This chapter will cover some of the more frequently used network services on Unix systems. We will cover how to define, setup, test and maintain all of the network services that FreeBSD utilizes. In addition, there have been example configuration files included throughout this chapter for you to benefit from. After reading this chapter, you will know: The basics of gateways and routes. How to make FreeBSD act as a bridge. How to setup a network filesystem. How to setup network booting on a diskless machine. How to setup a network information server for sharing user accounts. How to setup automatic network settings using DHCP. How to setup a domain name server. How to synchronize the time and date, and setup a time server, with the NTP protocol. How to setup network address translation. How to manage the inetd daemon. How to connect two computers via PLIP. How to setup IPv6 on a FreeBSD machine. Before reading this chapter, you should: Understand the basics of the /etc/rc scripts. Be familiar with basic network terminology. Coranth Gryphon Contributed by routing gateway subnet For one machine to be able to find another over a network, there must be a mechanism in place to describe how to get from one to the other. This is called routing. A route is a defined pair of addresses: a destination and a gateway. The pair indicates that if you are trying to get to this destination, communicate through this gateway. There are three types of destinations: individual hosts, subnets, and default. The default route is used if none of the other routes apply. We will talk a little bit more about default routes later on. There are also three types of gateways: individual hosts, interfaces (also called links), and Ethernet hardware addresses (MAC addresses). To illustrate different aspects of routing, we will use the following example from netstat: &prompt.user; netstat -r Routing tables Destination Gateway Flags Refs Use Netif Expire default outside-gw UGSc 37 418 ppp0 localhost localhost UH 0 181 lo0 test0 0:e0:b5:36:cf:4f UHLW 5 63288 ed0 77 10.20.30.255 link#1 UHLW 1 2421 example.com link#1 UC 0 0 host1 0:e0:a8:37:8:1e UHLW 3 4601 lo0 host2 0:e0:a8:37:8:1e UHLW 0 5 lo0 => host2.example.com link#1 UC 0 0 224 link#1 UC 0 0 default route The first two lines specify the default route (which we will cover in the next section) and the localhost route. loopback device The interface (Netif column) that this routing table specifies to use for localhost is lo0, also known as the loopback device. This says to keep all traffic for this destination internal, rather than sending it out over the LAN, since it will only end up back where it started. Ethernet MAC address The next thing that stands out are the addresses beginning with 0:e0:. These are Ethernet hardware addresses, which are also known as MAC addresses. FreeBSD will automatically identify any hosts (test0 in the example) on the local Ethernet and add a route for that host, directly to it over the Ethernet interface, ed0. There is also a timeout (Expire column) associated with this type of route, which is used if we fail to hear from the host in a specific amount of time. When this happens, the route to this host will be automatically deleted. These hosts are identified using a mechanism known as RIP (Routing Information Protocol), which figures out routes to local hosts based upon a shortest path determination. subnet FreeBSD will also add subnet routes for the local subnet (10.20.30.255 is the broadcast address for the subnet 10.20.30, and example.com is the domain name associated with that subnet). The designation link#1 refers to the first Ethernet card in the machine. You will notice no additional interface is specified for those. Both of these groups (local network hosts and local subnets) have their routes automatically configured by a daemon called routed. If this is not run, then only routes which are statically defined (i.e. entered explicitly) will exist. The host1 line refers to our host, which it knows by Ethernet address. Since we are the sending host, FreeBSD knows to use the loopback interface (lo0) rather than sending it out over the Ethernet interface. The two host2 lines are an example of what happens when we use an &man.ifconfig.8; alias (see the section on Ethernet for reasons why we would do this). The => symbol after the lo0 interface says that not only are we using the loopback (since this address also refers to the local host), but specifically it is an alias. Such routes only show up on the host that supports the alias; all other hosts on the local network will simply have a link#1 line for such routes. The final line (destination subnet 224) deals with multicasting, which will be covered in another section. Finally, various attributes of each route can be seen in the Flags column. Below is a short table of some of these flags and their meanings: U Up: The route is active. H Host: The route destination is a single host. G Gateway: Send anything for this destination on to this remote system, which will figure out from there where to send it. S Static: This route was configured manually, not automatically generated by the system. C Clone: Generates a new route based upon this route for machines we connect to. This type of route is normally used for local networks. W WasCloned: Indicated a route that was auto-configured based upon a local area network (Clone) route. L Link: Route involves references to Ethernet hardware. default route When the local system needs to make a connection to a remote host, it checks the routing table to determine if a known path exists. If the remote host falls into a subnet that we know how to reach (Cloned routes), then the system checks to see if it can connect along that interface. If all known paths fail, the system has one last option: the default route. This route is a special type of gateway route (usually the only one present in the system), and is always marked with a c in the flags field. For hosts on a local area network, this gateway is set to whatever machine has a direct connection to the outside world (whether via PPP link, DSL, cable modem, T1, or another network interface). If you are configuring the default route for a machine which itself is functioning as the gateway to the outside world, then the default route will be the gateway machine at your Internet Service Provider's (ISP) site. Let us look at an example of default routes. This is a common configuration: [Local2] <--ether--> [Local1] <--PPP--> [ISP-Serv] <--ether--> [T1-GW] The hosts Local1 and Local2 are at your site. Local1 is connected to an ISP via a dial up PPP connection. This PPP server computer is connected through a local area network to another gateway computer through an external interface to the ISPs Internet feed. The default routes for each of your machines will be: Host Default Gateway Interface Local2 Local1 Ethernet Local1 T1-GW PPP A common question is Why (or how) would we set the T1-GW to be the default gateway for Local1, rather than the ISP server it is connected to?. Remember, since the PPP interface is using an address on the ISP's local network for your side of the connection, routes for any other machines on the ISP's local network will be automatically generated. Hence, you will already know how to reach the T1-GW machine, so there is no need for the intermediate step of sending traffic to the ISP server. As a final note, it is common to use the address X.X.X.1 as the gateway address for your local network. So (using the same example), if your local class-C address space was 10.20.30 and your ISP was using 10.9.9 then the default routes would be: Host Default Route Local2 (10.20.30.2) Local1 (10.20.30.1) Local1 (10.20.30.1, 10.9.9.30) T1-GW (10.9.9.1) dual homed hosts There is one other type of configuration that we should cover, and that is a host that sits on two different networks. Technically, any machine functioning as a gateway (in the example above, using a PPP connection) counts as a dual-homed host. But the term is really only used to refer to a machine that sits on two local-area networks. In one case, the machine has two Ethernet cards, each having an address on the separate subnets. Alternately, the machine may only have one Ethernet card, and be using &man.ifconfig.8; aliasing. The former is used if two physically separate Ethernet networks are in use, the latter if there is one physical network segment, but two logically separate subnets. Either way, routing tables are set up so that each subnet knows that this machine is the defined gateway (inbound route) to the other subnet. This configuration, with the machine acting as a router between the two subnets, is often used when we need to implement packet filtering or firewall security in either or both directions. If you want this machine to actually forward packets between the two interfaces, you need to tell FreeBSD to enable this ability. router A network router is simply a system that forwards packets from one interface to another. Internet standards and good engineering practice prevent the FreeBSD Project from enabling this by default in FreeBSD. You can enable this feature by changing the following variable to YES in &man.rc.conf.5;: gateway_enable=YES # Set to YES if this host will be a gateway This option will set the &man.sysctl.8; variable net.inet.ip.forwarding to 1. If you should need to stop routing temporarily, you can reset this to 0 temporarily. Your new router will need routes to know where to send the traffic. If your network is simple enough you can use static routes. FreeBSD also comes with the standard BSD routing daemon &man.routed.8;, which speaks RIP (both version 1 and version 2) and IRDP. For more complex situations you may want to try net/gated. Even when FreeBSD is configured in this way, it does not completely comply with the Internet standard requirements for routers. It comes close enough for ordinary use, however. routing propagation We have already talked about how we define our routes to the outside world, but not about how the outside world finds us. We already know that routing tables can be set up so that all traffic for a particular address space (in our examples, a class-C subnet) can be sent to a particular host on that network, which will forward the packets inbound. When you get an address space assigned to your site, your service provider will set up their routing tables so that all traffic for your subnet will be sent down your PPP link to your site. But how do sites across the country know to send to your ISP? There is a system (much like the distributed DNS information) that keeps track of all assigned address-spaces, and defines their point of connection to the Internet Backbone. The Backbone are the main trunk lines that carry Internet traffic across the country, and around the world. Each backbone machine has a copy of a master set of tables, which direct traffic for a particular network to a specific backbone carrier, and from there down the chain of service providers until it reaches your network. It is the task of your service provider to advertise to the backbone sites that they are the point of connection (and thus the path inward) for your site. This is known as route propagation. traceroute Sometimes, there is a problem with routing propagation, and some sites are unable to connect to you. Perhaps the most useful command for trying to figure out where routing is breaking down is the &man.traceroute.8; command. It is equally useful if you cannot