The FreeBSD diaries ... installing filePro for FreeBSD

[Walter Vaughan]

Hardware:
	Dual Xeon
	Intel 7501 Motherboard
	Intel Hotswap chassis
	4 - 200Gig SATA drive
	Intel SATA RAID CARD
	1 GIG Memory
=$2500 from local ebay seller/builder

Just to make sure everything was going to work out of the gate, I paid 
him an additional $125 to install FreeBSD 4.10 and make sure it worked
before I started whacking on it, and he paid for FedEX delivery instead 
of making me drive 45 minutes to get it.

Of course I had to test out hot swapping the array drives. Since it was 
setup as RAID-5, with four drives, it handled the removal of one drive 
just fine, and the removal of a second drive put the array into read 
only mode, but it didn't lock up the array or computer.

If you are going to show off for your friends, be aware that it took 
this array over 11 hours to rebuild that first removed drive. I guess 
once the second drive was fiddled with, it protected itself.

Building a custom kernel in FreeBSD is pretty easy, and took only
a few minutes to compile. I paid for two CPU's, and the default FreeBSD 
kernal only is single CPU. Anyone who's been through a ./link_unix in 
SCO won't be out of the water.

If you haven't been exposed to the FreeBSD ports system, it really is 
the best thing since sliced bread. Getting apache-modssl installed is 
just a matter of
"cd /usr/ports/www/apache13-modssl"
"make install clean"

Getting PHP is similar.. cd to the "/usr/ports/lang/php4" directory
and a "make install clean" sequence. The php install will give you an 
option of installing filepro connectivity, and of course you select it.
(It's a manipulate by record number - read only module, but it's better 
than nothing).

Samba was the next target to install. 3 minutes later it was downloaded, 
compiled, and running.

There are times you really want to not have to use a command line for 
everything. Webmin really does work with FreeBSD. Install it so it only 
communicates over ssh. Printer administration/installation is only a 
click or two and away you go.

Webmin also admins Samba easier than SWAT does. I make a share on the 
/tmp directory.

I'm going to migrate from an SCO Openserver system that has migrated 
from SCO-Unix, from SCO-Xenix, from Tandy-Xenix, from...
Any ways I wanted to make sure filepro has the same user ID, so I added 
a filepro user at 200 so as to insure everything stayed hunky-dory before.
Few clicks in webmin and that's done as well.

filePro rising.

I'm admining this install from my XP box, so I download the filepro 
executables into that /tmp share that I put on the FreeBSD box.

I've been a fan of Anzio since Tom Cropper showed it to me at a filePro 
developer conference a million years ago. However, this machine will not 
be running telnet, and as such I need a lightweight inexpensive ssh 
client. PuTTy seems to fit the bill nicely.

Even though I've been installing filePro forever, it seems to me that 
the biggest secret to installing is "how to install". There is no link 
on the download page.

On the other hand, working from memory it installed in seconds. It just 
took me several minutes to remember my memory.

Out of the box it seemed to work. Only I had version .52 of PuTTy (2002 
era). Line drawing characters were "D"'s... typical ansi emulation 
problems. Downloaded .54 of PuTTy, and filepro looks and acts just like 
my fileProOBDC on my XP desktop. Yippee.

Only other setting from default on PuTTy is to use "SCO" function keys.
Which bites until I get it figured out since the up arrow key no longer 
gives me the last command typed.

Printing was another issue that only took a second to see the light.

We print to various Windows boxes. We used custom hacked smbprint
models to do it. With Webmin, we created printers in a mouse click,
and had to change what was in printer maintenance or /appl/fp/lib/config 
from using "lp -ddest" to "lpr -Pdest". Once that was done, everything
prints just fine. And we've got a much easier to manage printer environment.

Stay tuned. This afternoon we tackle printing to hylaxfax spoolers and 
barcode printers.

--
Walter