Ports is one of the correct approach to install softwares on FreeBSD like RPM of RedHat-based, APT of Debian-based and Portage of Gentoo. Anyway, FreeBSD is not as easy as others because you may install FreeBSD as small as possible. In that case, there is no something called Ports Tree. This is a way to get the fresh and the most up-to-date ports tree.

I am getting trouble to access some web sites without any error messages. It seems some packets being loss. I would like to identify the problem to fix it as soon as possible. The tool I used is not the classic traceroute because I can ping to the web site successfully. ICMP is not enough. I guess that the problem should be only effective to TCP or something in higher layer.

Someday, you might want to monitor popular internet services on several hosts. It should be quick and simple so you don't have to install so long software packets to meet the dependencies. I have ones for you. They are written in pure Perl to monitor HTTP service and MySQL service.

I have read an interesting blog regarding the topic of awesome mechanism built-in any Linux. Why Linux can be updated without rebooting? This is a feature of UNIX-like operation system as well as its filesystem implementation.

Apache HTTP Server comes with a handy mod_status for monitoring current status and performance of itself. However, mod_status doesn't show the performance in the past. I like the historical data because it would help me to find problem occured since last crash.

For those who have never tried FreeBSD including Windows and Linux, I would like to recommend to try it just once. FreeBSD is one of the most efficient operating system for heavy-load internet server. Below are what I did to setup a web server on FreeBSD. In this article I will focus on FreeBSD 6.1, Apache 2.2.3, MySQL 5.0.26, PHP 5.1.6, FastCGI 1.09, eAccelerator 0.95-rc1, and LimitIPConn 0.22.