No More FreeBSD
So, FreeBSD is a great OS. Really great. Better than I remembered, naturally, when I bumblingly installed it back in high school (installed the X package and didn’t know to put a window manager on … ah, to be young). However, the ports collection doesn’t exactly scream “Brandon, this will make your server configuration project easy.” In fact, it tends to do what it does and then I go and fix it to do what I want.
So, I’m rolling my own binaries from a baseline Slackware install and pristine sources from the likes of Postfix, Dovecot, Cyrus SASL (may it forever burn in Hell or at least until Postfix can perform its functions in-house), and Apache 2.2. Yes, I’m a hippy for using the 2.x series of Apache.
It’s going well, and I think I finally understand SASL and all its inconsistencies (documentation: “use passwd!”, reality: “you can’t use passwd unless you’re suid root! install pwcheck, run it as root during booting, and interface with it as an unprivileged user through a config file!”). I’ve got an award-winning Postfix main.cf file that doesn’t exactly do what I need it to do in the long run, but it at least performs as intended.
I’m planning on ninja’ing a nice (well, not really, but fast) P4 laptop Kristin’s P4 laptop up at school and actually making Slack packages to create a smooth install.
This sysadmin stuff is kind of fun. Good fun thing to keep as a hobby and not a job.