seem to make a connection to a remote machine (i.e. &man.ping.8; fails). The &man.traceroute.8; command is run with the name of the remote host you are trying to connect to. It will show the gateway hosts along the path of the attempt, eventually either reaching the target host, or terminating because of a lack of connection. For more information, see the manual page for &man.traceroute.8;. Eric Anderson Written by It can be very useful to be able to use a computer without the annoyance of having a network cable attached at all times. FreeBSD can be used as a wireless client, and even as a wireless access point. There are two main types of wireless devices: access points, and clients. Access points are wireless networking devices that allow one or more wireless clients to use the device as a central hub. When using an access point, all clients communicate through the access point. Multiple access points are often used to cover a complete area such as a house, business, or park with a wireless network. Access points typically have multiple network connections: the wireless card, and one or more wired ethernet adapters for connection to the rest of the network. Access points can either be purchased prebuilt, or you can build your own with FreeBSD and a supported wireless card. Several vendors make wireless access points and wireless cards with various features. In order to set up a wireless access point with FreeBSD, you need to have a compatible wireless card. Currently, only cards with the Prism chipset are supported. You will also need a wired network card that is supported by FreeBSD (this should not be difficult to find, FreeBSD supports a lot of different devices). For this guide, we will assume you want to &man.bridge.4; all traffic between the wireless device and the network attached to the wired network card. First, make sure your system can see the wireless card: &prompt.root; ifconfig -a wi0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 inet6 fe80::202:2dff:fe2d:c938%wi0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x7 inet 0.0.0.0 netmask 0xff000000 broadcast 255.255.255.255 ether 00:09:2d:2d:c9:50 media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (DS/2Mbps) status: no carrier ssid "" stationname "FreeBSD Wireless node" channel 10 authmode OPEN powersavemode OFF powersavesleep 100 wepmode OFF weptxkey 1 Do not worry about the details now, just make sure it shows you something to indicate you have a wireless card installed. Next, you will need to load a module in order to get the bridging part of FreeBSD ready for the access point. In order to load the &man.bridge.4; module, simply run the following command: &prompt.root; kldload bridge It should not have produced any errors when loading the module. If it did, you may need to compile the &man.bridge.4; code into your kernel. The Bridging section of the handbook should be able to help you accomplish that task. Now that you have the bridging stuff done, we need to tell the FreeBSD kernel which interfaces to bridge together. We do that by using &man.sysctl.8;: &prompt.root; sysctl net.link.ether.bridge=1 &prompt.root; sysctl net.link.ether.bridge_cfg="wi0 xl0" &prompt.root; sysctl net.inet.ip.forwarding=1 Now it is time for the wireless card setup. The following commands will set the card into BSS mode (turning it into an access point): &prompt.root; wicontrol -s "FreeBSD AP"" &prompt.root; ifconfig wi0 inet ssid my_net channel 11 media DS/11Mbps mediaopt hostap up The first &man.wicontrol.8; command tells FreeBSD that the name of this access point is FreeBSD AP by using the -s flag, Check out &man.wicontrol.8; for more information. The &man.ifconfig.8; line brings the wi0 interface up, and sets its SSID to my_net. This is a little redundant, but it is shown here to emphasize that you can do these settings in either place. You will also notice a mediaopt hostap setting; this setting is to tell &man.ifconfig.8; to put the interface into access point mode. The media DS/11Mbps is needed so that the mediaopt hostap setting will become effective. The channel 11 sets the 802.11b channel to use. The &man.wicontrol.7; man page has valid channel options for your regulatory domain. Now you should have a complete functioning access point up and running. You are encouraged to read &man.wicontrol.8;, &man.ifconfig.8;, and &man.wi.4; for further information. It is also suggested that you read the section on encryption that follows. A wireless client is a system that accesses an access point or another client directly. Typically, wireless clients only have one network device, the wireless networking card. There are a few different ways to configure a wireless client. These are based on the different wireless modes, generally BSS (infrastructure mode, which requires an access point), and IBSS (ad-hoc, or peer-to-peer mode). In our example, we will use the most popular of the two, BSS mode, to talk to an access point. There is only one real requirement for setting up FreeBSD as a wireless client. You will need a wireless card that is supported by FreeBSD. You will need to know a few things about the wireless network you are joining before you start. In this example, we are joining a network that has a name of my_net, and encryption turned off. Note: In this example, we are not using encryption, which is a dangerous situation. In the next section, you will learn how to turn on encryption, and why it is important to do so, and why some encryption technologies still do not completely protect you. Make sure your card is recognized by FreeBSD: &prompt.root; ifconfig -a wi0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 inet6 fe80::202:2dff:fe2d:c938%wi0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x7 inet 0.0.0.0 netmask 0xff000000 broadcast 255.255.255.255 ether 00:09:2d:2d:c9:50 media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (DS/2Mbps) status: no carrier ssid "" stationname "FreeBSD Wireless node" channel 10 authmode OPEN powersavemode OFF powersavesleep 100 wepmode OFF weptxkey 1 Now, we will set the card to the correct settings for our network: &prompt.root; ifconfig wi0 inet 192.168.0.20 netmask 255.255.255.0 ssid my_net Replace 192.168.0.20 and 255.255.255.0 with a valid IP address and netmask on your wired network. Remember, our access point is bridging the data between the wireless network, and the wired network, so it will appear to the other devices on your network that you are on the wired network just as they are. Once you have done that, you should be able to ping hosts on the wired network just as if you were connected using a standard wired connection. If you are experiencing problems with your wireless connection, check to make sure that your are associated (connected) to the access point: &prompt.root; ifconfig wi0 should return some information, and you should see: status: associated If it does not show associated, then you may be out of range of the access point, do not have encryption on, or possibly have a configuration problem. Encryption on a wireless network is important because you no longer have the ability to keep the network contained in a well protected area. Your wireless data will be broadcast across your entire neighborhood, so anyone who cares to read it can. This is where encryption comes in. By encrypting the data that is sent over the airwaves, you make it much more difficult for any interested party to grab your data right out of the air. The two most common ways to encrypt the data between your client and the access point, are WEP, and &man.ipsec.4;. WEP is an abbreviation for Wired Equivalency Protocol. WEP is an attempt to make wireless networks as safe and secure as a wired network. Unfortunately, it has been cracked, and is fairly trivial to break. This also means it is not something to rely on when it comes to encrypting sensitive data. It is better than nothing, so use the following to turn on WEP on your new FreeBSD access point: &prompt.root; ifconfig wi0 inet up ssid my_net wepmode on wepkey 0x1234567890 media DS/11Mbps mediaopt hostap And you can turn on WEP on a client with this command: &prompt.root; ifconfig wi0 inet 192.168.0.20 netmask 255.255.255.0 ssid my_net wepmode on wepkey 0x1234567890 Note that you should replace the 0x1234567890 with a more unique key. &man.ipsec.4; is a much more robust and powerful tool for encrypting data across a network. This is definitely the preferred way to encrypt wireless data over a network. You can read more about &man.ipsec.4; security and how to implement it in the IPsec section of the handbook. There are a small number of tools available for use in debugging and setting up your wireless network, and here we will attempt to describe some of them and what they do. The bsd-airtools package is a complete toolset that includes wireless auditing tools for WEP key cracking, access point detection, etc. The bsd-airtools utilities can be installed from the net/bsd-airtools port. Information on installing ports can be found in of the handbook. The program dstumbler is the packaged tool that allows for access point discovery and signal to noise ratio graphing. If you are having a hard time getting your access point up and running, dstumbler may help you get started. To test your wireless network security, you may choose to use dweputils (dwepcrack, dwepdump and dwepkeygen) to help you determine if WEP is the right solution to your wireless security needs. These are the tools you use to control how your wireless card behaves on the wireless network. In the examples above, we have chosen to use &man.wicontrol.8;, since our wireless card is a wi0 interface. If you had a Cisco wireless device, it would come up as an0, and therefore you would use &man.ancontrol.8;. &man.ifconfig.8; can be used to do many of the same options as &man.wicontrol.8;, however it does lack a few options. Check &man.ifconfig.8; for command line parameters and options. The only cards that are currently supported for BSS (as an access point) mode are devices based on the Prism (or Prism 2, 2.5, 3) chipsets. For a complete list, look at &man.wi.4;. Almost all 802.11b wireless cards are currently supported under FreeBSD. Most cards based on Prism, Spectrum24, Hermes, Aironet, and Raylink will work as a wireless network card in IBSS (ad-hoc, peer-to-peer, and BSS) mode. Steve Peterson Written by IP subnet bridge It is sometimes useful to divide one physical network (such as an Ethernet segment) into two separate network segments without having to create IP subnets and use a router to connect the segments together. A device that connects two networks together in this fashion is called a bridge. A FreeBSD system with two network interface cards can act as a bridge. The bridge works by learning the MAC layer addresses (Ethernet addresses) of the devices on each of its network interfaces. It forwards traffic between two networks only when its source and destination are on different networks. In many respects, a bridge is like an Ethernet switch with very few ports. There are two common situations in which a bridge is used today. Situation one is where your physical network segment is overloaded with traffic, but you do not want for whatever reason to subnet the network and interconnect the subnets with a router. Let us consider an example of a newspaper where the Editorial and Production departments are on the same subnetwork. The Editorial users all use server A for file service, and the Production users are on server B. An