Technical Papers Collection |
This is a collection of papers I have written over the last few years. Some many not be directly applicable now but they can make good references and pointers.
| Building Firefox on FreeBSD | Back in the day when Firefox wasn't available in the ports collection, we had to (shock!) compile it ourselves. This page outlines the steps you need to use to compile Firefox from CVS, and also provides the script that I use to upload the nightly tarball of FreeBSD Firefox binaries to ftp.mozilla.org |
| FreeBSD Denial of Service Protection | This is one of my first papers on FreeBSD. Running irc.mindspring.com taught me a great deal about hardening a server and network from denial of service attacks, most of which is documented here. Being one of the vintage set, the numbers in this paper probably need some tuning today. However all of the other concepts should still be directly applicable sure as DEVICE_POLLING. |
| FreeBSD Kernel Compiling and Tuning | This is complementory to the FreeBSD handbook describing how to compile your own kernel, and extends into significant areas of tuning your kernel for maximum performance. You will also find information on building debugging kernels to help diagnose problems in the event of a kernel panic. Originally written for FreeBSD 4.8, this paper still applies quite well to FreeBSD 6.0, and should remain consistant for the forseeable future. |
| Performance Tuning FreeBSD | FreeBSD is already fast, but many people do not realise how much faster and more efficient it can really be. Did you know that adding a single line to /etc/make.conf can reduce the space footprint of your installation by up to 200Mb, and cause Xorg to run significantly and noticably faster with no drawbacks? Read on! |
| FreeBSD, SNMP and RRDTool Tutorial | Without a doubt one of the most widely read papers I have written, and it's easy to see why. RRDTool is an incredibly powerful package allowing the user to plot almost any set of numbers on a graph and watch changes over time. Many popular packages including Cacti are built on top of RRDTool. Find out how easy it is to get started in this paper. |
| Using PF on FreeBSD to filter by OS | It is often quite useful to filter network traffic by operating system. Unfortunately this has been quite difficult until recently, often involving the purchase of very expensive hardware. PF, developed by the OpenBSD team allows users to do this quite easily. This paper discusses PF configuration, to filter all Windows traffic through a transparent HTTP proxy. This paper was originally published on O'Reilly's OnLamp.com. |
| vi Quick Reference Guide | A simple and quick introduction to commonly used commands in vi. It provides a mix of single and complex commands, showing a brief glimpse into the power of vi. |