ad0s1 on your disk, then to see disk information you can type:
disklabel /dev/ad0s1
This shows you output along these lines:
As you can see it includes the "c" partition and "b" or the "swap" partition as well as filetypes.# /dev/ad0s2: 8 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] a: 409600 0 4.2BSD 2048 16384 25608 b: 1433600 409600 swap c: 8385930 0 unused 0 0 # "raw" part, don't edit d: 1843200 1843200 4.2BSD 2048 16384 28552 e: 3072000 3686400 4.2BSD 2048 16384 28552 f: 1627530 6758400 4.2BSD 2048 16384 28552
21.) Shutdown and reboot your system [Top]
For this exercise you need to be root. It is better to close open files and programs (for example Mozilla, vi, etc.), but it is not necessary. Before continuing read the man pages for shutdown, init, halt, and reboot (you'll see they are all connected):
$ man shutdown
$ man init
$ man reboot
$ man halt
Now, in a terminal do the following (save data, etc. as this will immediately reboot your machine!):
$ shutdown -r now
Now your machine is rebooting. The "-r" stand for "reboot" and the "now" meant to take this action "now". This takes a moment. To stop your machine entirely you can use the command:
$ halt
Or, you can also change your run level to run level 0, which is the same as "halt". So, you would write:
$ init 0
And, to reboot this is the same as init 6, or:
$ init 6
If you are running something like gdm for a graphical
login prompt on your machine you can usually use provided menu choices
to reboot or shutdown. The thinking is that once you have this level of
access, then you can simply turn off the machine's power if you wish.
At the very least it is much more friendly to use a software interface
to shutdown or reboot than pulling the power as processes have a chance
to clean up, save data, etc.
Note, sometimes it is useful to bring your machine down to runlevel 1, or "single user mode". For instance, if you are running X Windows and want to shut it down quickly (you'd really only do this on a desktop machine, by the way!), then you can open a terminal window as root (or use "su"), and then type"
$ init 1
This will shut down X Windows, networking, and quite a bit more. Now you are in "single user mode". To get back to "multi-user mode" you simply type:
$ exit
This exits your single-user modem shell and tells the system to go back to multi-user mode.
22.) Update your /user/ports collection using cvsup [Top]
As our final exercise we are going to ask you to update your entire ports collection on your machine. We are going to use the cvsup package (not yet installed) to tell your machine to compare all the files in /usr/ports with the files on a cvs server and then download any updates that may have been made. The ports collection is large and if you attempted to do this over our classroom link it would take many hours, if not days, to complete. To avoid this we have installed a local mirror of an up-to-date FreeBSD ports collection and cvs server on our classroom server. We are going to use this machine to update our ports collection.
So, to go through this process you first need to install the cvsup-without-gui package. We have downloaded and copied this to our local server. To install cvsup-without-gui do the following:
pkg_add ftp://noc.presanog.org.bt/pub/FreeBSD/packages/All/cvsup-without-gui-16.1h.tbz
Next we need to configure your machine so that it will automatically look in the correct location for the cvs server in our classroom to update your ports collection.
If you completed exercise 10, then this step should already be completed.
To do this first start by editing the file /etc/make.conf:
vi /etc/make.conf
And, scroll down to the bottom of the file. Now you should add the following two lines (remember "o" for input mode in vi with a new line):
MASTER_SITE_BACKUP=ftp://noc.presanog.org.bt/pub/FreeBSD/ports/distfiles/${DIST_SUBDIR}/
MASTER_SITE_FREEBSD=yes
This last step is not technically necessary at this point as we are going to explicitly tell our cvsup process where to look for updated ports file, but we make sure that the variables MASTER_SITE_BACKUP and MASTER_SITE_FREEBSD are set so that when you install future ports using the make command the process will look on our local server for files to download, and not go out to the freebsd.org site across our classroom link to the outside world.
If you are interested in how items are configured for doing things like updating your ports files, maybe your FreeBSD source tree, etc. then have a look at the example files in /usr/share/examples/cvsup.
When we run cvsup, in this case, it is going to download updates to descriptive files only. Actuall source is not downloaded until you issue a make. This has been determined by the configuration in the example cvsup config file we'll use in our command below, which is /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile.
Now that things are setup correctly, let's start the ports package upgrade process using cvsup. Once you issue this command you can leave your machine running as this may take some time to complete. The command to issue is:
cvsup -g -L 2 -h noc.presanog.org.bt /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile
Specifics on the command (taken directly from "man cvsup"):
Hervey Allen