FreeBSD Web Server Install

FreeBSD suggested install tutorials

[thiessenp]

Hi,

I was a sys admin about 5 years ago, running mainly Slackware boxes. I'm taking up a partial sys admin role again and will be installing FreeBSD on 3 servers. Can anyone suggest easy to follow tutorials, how tos on the following:

1) Installing FreeBSD
2) Configuring Network services (eg. SSH, Mail, etc.)
3) Installing Web services (eg. Apache, PHP, MySQL)
4) Writing automation scripts for FreeBSD (eg. restarting the server through a Web UI)
5) FreeBSD redundancy. This I am very new to. So, suppose box 1 of the 3 BSD boxes go down, box 2 will take all requests.
6) MySQL load balancing on FreeBSD (though maybe this is more of a MySQL question than a FreeBSD question)
7) FreeBSD support forums and live chats (like the excellent Perl Monks chat)

Thanks!
-peter

[lammert]

6) MySQL load balancing on FreeBSD (though maybe this is more of a MySQL question than a FreeBSD question)

This is a tough point. MySQL is developed mainly for Linux, and it is specially adapted to the threading features that Linux provides. There have been large problems in the past with MySQL performing badly in high load situations on FreeBSD using the normal FreeBSD threads library. Yahoo (who are almost totally running on FreeBSD) has dedicated quite some development time to get this right, but threading problems still appear in some combinations of FreeBSD versions and MySQL versions and sometimes even seem to reappear in newer versions of the software. You should therefore very carefully choose the right versions of both software and installation options.

Jeremy Zawodny has made some comments on it, but as we are not allowed to link to blogs here, I leave it upto you to find his pages about the issue.

[Sharper]

This may be a little too obvious, but the FreeBSD handbook (and the other documentation) at [freebsd.org...] generally covers all of the basics.

For specific applications I'd suggest a good start would be to browse the ports collection. Make sure you install and use cvsup-without-gui and portupgrade as well. That should give you a good start.

[ckarg]

Several years ago, I had to migrate a complete e-commerce environment from OpenBSD to FreeBSD. The only book I needed for all of the answers on how to find, setup and configure stuff on FreeBSD was "Absolute BSD: The Ultimate Guide to FreeBSD" by Michael Lucas. The first edition had a few minor errors (e.g. in sample config file syntax), but there's now a second edition that should work even better.