Ethernet is used to connect all users together, and high loads on the network are slowing things down. If the Editorial users could be segregated on one network segment and the Production users on another, the two network segments could be connected with a bridge. Only the network traffic destined for interfaces on the other side of the bridge would be sent to the other network, reducing congestion on each network segment. firewall IP Masquerading The second common situation is where firewall functionality is needed without IP Masquerading (NAT). An example is a small company that is connected via DSL or ISDN to their ISP. They have a 13 globally-accessible IP addresses from their ISP and have 10 PCs on their network. In this situation, using a router-based firewall is difficult because of subnetting issues. router DSL ISDN A bridge-based firewall can be configured and dropped into the path just downstream of their DSL/ISDN router without any IP numbering issues. A bridge requires at least two network cards to function. Unfortunately, not all network interface cards as of FreeBSD 4.0 support bridging. Read &man.bridge.4; for details on the cards that are supported. Install and test the two network cards before continuing. kernel configuration kernel configuration options BRIDGE To enable kernel support for bridging, add the: options BRIDGE statement to your kernel configuration file, and rebuild your kernel. firewall If you are planning to use the bridge as a firewall, you will need to add the IPFIREWALL option as well. Read for general information on configuring the bridge as a firewall. If you need to allow non-IP packets (such as ARP) to flow through the bridge, there is an undocumented firewall option that must be set. This option is IPFIREWALL_DEFAULT_TO_ACCEPT. Note that this changes the default rule for the firewall to accept any packet. Make sure you know how this changes the meaning of your ruleset before you set it. If you want to use the bridge as a traffic shaper, you will need to add the DUMMYNET option to your kernel configuration. Read &man.dummynet.4; for further information. Add the line: net.link.ether.bridge=1 to /etc/sysctl.conf to enable the bridge at runtime, and the line: net.link.ether.bridge_cfg=if1,if2 to enable bridging on the specified interfaces (replace if1 and if2 with the names of your two network interfaces). If you want the bridged packets to be filtered by &man.ipfw.8;, you should add: net.link.ether.bridge_ipfw=1 as well. My bridge/firewall is a Pentium 90 with one 3Com 3C900B and one 3C905B. The protected side of the network runs at 10 mbps half duplex and the connection between the bridge and my router (a Cisco 675) runs at 100 mbps full duplex. With no filtering enabled, I have found that the bridge adds about 0.4 milliseconds of latency to pings from the protected 10 mbps network to the Cisco 675. If you want to be able to telnet into the bridge from the network, it is OK to assign one of the network cards an IP address. The consensus is that assigning both cards an address is a bad idea. If you have multiple bridges on your network, there cannot be more than one path between any two workstations. Technically, this means that there is no support for spanning tree link management. Tom Rhodes Reorganized and enhanced by Bill Swingle Written by NFS Among the many different filesystems that FreeBSD supports is the Network File System, also known as NFS. NFS allows a system to share directories and files with others over a network. By using NFS, users and programs can access files on remote systems almost as if they were local files. Some of the most notable benefits that NFS can provide are: Local workstations use less disk space because commonly used data can be stored on a single machine and still remain accessible to others over the network. There is no need for users to have separate home directories on every network machine. Home directories could be setup on the NFS server and made available throughout the network. Storage devices such as floppy disks, CDROM drives, and ZIP drives can be used by other machines on the network. This may reduce the number of removable media drives throughout the network. NFS consists of at least two main parts: a server and one or more clients. The client remotely accesses the data that is stored on the server machine. In order for this to function properly a few processes have to be configured and running: The server has to be running the following daemons: NFS server portmap mountd nfsd Daemon Description nfsd The NFS daemon which services requests from the NFS clients. mountd The NFS mount daemon which carries out the requests that &man.nfsd.8; passes on to it. portmap The portmapper daemon allows NFS clients to discover which port the NFS server is using. The client can also run a daemon, known as nfsiod. The nfsiod daemon services the requests from the NFS server. This is optional, and improves performance, but is not required for normal and correct operation. See the &man.nfsiod.8; manual page for more information. NFS configuration NFS configuration is a relatively straightforward process. The processes that need to be running can all start at boot time with a few modifications to your /etc/rc.conf file. On the NFS server, make sure that the following options are configured in the /etc/rc.conf file: portmap_enable="YES" nfs_server_enable="YES" mountd_flags="-r" mountd runs automatically whenever the NFS server is enabled. On the client, make sure this option is present in /etc/rc.conf: nfs_client_enable="YES" The /etc/exports file specifies which filesystems NFS should export (sometimes referred to as share). Each line in /etc/exports specifies a filesystem to be exported and which machines have access to that filesystem. Along with what machines have access to that filesystem, access options may also be specified. There are many such options that can be used in this file but only a few will be mentioned here. You can easily discover other options by reading over the &man.exports.5; manual page. Here are a few example /etc/exports entries: NFS Examples of exporting filesystems The following examples give an idea of how to export filesystems, although the settings may be different depending on your environment and network configuration. For instance, to export the /cdrom directory to three example machines that have the same domain name as the server (hence the lack of a domain name for each) or have entries in your /etc/hosts file. The -ro flag makes the exported filesystem read-only. With this flag, the remote system will not be able to write any changes to the exported filesystem. /cdrom -ro host1 host2 host3 The following line exports /home to three hosts by IP address. This is a useful setup if you have a private network without a DNS server configured. Optionally the /etc/hosts file could be configured for internal hostnames; please review &man.hosts.5; for more information. The -alldirs flag allows the subdirectories to be mount points. In other words, it will not mount the subdirectories but permit the client to mount only the directories that are required or needed. /home -alldirs 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.3 10.0.0.4 The following line exports /a so that two clients from different domains may access the filesystem. The -maproot=root flag allows the root user on the remote system to write data on the exported filesystem as root. If the -maproot=root flag is not specified, then even if a user has root access on the remote system, they will not be able to modify files on the exported filesystem. /a -maproot=root host.example.com box.example.org In order for a client to access an exported filesystem, the client must have permission to do so. Make sure the client is listed in your /etc/exports file. In /etc/exports, each line represents the export information for one filesystem to one host. A remote host can only be specified once per filesystem, and may only have one default entry. For example, assume that /usr is a single filesystem. The following /etc/exports would be invalid: /usr/src client /usr/ports client One filesystem, /usr, has two lines specifying exports to the same host, client. The correct format for this situation is: /usr/src /usr/ports client The properties of one filesystem exported to a given host must all occur on one line. Lines without a client specified are treated as a single host. This limits how you can export filesystems, but for most people this is not an issue. The following is an example of a valid export list, where /usr and /exports are local filesystems: # Export src and ports to client01 and client02, but only # client01 has root privileges on it /usr/src /usr/ports -maproot=root client01 /usr/src /usr/ports client02 # The client machines have root and can mount anywhere # on /exports. Anyone in the world can mount /exports/obj read-only /exports -alldirs -maproot=root client01 client02 /exports/obj -ro You must restart mountd whenever you modify /etc/exports so the changes can take effect. This can be accomplished by sending the HUP signal to the mountd process: &prompt.root; kill -HUP `cat /var/run/mountd.pid` Alternatively, a reboot will make FreeBSD set everything up properly. A reboot is not necessary though. Executing the following commands as root should start everything up. On the NFS server: &prompt.root; portmap &prompt.root; nfsd -u -t -n 4 &prompt.root; mountd -r On the NFS client: &prompt.root; nfsiod -n 4 Now everything should be ready to actually mount a remote file system. In these examples the server's name will be server and the client's name will be client. If you only want to temporarily mount a remote filesystem or would rather test the configuration, just execute a command like this as root on the client: NFS mounting filesystems &prompt.root; mount server:/home /mnt This will mount the /home directory on the server at /mnt on the client. If everything is set up correctly you should be able to enter /mnt on the client and see all the files that are on the server. If you want to automatically mount a remote filesystem each time the computer boots, add the filesystem to the /etc/fstab file. Here is an example: server:/home /mnt nfs rw 0 0 The &man.fstab.5; manual page lists all the available options. NFS has many practical uses. Some of the more common ones are listed below: NFS uses Set several machines to share a CDROM or other media among them. This is cheaper and often a more convenient method to install software on multiple machines. On large networks, it might be more convenient to configure a central NFS server in which to store all the user home directories. These home directories can then be exported to the network so that users would always have the same home directory, regardless of which workstation they log in to. Several machines could have a common /usr/ports/distfiles directory. That way, when you need to install a port on several machines, you can quickly access the source without downloading it on each machine. Wylie Stilwell Contributed by Chern Lee Rewritten by amd automatic mounter daemon &man.amd.8; (the automatic mounter daemon) automatically mounts a remote filesystem whenever a file or directory within that filesystem is accessed. Filesystems that are inactive for a period of time will also be automatically unmounted by amd. Using amd provides a simple alternative to permanent mounts, as permanent mounts are usually listed in /etc/fstab. amd operates by attaching