Review of Building a Server with FreeBSD 7

If you look at the reviews of Building a Server with FreeBSD 7 by Bryan Hong, you'll see my review for the self-published Building an Internet Server With FreeBSD 6 Posted, which I gave 4 our of 5 stars. No Starch took the first edition, worked with the author, and published this new book using FreeBSD 7.0 as the base OS. If I could post a new review at Amazon.com, I would also give this book 4 out of 5 stars.

I think BASWF7 is an excellent companion to Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd Ed by Michael Lucas. Much of my original review pertains to this new edition. The majority of the book explores how to get a variety of popular open source applications running on FreeBSD 7.0 using the ports tree. For each application, the following sections usually appear: summary, resources, required, optional, preparation, install, configure, testing, utilities, config files, log files, and notes. I am really confident I could sit down with the appropriate chapter and get a previously unfamiliar program like SquirrelMail running fairly quickly.

Does this focus make the book a "FreeBSD book?" To the extent you use FreeBSD to provide services to others, and you want to follow the "FreeBSD way" using the ports tree, I say "yes". If you want really specific FreeBSD OS information, use Michael Lucas' book.

I have a few comments that perhaps Bryan might answer here. First, why replace the OpenSSH and OpenSSL included in the base OS with those from the ports tree? (I'm not saying that's "wrong;" I'd just like to know his thoughts. Second, I recommend including some words on using Portsnap to update the ports tree, and pkg_add to install binary packages instead of compiling source through the ports tree. Third, consider replacing net/ntp with net/openntpd. Fourth, the beginning of the book seems to imply that only i386 and amd64 distributions are available. Finally, I don't like the labels attached to the TCP/IP layers in Appendix D.

Overall, I think those with beginning to intermediate FreeBSD system administration will really like this book. I would like to see Bryan accept suggestions for new applications to be included in the next edition for FreeBSD 8.0.