FreeBSD Blog

First Website Is Running

January 13, 2005 Posted by KP

Finally, I solved the DNS problem, the following steps after that are much easier.

Some tips for DNS troubleshooting
1. Get a working example from another server if possible, it doesn’t matter the server is running FreeBSD or Linux, it’s fine as long as the Bind is the same version (well, roughly). I didn’t do this at the beginning because the Linux Bind configuration and zone files looks quite different, but I have no other options after tried two days and still no luck.

2. There is a default line in the bind configuration file, remove or comment it if you want to use the same server as DNS server.
listen-on { 127.0.0.1; };

3. Don’t directly copy the text from web pages, the different Windows/Unix format could cause troubles.

4. Read the handbook carefully and don’t miss any step in it :-).

PHP/MySQL
I installed php 5 and mysql 5 at first, but php didn’t work, I didn’t look into the problem, although it should be easy, also considering lower versions have better support and documentations, so I installed php 4 and mysql 4 instead with pkg_add.

PHP doesn’t need any configuration (done by pkg_add) and is ready after installation.

Browsing ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5.3-release/Latest/ to check available packages, for example, check php 4 related packages:
ncftp > ls php4*
By the way, ncftp is a great ftp client program with bookmark support.

I installed the following packages with pkg_add:
# pkg_add -r php4
# pkg_add -r php4-mysql
# pkg_add -r mysql40-server
(Don’t install mysql41-server, php4-mysql requires mysql40)

Start/Stop Mysql
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server.sh start[stop/restart]

Mysql will start at boot time by default, because any executable script accepting a ’start’ command-line argument found in /usr/local/etc/rc.d will be executed when the system starts up.

POP3 Server
I installed qpopper as pop3 server, the installation is very easy with pkg_add, uncomment the following line in file /etc/inetd.conf to enable qpopper
pop3 stream tcp nowait root /usr/local/libexec/qpopper popper

Qpopper is controlled by inetd (super server), enable inetd start at boot time, insert the following line in /etc/rc.conf.
inetd_enable=”YES”

Any configuration changes with qpopper require inetd to restart, it will reload the config file. Restart inetd with:
# /etc/rc.d/inetd restart
or send a HUP (hang up) to inetd process, it will also restart and reload the new config information:
# killall -HUP inetd
or
# kill -s HUP `cat /var/run/inetd.pid`
Note: ` is backticks not forward ticks.

I can connect the pop3 server with mail client, but didn’t send or receive email successfully, should be some problems of sendmail configuration, next step.

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