itself as an NFS server to the /host and /net directories. When a file is accessed within one of these directories, amd looks up the corresponding remote mount and automatically mounts it. /net is used to mount an exported filesystem from an IP address, while /host is used to mount an export from a remote hostname. An access to a file within /host/foobar/usr would tell amd to attempt to mount the /usr export on the host foobar. You can view the available mounts of a remote host with the showmount command. For example, to view the mounts of a host named foobar, you can use: &prompt.user; showmount -e foobar Exports list on foobar: /usr 10.10.10.0 /a 10.10.10.0 &prompt.user; cd /host/foobar/usr As seen in the example, the showmount shows /usr as an export. When changing directories to /host/foobar/usr, amd attempts to resolve the hostname foobar and automatically mount the desired export. amd can be started by the startup scripts by placing the following lines in /etc/rc.conf: amd_enable="YES" Additionally, custom flags can be passed to amd from the amd_flags option. By default, amd_flags is set to: amd_flags="-a /.amd_mnt -l syslog /host /etc/amd.map /net /etc/amd.map" The /etc/amd.map file defines the default options that exports are mounted with. The /etc/amd.conf file defines some of the more advanced features of amd. Consult the &man.amd.8; and &man.amd.conf.5; manual pages for more information. John Lind Contributed by Certain Ethernet adapters for ISA PC systems have limitations which can lead to serious network problems, particularly with NFS. This difficulty is not specific to FreeBSD, but FreeBSD systems are affected by it. The problem nearly always occurs when (FreeBSD) PC systems are networked with high-performance workstations, such as those made by Silicon Graphics, Inc., and Sun Microsystems, Inc. The NFS mount will work fine, and some operations may succeed, but suddenly the server will seem to become unresponsive to the client, even though requests to and from other systems continue to be processed. This happens to the client system, whether the client is the FreeBSD system or the workstation. On many systems, there is no way to shut down the client gracefully once this problem has manifested itself. The only solution is often to reset the client, because the NFS situation cannot be resolved. Though the correct solution is to get a higher performance and capacity Ethernet adapter for the FreeBSD system, there is a simple workaround that will allow satisfactory operation. If the FreeBSD system is the server, include the option -w=1024 on the mount from the client. If the FreeBSD system is the client, then mount the NFS filesystem with the option -r=1024. These options may be specified using the fourth field of the fstab entry on the client for automatic mounts, or by using the -o parameter of the mount command for manual mounts. It should be noted that there is a different problem, sometimes mistaken for this one, when the NFS servers and clients are on different networks. If that is the case, make certain that your routers are routing the necessary UDP information, or you will not get anywhere, no matter what else you are doing. In the following examples, fastws is the host (interface) name of a high-performance workstation, and freebox is the host (interface) name of a FreeBSD system with a lower-performance Ethernet adapter. Also, /sharedfs will be the exported NFS filesystem (see &man.exports.5;), and /project will be the mount point on the client for the exported filesystem. In all cases, note that additional options, such as hard or soft and bg may be desirable in your application. Examples for the FreeBSD system (freebox) as the client in /etc/fstab on freebox: fastws:/sharedfs /project nfs rw,-r=1024 0 0 As a manual mount command on freebox: &prompt.root; mount -t nfs -o -r=1024 fastws:/sharedfs /project Examples for the FreeBSD system as the server in /etc/fstab on fastws: freebox:/sharedfs /project nfs rw,-w=1024 0 0 As a manual mount command on fastws: &prompt.root; mount -t nfs -o -w=1024 freebox:/sharedfs /project Nearly any 16-bit Ethernet adapter will allow operation without the above restrictions on the read or write size. For anyone who cares, here is what happens when the failure occurs, which also explains why it is unrecoverable. NFS typically works with a block size of 8 k (though it may do fragments of smaller sizes). Since the maximum Ethernet packet is around 1500 bytes, the NFS block gets split into multiple Ethernet packets, even though it is still a single unit to the upper-level code, and must be received, assembled, and acknowledged as a unit. The high-performance workstations can pump out the packets which comprise the NFS unit one right after the other, just as close together as the standard allows. On the smaller, lower capacity cards, the later packets overrun the earlier packets of the same unit before they can be transferred to the host and the unit as a whole cannot be reconstructed or acknowledged. As a result, the workstation will time out and try again, but it will try again with the entire 8 K unit, and the process will be repeated, ad infinitum. By keeping the unit size below the Ethernet packet size limitation, we ensure that any complete Ethernet packet received can be acknowledged individually, avoiding the deadlock situation. Overruns may still occur when a high-performance workstations is slamming data out to a PC system, but with the better cards, such overruns are not guaranteed on NFS units. When an overrun occurs, the units affected will be retransmitted, and there will be a fair chance that they will be received, assembled, and acknowledged. Jean-François Dockès Updated by diskless workstation diskless operation A FreeBSD machine can boot over the network and operate without a local disk, using filesystems mounted from an NFS server. No system modification is necessary, beyond standard configuration files. Such a system is easy to set up because all the necessary elements are readily available: There are at least two possible methods to load the kernel over the network: PXE: Intel's Preboot Execution Environment system is a form of smart boot ROM built into some networking cards or motherboards. See &man.pxeboot.8; for more details. The etherboot port (net/etherboot) produces ROM-able code to boot kernels over the network. The code can be either burnt into a boot PROM on a network card, or loaded from a local floppy (or hard) disk drive, or from a running MS-DOS system. Many network cards are supported. A sample script (/usr/share/examples/diskless/clone_root) eases the creation and maintenance of the workstation's root filesystem on the server. The script will probably require a little customization but it will get you started very quickly. Standard system startup files exist in /etc to detect and support a diskless system startup. Swapping, if needed, can be done either to an NFS file or to a local disk. There are many ways to set up diskless workstations. Many elements are involved, and most can be customized to suit local taste. The following will describe the setup of a complete system, emphasizing simplicity and compatibility with the standard FreeBSD startup scripts. The system described has the following characteristics: The diskless workstations use a shared read-only root filesystem, and a shared read-only /usr. The root filesystem is a copy of a standard FreeBSD root (typically the server's), with some configuration files overridden by ones specific to diskless operation or, possibly, to the workstation they belong to. The parts of the root which have to be writable are overlaid with &man.mfs.8; filesystems. Any changes will be lost when the system reboots. The kernel is loaded by etherboot , using DHCP (or BOOTP) and TFTP. As described, this system is insecure. It should live in a protected area of a network, and be untrusted by other hosts. There are two protocols that are commonly used to boot a workstation that retrieves its configuration over the network: BOOTP and DHCP. They are used at several points in the workstation bootstrap: etherboot uses DHCP (by default) or BOOTP (needs a configuration option) to find the kernel. (PXE uses DHCP). The kernel uses BOOTP to locate the NFS root. It is possible to configure a system to use only BOOTP. The &man.bootpd.8; server program is included in the base FreeBSD system. However, DHCP has a number of advantages over BOOTP (nicer configuration files, possibility of using PXE, plus many others not directly related to diskless operation), and we shall describe both a pure BOOTP, and a BOOTP+DHCP configuration, with an emphasis on the latter, which will use the ISC DHCP software package. The isc-dhcp server can answer both BOOTP and DHCP requests. As of release 4.4, isc-dhcp 3.0 is not part of the base system. You will first need to install the net/isc-dhcp3 port or the corresponding package. Please refer to for general information about ports and packages. Once isc-dhcp is installed, it needs a configuration file to run, (normally named /usr/local/etc/dhcpd.conf). Here follows a commented example: default-lease-time 600; max-lease-time 7200; authoritative; option domain-name "example.com"; option domain-name-servers 192.168.4.1; option routers 192.168.4.1; subnet 192.168.4.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { use-host-decl-names on; option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0; option broadcast-address 192.168.4.255; host margaux { hardware ethernet 01:23:45:67:89:ab; fixed-address margaux.example.com; next-server 192.168.4.4; filename "/tftpboot/kernel.diskless"; option root-path "192.168.4.4:/data/misc/diskless"; } } This option tells dhcpd to send the value in the host declarations as the hostname for the diskless host. An alternate way would be to add an option host-name margaux inside the host declarations. The next-server directive designates the TFTP server (the default is to use the same host as the DHCP server). The filename directive defines the file that etherboot will load as a kernel. PXE appears to prefer a relative file name, and it loads pxeboot, not the kernel (option filename "pxeboot"). The root-path option defines the path to the root filesystem, in usual NFS notation. Here follows an equivalent bootpd configuration. This would be found in /etc/bootptab. Please note that etherboot must be compiled with the non-default option NO_DHCP_SUPPORT in order to use BOOTP, and that PXE needs DHCP. The only obvious advantage of bootpd is that it exists in the base system. .def100:\ :hn:ht=1:sa=192.168.4.4:vm=rfc1048:\ :sm=255.255.255.0:\ :ds=192.168.4.1:\ :gw=192.168.4.1:\ :hd="/tftpboot":\ :bf="/kernel.diskless":\ :rp="192.168.4.4:/data/misc/diskless": margaux:ha=0123456789ab:tc=.def100 Etherboot's Web site contains extensive documentation mainly intended for Linux systems, but nonetheless containing useful information. The following will just outline how you would use etherboot on a FreeBSD system. You must first install the net/etherboot package or port. The etherboot port can normally be found in /usr/ports/net/etherboot. If the ports tree is installed on your system, just typing make in this directory should take care of everything. Else refer to for information about ports and packages. For our setup, we shall use a boot floppy. For other methods (PROM, or dos program), please refer to the etherboot documentation. To make a boot floppy, insert a floppy in the drive on the machine where you installed etherboot, then change your current directory to the src directory in the etherboot tree and type: &prompt.root; gmake bin32/devicetype.fd0 devicetype depends on the type of the Ethernet card in the diskless workstation. Refer to the NIC file in the same directory to determine the right devicetype. You need to enable tftpd on the TFTP server: Create a directory from which tftpd will serve the files, i.e.: /tftpboot Add this line to your /etc/inetd.conf: tftp dgram udp wait nobody /usr/libexec/tftpd tftpd /tftpboot It appears that at least some PXE versions want the TCP version of TFTP. In this case, add a second line, replacing dgram udp with stream tcp. Tell inetd to reread its configuration file: &prompt.root; kill -HUP `cat /var/run/inetd.pid` You can place the tftpboot directory anywhere on the server. Make sure that the location is set in both inetd.conf and dhcpd.conf. You also need to enable NFS and export the appropriate filesystem on the NFS server. Add this to /etc/rc.conf: nfs_server_enable="YES" Export the filesystem where the diskless root directory is located by adding the following to /etc/exports (adjust the volume mount point and replace margaux with the name of the diskless workstation): /data/misc -alldirs -ro margaux Tell mountd to reread its configuration file. If you actually needed to enable NFS in /etc/rc.conf at the first step, you probably want to reboot instead. &prompt.root; kill -HUP `cat /var/run/mountd.pid` Create a kernel configuration file for the diskless client with the following options (in addition to the usual ones): options BOOTP # Use BOOTP to obtain IP address/hostname options BOOTP_NFSROOT # NFS mount root filesystem using BOOTP info options BOOTP_COMPAT # Workaround for broken bootp daemons. You may also want to use BOOTP_NFSV3 and BOOTP_WIRED_TO (refer to LINT). Build the kernel (See ), and copy it to the tftp directory, under the name listed in dhcpd.conf. You need to create a root filesystem for the diskless workstations, in the location listed as root-path in dhcpd.conf. The easiest way to do this is to use the /usr/share/examples/diskless/clone_root shell script. This script needs customization, at least to adjust the place where the filesystem will be created (the DEST variable). Refer to the comments at the top of the script for instructions. They explain how the base filesystem is built, and how files may be selectively overridden by versions specific to diskless operation, to a subnetwork, or to an individual workstation. They also give examples for the diskless /etc/fstab and /etc/rc.conf files. The README files in /usr/share/examples/diskless contain a lot of interesting background information, but, together with the other examples in the diskless directory, they actually document a configuration method which is distinct from the one used by clone_root and /etc/rc.diskless[12], which is a little confusing. Use them for reference only, except if you prefer the method that they describe, in which case you will need customized rc scripts. If needed, a swap file located on the server can be accessed via NFS. The exact bootptab or dhcpd.conf options are not clearly documented at this time. The following configuration suggestions have been reported to work in some installations using isc-dhcp 3.0rc11. Add the following lines to dhcpd.conf: # Global section option swap-path code 128 = string; option swap-size code 129 = integer 32; host margaux { ... # Standard lines, see above option swap-path "192.168.4.4:/netswapvolume/netswap"; option swap-size 64000; } The idea is that, at least for a FreeBSD client, DHCP/BOOTP option code 128 is the path to the NFS swap file, and option code 129 is the swap size in kilobytes. Older versions of dhcpd allowed a syntax of option option-128 "..., which does not seem to work any more. /etc/bootptab would use the following syntax instead: T128="192.168.4.4:/netswapvolume/netswap":T129=64000 On the NFS swap file server, create the swap file(s) &prompt.root; mkdir /netswapvolume/netswap &prompt.root; cd /netswapvolume/netswap &prompt.root; dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=64000 of=swap.192.168.4.6 &prompt.root; chmod 0600 swap.192.168.4.6 192.168.4.6 is the IP address for the diskless client. On the NFS swap file server, add the following line to /etc/exports: /netswapvolume -maproot=0:10 -alldirs margaux Then tell mountd to reread the exports file, as above. If the diskless workstation is configured to run X, you will have to adjust the xdm configuration file, which puts the error log on /usr by default. When the server for the root filesystem is not running FreeBSD, you will have to create the root filesystem on a FreeBSD machine, then copy it to its destination, using tar or cpio. In this situation, there are sometimes problems with the special files in /dev, due to differing major/minor integer sizes. A solution to this problem is to export a directory from the non-FreeBSD server, mount this directory onto a FreeBSD machine, and run MAKEDEV on the FreeBSD machine to create the correct device entries (FreeBSD 5.0 and later use &man.devfs.5; to allocate device nodes transparently for the user, running MAKEDEV on these versions is useless). A good resource for information on ISDN technology and hardware is Dan Kegel's ISDN Page. A quick simple road map to ISDN follows: If you live in Europe you might want to investigate the ISDN card section. If you are planning to use ISDN primarily to connect to the Internet with an Internet Provider on a dial-up non-dedicated basis, you might look into Terminal Adapters. This will give you the most flexibility, with the fewest problems, if you change providers. If you are connecting two LANs together, or connecting to the Internet with a dedicated ISDN connection, you might consider the stand alone router/bridge option. Cost is a significant factor in determining what solution you will choose. The following options are listed from least expensive to most expensive. Hellmuth Michaelis Contributed by ISDN cards FreeBSD's ISDN implementation supports only the DSS1/Q.931 (or Euro-ISDN) standard using passive cards. Starting with FreeBSD 4.4, some active cards are supported where the firmware also supports other signaling protocols; this also includes the first supported Primary Rate (PRI) ISDN card. Isdn4bsd allows you to connect to other ISDN routers using either IP over raw HDLC or by using synchronous PPP: either by using kernel PPP with isppp, a modified sppp driver, or by using userland &man.ppp.8;. By using userland &man.ppp.8;, channel bonding of two or more ISDN B-channels is possible. A telephone answering machine application is also available as well as many utilities such as a software 300 Baud modem. Some growing number of PC ISDN cards are supported under FreeBSD and the reports show that it is successfully used all over Europe and in many other parts of the world. The passive ISDN cards supported are mostly the ones with the Infineon (formerly Siemens) ISAC/HSCX/IPAC ISDN chipsets, but also ISDN cards with chips from Cologne Chip (ISA bus only), PCI cards with Winbond W6692 chips, some cards with the Tiger300/320/ISAC chipset combinations and some vendor specific chipset based cards such as the AVM Fritz!Card PCI V.1.0 and the AVM Fritz!Card PnP. Currently the active supported ISDN cards are the AVM B1 (ISA and PCI) BRI cards and the AVM T1 PCI PRI cards. For documentation on isdn4bsd, have a look at /usr/share/examples/isdn/ directory on your FreeBSD system or at the homepage of isdn4bsd which also has pointers to hints, erratas and much more documentation such as the isdn4bsd handbook. In case you are interested in adding support for a different ISDN protocol, a currently unsupported ISDN PC card or otherwise enhancing isdn4bsd, please get in touch with &a.hm;. For questions regarding the installation, configuration and troubleshooting isdn4bsd, a majordomo maintained mailing list is available. To join, send mail to &a.majordomo; and specify: subscribe freebsd-isdn in the body of your message. Terminal adapters(TA), are to ISDN what modems are to regular phone lines. modem Most TA's use the standard hayes modem AT command set, and can be used as a drop in replacement for a modem. A TA will operate basically the same as a modem except connection and throughput speeds will be much faster than your old modem. You will need to configure PPP exactly the same as for a modem setup. Make sure you set your serial speed as high as possible. PPP The main advantage of using a TA to connect to an Internet Provider is that you can do Dynamic PPP. As IP address space becomes more and more scarce, most providers are not willing to provide you with a static IP anymore. Most stand-alone routers are not able to accommodate dynamic IP allocation. TA's completely rely on the PPP daemon that you are running for their features and stability of connection. This allows you to upgrade easily from using a modem to ISDN on a FreeBSD machine, if you already have PPP setup. However, at the same time any problems you experienced with the PPP program and are going to persist. If you want maximum stability, use the kernel PPP option, not the user-land iijPPP. The following TA's are known to work with FreeBSD. Motorola BitSurfer and Bitsurfer Pro Adtran Most other TA's will probably work as well, TA vendors try to make sure their product can accept most of the standard modem AT command set. The real problem with external TA's is that, like modems, you need a good serial card in your computer. You should read the FreeBSD Serial Hardware tutorial for a detailed understanding of serial devices, and the differences between asynchronous and synchronous serial ports. A TA running off a standard PC serial port (asynchronous) limits you to 115.2 Kbs, even though you have a 128 Kbs connection. To fully utilize the 128 Kbs that ISDN is capable of, you must move the TA to a synchronous serial card. Do not be fooled into buying an internal TA and thinking you have avoided the synchronous/asynchronous issue. Internal TA's simply have a standard PC serial port chip built into them. All this will do is save you having to buy another serial cable and find another empty electrical socket. A synchronous card with a TA is at least as fast as a stand-alone router, and with a simple 386 FreeBSD box driving it, probably more flexible. The choice of sync/TA v.s. stand-alone router is largely a religious issue. There has been some discussion of this in the mailing lists. I suggest you search the archives for the complete discussion. ISDN stand-alone bridges/routers ISDN bridges or routers are not at all specific to FreeBSD or any other operating system. For a more complete description of routing and bridging technology, please refer to a Networking reference book. In the context of this page, the terms router and bridge will be used interchangeably. As the cost of low end ISDN routers/bridges comes down, it will likely become a more and more popular choice. An ISDN router is a small box that plugs directly into your local Ethernet network, and manages its own connection to the other bridge/router. It has built in software to communicate via PPP and other popular protocols. A router will allow you much faster throughput than a standard TA, since it will be using a full synchronous ISDN connection. The main problem with ISDN routers and bridges is that interoperability between manufacturers can still be a problem. If you are planning to connect to an Internet provider, you should discuss your needs with them. If you are planning to connect two LAN segments together, such as your home LAN to the office LAN, this is the simplest lowest maintenance solution. Since you are buying the equipment for both sides of the connection you can be assured that the link will work. For example to connect a home computer or branch office network to a head office network the following setup could be used. 10 base 2 Network uses a bus based topology with 10 base 2 Ethernet (thinnet). Connect router to network cable with AUI/10BT transceiver, if necessary. ---Sun workstation | ---FreeBSD box | ---Windows 95 (Do not admit to owning it) | Stand-alone router | ISDN BRI line 10 Base 2 Ethernet If your home/branch office is only one computer you can use a twisted pair crossover cable to connect to the stand-alone router directly. 10 base T Network uses a star topology with 10 base T Ethernet (Twisted Pair). -------Novell Server | H | | ---Sun | | | U ---FreeBSD | | | ---Windows 95 | B | |___---Stand-alone router | ISDN BRI line ISDN Network Diagram One large advantage of most routers/bridges is that they allow you to have 2 separate independent PPP connections to 2 separate sites at the same time. This is not supported on most TA's, except for specific (usually expensive) models that have two serial ports. Do not confuse this with channel bonding, MPP, etc. This can be a very useful feature if, for example, you have an dedicated ISDN connection at your office and would like to tap into it, but do not want to get another ISDN line at work. A router at the office location can manage a dedicated B channel connection (64 Kbps) to the Internet and use the other B channel for a separate data connection. The second B channel can be used for dial-in, dial-out or dynamically bonding (MPP, etc.) with the first B channel for more bandwidth. IPX/SPX An Ethernet bridge will also allow you to transmit more than just IP traffic. You can also send IPX/SPX or whatever other protocols you use. Bill Swingle Written by Eric Ogren Enhanced by Udo Erdelhoff NIS Solaris HP-UX AIX Linux NetBSD OpenBSD NIS, which stands for Network Information Services, was developed by Sun Microsystems to centralize administration of Unix (originally SunOS) systems. It has now essentially become an industry standard; all major Unix systems (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc) support NIS. yellow pagesNIS NIS was formerly known as Yellow Pages, but because of trademark issues, Sun changed the name. The old term (and yp) is still often seen and used. NIS domains It is a RPC-based client/server system that allows a group of machines within an NIS domain to share a common set of configuration files. This permits a system administrator to set up NIS client systems with only minimal configuration data and add, remove or modify configuration data from a single location. Windows NT It is similar to Windows NT's domain system; although the internal implementation of the two are not at all similar, the basic functionality can be compared. There are several terms and several important user processes that you will come across when attempting to implement NIS on FreeBSD, whether you are trying to create an NIS server or act as an NIS client: portmap Term Description NIS domainname An NIS master server and all of its clients (including its slave servers) have a NIS domainname. Similar to an NT domain name, the NIS domainname does not have anything to do with DNS. portmap Must be running in order to enable RPC (Remote Procedure Call, a network protocol used by NIS). If portmap is not running, it will be impossible to run an NIS server, or to act as an NIS client. ypbind binds an NIS client to its NIS server. It will take the NIS domainname from the system, and using RPC, connect to the server. ypbind is the core of client-server communication in an NIS environment; if ypbind dies on a client machine, it will not be able to access the NIS server. ypserv Should only be running on NIS servers, is the NIS server process itself. If &man.ypserv.8; dies, then the server will no longer be able to respond to NIS requests (hopefully, there is a slave server to take over for it). There are some implementations of NIS (but not the FreeBSD one), that do not try to reconnect to another server if the server it used before dies. Often, the only thing that helps in this case is to restart the server process (or even the whole server) or the ypbind process on the client. rpc.yppasswdd Another process that should only be running on NIS master servers, is a daemon that will allow NIS clients to change their NIS passwords. If this daemon is not running, users will have to login to the NIS master server and change their passwords there. There are three types of hosts in an NIS environment: master servers, slave servers, and clients. Servers act as a central repository for host configuration information. Master servers hold the authoritative copy of this information, while slave servers mirror this information for redundancy. Clients rely on the servers to provide this information to them. Information in many files can be shared in this manner. The master.passwd, group, and hosts files are commonly shared via NIS. Whenever a process on a client needs information that would normally be found in these files locally, it makes a query to the NIS server that it is bound to instead. NIS master server A NIS master server. This server, analogous to a Windows NT primary domain controller, maintains the files used by all of the NIS clients. The passwd, group, and other various files used by the NIS clients live on the master server. It is possible for one machine to be an NIS master server for more than one NIS domain. However, this will not be covered in this introduction, which assumes a relatively small-scale NIS environment. NIS slave server NIS slave servers. Similar to NT's backup domain controllers, NIS slave servers maintain copies of the NIS master's data files. NIS slave servers provide the redundancy, which is needed in important environments. They also help to balance the load of the master server: NIS Clients always attach to the NIS server whose response they get first, and this includes slave-server-replies. NIS client NIS clients. NIS clients, like most NT workstations, authenticate against the NIS server (or the NT domain controller in the NT Workstation case) to log on. This section will deal with setting up a sample NIS environment. This section assumes that you are running FreeBSD 3.3 or later. The instructions given here will probably work for any version of FreeBSD greater than 3.0, but there are no guarantees that this is true. Let us assume that you are the administrator of a small university lab. This lab, which consists of 15 FreeBSD machines, currently has no centralized point of administration; each machine has its own /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd. These files are kept in sync with each other only through manual intervention; currently, when you add a user to the lab, you must run adduser on all 15 machines. Clearly, this has to change, so you have decided to convert the lab to use NIS, using two of the machines as servers. Therefore, the configuration of the lab now looks something like: Machine name IP address Machine role ellington 10.0.0.2 NIS master coltrane 10.0.0.3 NIS slave basie 10.0.0.4 Faculty workstation bird 10.0.0.5 Client machine cli[1-11] 10.0.0.[6-17] Other client machines If you are setting up a NIS scheme for the first time, it is a good idea to think through how you want to go about it. No matter what the size of your network, there are a few decisions that need to be made. NIS domainname This might not be the domainname that you are used to. It is more accurately called the NIS domainname. When a client broadcasts its requests for info, it includes the name of the NIS domain that it is part of. This is how multiple servers on one network can tell which server should answer which request. Think of the NIS domainname as the name for a group of hosts that are related in some way. Some organizations choose to use their Internet domainname for their NIS domainname. This is not recommended as it can cause confusion when trying to debug network problems. The NIS domainname should be unique within your network and it is helpful if it describes the group of machines it represents. For example, the Art department at Acme Inc. might be in the acme-art NIS domain. For this example, assume you have chosen the name test-domain. SunOS However, some operating systems (notably SunOS) use their NIS domain name as their Internet domain name. If one or more machines on your network have this restriction, you must use the Internet domain name as your NIS domain name. There are several things to keep in mind when choosing a machine to use as a NIS server. One of the unfortunate things about NIS is the level of dependency the clients have on the server. If a client cannot contact the server for its NIS domain, very often the machine becomes unusable. The lack of user and group information causes most systems to temporarily freeze up. With this in mind you should make sure to choose a machine that will not be prone to being rebooted regularly, or one that might be used for development. The NIS server should ideally be a stand alone machine whose sole purpose in life is to be an NIS server. If you have a network that is not very heavily used, it is acceptable to put the NIS server on a machine running other services, just keep in mind that if the NIS server becomes unavailable, it will affect all of your NIS clients adversely. The canonical copies of all NIS information are stored on a single machine called the NIS master server. The databases used to store the information are called NIS maps. In FreeBSD, these maps are stored in /var/yp/[domainname] where [domainname] is the name of the NIS domain being served. A single NIS server can support several domains at once, therefore it is possible to have several such directories, one for each supported domain. Each domain will have its own independent set of maps. NIS master and slave servers handle all NIS requests with the ypserv daemon. ypserv is responsible for receiving incoming requests from NIS clients, translating the requested domain and map name to a path to the corresponding database file and transmitting data from the database back to the client. NIS server configuration Setting up a master NIS server can be relatively straight forward, depending on your needs. FreeBSD comes with support for NIS out-of-the-box. All you need is to add the following lines to /etc/rc.conf, and FreeBSD will do the rest for you. nisdomainname="test-domain" This line will set the NIS domainname to test-domain upon network setup (e.g. after reboot). nis_server_enable="YES" This will tell FreeBSD to start up the NIS server processes when the networking is next brought up. nis_yppasswdd_enable="YES" This will enable the rpc.yppasswdd daemon which, as mentioned above, will allow users to change their NIS password from a client machine. Depending on your NIS setup, you may need to add further entries. See the section about NIS servers that are also NIS clients, below, for details. Now, all you have to do is to run the command /etc/netstart as superuser. It will set up everything for you, using the values you defined in /etc/rc.conf. NIS maps The NIS maps are database files, that are kept in the /var/yp directory. They are generated from configuration files in the /etc directory of the NIS master, with one exception: the /etc/master.passwd file. This is for a good reason; you do not want to propagate passwords to your root and other administrative accounts to all the servers in the NIS domain. Therefore, before we initialize the NIS maps, you should: &prompt.root; cp /etc/master.passwd /var/yp/master.passwd &prompt.root; cd /var/yp &prompt.root; vi master.passwd You should remove all entries regarding system accounts (bin, tty, kmem, games, etc), as well as any accounts that you do not want to be propagated to the NIS clients (for example root and any other UID 0 (superuser) accounts). Make sure the /var/yp/master.passwd is neither group nor world readable (mode 600)! Use the chmod command, if appropriate. Tru64 Unix When you have finished, it is time to initialize the NIS maps! FreeBSD includes a script named ypinit to do this for you (see its manual page for more information). Note that this script is available on most Unix Operating Systems, but not on all. On Digital Unix/Compaq Tru64 Unix it is called ypsetup. Because we are generating maps for an NIS master, we are going to pass the -m option to ypinit. To generate the NIS maps, assuming you already performed the steps above, run: ellington&prompt.root; ypinit -m test-domain Server Type: MASTER Domain: test-domain Creating an YP server will require that you answer a few questions. Questions will all be asked at the beginning of the procedure. Do you want this procedure to quit on non-fatal errors? [y/n: n] n Ok, please remember to go back and redo manually whatever fails. If you don't, something might not work. At this point, we have to construct a list of this domains YP servers. rod.darktech.org is already known as master server. Please continue to add any slave servers, one per line. When you are done with the list, type a <control D>. master server : ellington next host to add: coltrane next host to add: ^D The current list of NIS servers looks like this: ellington coltrane Is this correct? [y/n: y] y [..output from map generation..] NIS Map update completed. ellington has been setup as an YP master server without any errors. ypinit should have created /var/yp/Makefile from /var/yp/Makefile.dist. When created, this file assumes that you are operating in a single server NIS environment with only FreeBSD machines. Since test-domain has a slave server as well, you must edit /var/yp/Makefile: ellington&prompt.root; vi /var/yp/Makefile You should comment out the line that says NOPUSH = "True" (if it is not commented out already). NIS configuring a slave server Setting up an NIS slave server is even more simple than setting up the master. Log on to the slave server and edit the file /etc/rc.conf as you did before. The only difference is that we now must use the -s option when running ypinit. The -s option requires the name of the NIS master be passed to it as well, so our command line looks like: coltrane&prompt.root; ypinit -s ellington test-domain Server Type: SLAVE Domain: test-domain Master: ellington Creating an YP server will require that you answer a few questions. Questions will all be asked at the beginning of the procedure. Do you want this procedure to quit on non-fatal errors? [y/n: n] n Ok, please remember to go back and redo manually whatever fails. If you don't, something might not work. There will be no further questions. The remainder of the procedure should take a few minutes, to copy the databases from ellington. Transferring netgroup... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring netgroup.byuser... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring netgroup.byhost... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring master.passwd.byuid... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring passwd.byuid... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring passwd.byname... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring group.bygid... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring group.byname... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring services.byname... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring rpc.bynumber... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring rpc.byname... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring protocols.byname... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring master.passwd.byname... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring networks.byname... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring networks.byaddr... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring netid.byname... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring hosts.byaddr... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring protocols.bynumber... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring ypservers... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred Transferring hosts.byname... ypxfr: Exiting: Map successfully transferred coltrane has been setup as an YP slave server without any errors. Don't forget to update map ypservers on ellington. You should now have a directory called /var/yp/test-domain. Copies of the NIS master server's maps should be in this directory. You will need to make sure that these stay updated. The following /etc/crontab entries on your slave servers should do the job: 20 * * * * root /usr/libexec/ypxfr passwd.byname 21 * * * * root /usr/libexec/ypxfr passwd.byuid These two lines force the slave to sync its maps with the maps on the master server. Although these entries are not mandatory, since the master server attempts to ensure any changes to its NIS maps are communicated to its slaves and because password information is vital to systems depending on the server, it is a good idea to force the updates. This is more important on busy networks where map updates might not always complete. Now, run the command /etc/netstart on the slave server as well, which again starts the NIS server. An NIS client establishes what is called a binding to a particular NIS server using the ypbind daemon. ypbind checks the system's default domain (as set by the domainname command), and begins broadcasting RPC requests on the local network. These requests specify the name of the domain for which ypbind is attempting to establish a binding. If a server that has been configured to serve the requested domain receives one of the broadcasts, it will respond to ypbind, which will record the server's address. If there are several servers available (a master and several slaves, for example), ypbind will use the address of the first one to respond. From that point on, the client system will direct all of its NIS requests to that server. ypbind will occasionally ping the server to make sure it is still up and running. If it fails to receive a reply to one of its pings within a reasonable amount of time, ypbind will mark the domain as unbound and begin broadcasting again in the hopes of locating another server. NIS client configuration Setting up a FreeBSD machine to be a NIS client is fairly straightforward. Edit the file /etc/rc.conf and add the following lines in order to set the NIS domainname and start ypbind upon network startup: nisdomainname="test-domain" nis_client_enable="YES" To import all possible password entries from the NIS server, remove all user accounts from your /etc/master.passwd file and use vipw to add the following line to the end of the file: +::::::::: This line will afford anyone with a valid account in the NIS server's password maps an account. There are many ways to configure your NIS client by changing this line. See the netgroups section below for more information. For more detailed reading see O'Reilly's book on Managing NFS and NIS. You should keep at least one local account (i.e. not imported via NIS) in your /etc/master.passwd and this account should also be a member of the group wheel. If there is something wrong with NIS, this account can be used to log in remotely, become root, and fix things. To import all possible group entries from the NIS server, add this line to your /etc/group file: +:*:: After completing these steps, you should be able to run ypcat passwd and see the NIS server's passwd map. In general, any remote user can issue an RPC to &man.ypserv.8; and retrieve the contents of your NIS maps, provided the remote user knows your domainname. To prevent such unauthorized transactions, &man.ypserv.8; supports a feature called securenets which can be used to restrict access to a given set of hosts. At startup, &man.ypserv.8; will attempt to load the securenets information from a file called /var/yp/securenets. This path varies depending on the path specified with the -p option. This file contains entries that consist of a network specification and a network mask separated by white space. Lines starting with # are considered to be comments. A sample securenets file might look like this: # allow connections from local host -- mandatory 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 # allow connections from any host # on the 192.168.128.0 network 192.168.128.0 255.255.255.0 # allow connections from any host # between 10.0.0.0 to 10.0.15.255 # this includes the machines in the testlab 10.0.0.0 255.255.240.0 If &man.ypserv.8; receives a request from an address that matches one of these rules, it will process the request normally. If the address fails to match a rule, the request will be ignored and a warning message will be logged. If the /var/yp/securenets file does not exist, ypserv will allow connections from any host. The ypserv program also has support for Wietse Venema's tcpwrapper package. This allows the administrator to use the tcpwrapper configuration files for access control instead of /var/yp/securenets. While both of these access control mechanisms provide some security, they, like the privileged port test, are vulnerable to IP spoofing attacks. All NIS-related traffic should be blocked at your firewall. Servers using /var/yp/securenets may fail to serve legitimate NIS clients with archaic TCP/IP implementations. Some of these implementations set all host bits to zero when doing broadcasts and/or fail to observe the subnet mask when calculating the broadcast address. While some of these problems can be fixed by changing the client configuration, other problems may force the retirement of the client systems in question or the abandonment of /var/yp/securenets. Using /var/yp/securenets on a server with such an archaic implementation of TCP/IP is a really bad idea and will lead to loss of NIS functionality for large parts of your network. tcpwrapper The use of the tcpwrapper package increases the latency of your NIS server. The additional delay may be long enough to cause timeouts in client programs, especially in busy networks or with slow NIS servers. If one or more of your client systems suffers from these symptoms, you should convert the client systems in question into NIS slave servers and force them to bind to themselves. In our lab, there is a machine basie that is supposed to be a faculty only workstation. We do not want to take this machine out of the NIS domain, yet the passwd file on the master NIS server contains accounts for both faculty and students. What can we do? There is a way to bar specific users from logging on to a machine, even if they are present in the NIS database. To do this, all you must do is add -username to the end of the /etc/master.passwd file on the client machine, where username is the username of the user you wish to bar from logging in. This should preferably be done using vipw, since vipw will sanity check your changes to /etc/master.passwd, as well as automatically rebuild the password database when you finish editing. For example, if we wanted to bar user bill from logging on to basie we would: basie&prompt.root; vipw [add -bill to the end, exit] vipw: rebuilding the database... vipw: done basie&prompt.root; cat /etc/master.passwd root:[password]:0:0::0:0:The super-user:/root:/bin/csh toor:[password]:0:0::0:0:The other super-user:/root:/bin/sh daemon:*:1:1::0:0:Owner of many system processes:/root:/sbin/nologin operator:*:2:5::0:0:System &:/:/sbin/nologin bin:*:3:7::0:0:Binaries Commands and Source,,,:/:/sbin/nologin tty:*:4:65533::0:0:Tty Sandbox:/:/sbin/nologin kmem:*:5:65533::0:0:KMem Sandbox:/:/sbin/nologin games:*:7:13::0:0:Games pseudo-user:/usr/games:/sbin/nologin news:*:8:8::0:0:News Subsystem:/:/sbin/nologin man:*:9:9::0:0:Mister Man Pages:/usr/share/man:/sbin/nologin bind:*:53:53::0:0:Bind Sandbox:/:/sbin/nologin uucp:*:66:66::0:0:UUCP pseudo-user:/var/spool/uucppublic:/usr/libexec/uucp/uucico xten:*:67:67::0:0:X-10 daemon:/usr/local/xten:/sbin/nologin pop:*:68:6::0:0:Post Office Owner:/nonexistent:/sbin/nologin nobody:*:65534:65534::0:0:Unprivileged user:/nonexistent:/sbin/nologin +::::::::: -bill basie&prompt.root; Udo Erdelhoff Contributed by netgroups The method shown in the previous section works reasonably well if you need special rules for a very small number of users and/or machines. On larger networks, you will forget to bar some users from logging onto sensitive machines, or you may even have to modify each machine separately, thus losing the main benefit of NIS, centralized administration. The NIS developers' solution for this problem is called netgroups. Their purpose and semantics can be compared to the normal groups used by Unix file systems. The main differences are the lack of a numeric id and the ability to define a netgroup by including both user accounts and other netgroups. Netgroups were developed to handle large, complex networks with hundreds of users and machines. On one hand, this is a Good Thing if you are forced to deal with such a situation. On the other hand, this complexity makes it almost impossible to explain netgroups with really simple examples. The example used in the remainder of this section demonstrates this problem. Let us assume that your successful introduction of NIS in your laboratory caught your superiors' interest. Your next job is to extend your NIS domain to cover some of the other machines on campus. The two tables contain the names of the new users and new machines as well as brief descriptions of them. User Name(s) Description alpha, beta Normal employees of the IT department charlie, delta The new apprentices of the IT department echo, foxtrott, golf, ... Ordinary employees able, baker, ... The current interns Machine Name(s) Description war, death, famine, pollution Your most important servers. Only the IT employees are allowed to log onto these machines. pride, greed, envy, wrath, lust, sloth Less important servers. All members of the IT department are allowed to login onto these machines. one, two, three, four, ... Ordinary workstations. Only the real employees are allowed to use these machines. trashcan A very old machine without any critical data. Even the intern is allowed to use this box. If you tried to implement these restrictions by separately blocking each user, you would have to add one -user line to each system's passwd for each user who is not allowed to login onto that system. If you forget just one entry, you could be in trouble. It may be feasible to do this correctly during the initial setup, however you will eventually forget to add the lines for new users during day-to-day operations. After all, Murphy was an optimist. Handling this situation with netgroups offers several advantages. Each user need not be handled separately; you assign a user to one or more netgroups and allow or forbid logins for all members of the netgroup. If you add a new machine, you will only have to define login restrictions for netgroups. If a new user is added, you will only have to add the user to one or more netgroups. Those changes are independent of each other; no more for each combination of user and machine do... If your NIS setup is planned carefully, you will only have to modify exactly one central configuration file to grant or deny access to machines. The first step is the initialization of the NIS map netgroup. FreeBSD's &man.ypinit.8; does not create this map by default, but its NIS implementation will support it once it has been created. To create an empty map, simply type ellington&prompt.root; vi /var/yp/netgroup and start adding content. For our example, we need at least four netgroups: IT employees, IT apprentices, normal employees and interns. IT_EMP (,alpha,test-domain) (,beta,test-domain) IT_APP (,charlie,test-domain) (,delta,test-domain) USERS (,echo,test-domain) (,foxtrott,test-domain) \ (,golf,test-domain) INTERNS (,able,test-domain) (,baker,test-domain) IT_EMP, IT_APP etc. are the names of the netgroups. Each bracketed group adds one or more user accounts to it. The three fields inside a group are: The name of the host(s) where the following items are valid. If you do not specify a hostname, the entry is valid on all hosts. If you do specify a hostname, you will enter a realm of darkness, horror and utter confusion. The name of the account that belongs to this netgroup. The NIS domain for the account. You can import accounts from other NIS domains into your netgroup if you are one of the unlucky fellows with more than one NIS domain. Each of these fields can contain wildcards. See &man.netgroup.5; for details. netgroups Netgroup names longer than 8 characters should not be used, especially if you have machines running other operating systems within your NIS domain. The names are case sensitive; using capital letters for your netgroup names is an easy way to distinguish between user, machine and netgroup names. Some NIS clients (other than FreeBSD) cannot handle netgroups with a large number of entries. For example, some older versions of SunOS start to cause trouble if a netgroup contains more than 15 entries. You can circumvent this limit by creating several sub-netgroups with 15 users or less and a real netgroup that consists of the sub-netgroups: BIGGRP1 (,joe1,domain) (,joe2,domain) (,joe3,domain) [...] BIGGRP2 (,joe16,domain) (,joe17,domain) [...] BIGGRP3 (,joe31,domain) (,joe32,domain) BIGGROUP BIGGRP1 BIGGRP2 BIGGRP3 You can repeat this process if you need more than 225 users within a single netgroup. Activating and distributing your new NIS map is easy: ellington&prompt.root; cd /var/yp ellington&prompt.root; make This will generate the three NIS maps netgroup, netgroup.byhost and netgroup.byuser. Use &man.ypcat.1; to check if your new NIS maps are available: ellington&prompt.user; ypcat -k netgroup ellington&prompt.user; ypcat -k netgroup.byhost ellington&prompt.user; ypcat -k netgroup.byuser The output of the first command should resemble the contents of /var/yp/netgroup. The second command will not produce output if you have not specified host-specific netgroups. The third command can be used to get the list of netgroups for a user. The client setup is quite simple. To configure the server war, you only have to start &man.vipw.8; and replace the line +::::::::: with +@IT_EMP::::::::: Now, only the data for the users defined in the netgroup IT_EMP is imported into war's password database and only these users are allowed to login. Unfortunately, this limitation also applies to the ~ function of the shell and all routines converting between user names and numerical user ids. In other words, cd ~user will not work, ls -l will show the numerical id instead of the username and find . -user joe -print will fail with No such user. To fix this, you will have to import all user entries without allowing them to login onto your servers. This can be achieved by adding another line to /etc/master.passwd. This line should contain: +:::::::::/sbin/nologin, meaning Import all entries but replace the shell with /sbin/nologin in the imported entries. You can replace any field in the passwd entry by placing a default value in your /etc/master.passwd. Make sure that the line +:::::::::/sbin/nologin is placed after +@IT_EMP:::::::::. Otherwise, all user accounts imported from NIS will have /sbin/nologin as their login shell. After this change, you will only have to change one NIS map if a new employee joins the IT department. You could use a similar approach for the less important servers by replacing the old +::::::::: in their local version of /etc/master.passwd with something like this: +@IT_EMP::::::::: +@IT_APP::::::::: +:::::::::/sbin/nologin The corresponding lines for the normal workstations could be: +@IT_EMP::::::::: +@USERS::::::::: +:::::::::/sbin/nologin And everything would be fine until there is a policy change a few weeks later: The IT department starts hiring interns. The IT interns are allowed to use the normal workstations and the less important servers; and the IT apprentices are allowed to login onto the main servers. You add a new netgroup IT_INTERN, add the new IT interns to this netgroup and start to change the config on each and every machine... As the old saying goes: Errors in centralized planning lead to global mess. NIS' ability to create netgroups from other netgroups can be used to prevent situations like these. One possibility is the creation of role-based netgroups. For example, you could create a netgroup called BIGSRV to define the login restrictions for the important servers, another netgroup called SMALLSRV for the less important servers and a third netgroup called USERBOX for the normal workstations. Each of these netgroups contains the netgroups that are allowed to login onto these machines. The new entries for your NIS map netgroup should look like this: BIGSRV IT_EMP IT_APP SMALLSRV IT_EMP IT_APP ITINTERN USERBOX IT_EMP ITINTERN USERS This method of defining login restrictions works reasonably well if you can define groups of machines with identical restrictions. Unfortunately, this is the exception and not the rule. Most of the time, you will need the ability to define login restrictions on a per-machine basis. Machine-specific netgroup definitions are the other possibility to deal with the policy change outlined above. In this scenario, the /etc/master.passwd of each box contains two lines starting with +. The first of them adds a netgroup with the accounts allowed to login onto this machine, the second one adds all other accounts with /sbin/nologin as shell. It is a good idea to use the ALL-CAPS version of the machine name as the name of the netgroup. In other words, the lines should look like this: +@BOXNAME::::::::: +:::::::::/sbin/nologin Once you have completed this task for all your machines, you will not have to modify the local versions of /etc/master.passwd ever again. All further changes can be handled by modifying the NIS map. Here is an example of a possible netgroup map for this scenario with some additional goodies. # Define groups of users first IT_EMP (,alpha,test-domain) (,beta,test-domain) IT_APP (,charlie,test-domain) (,delta,test-domain) DEPT1 (,echo,test-domain) (,foxtrott,test-domain) DEPT2 (,golf,test-domain) (,hotel,test-domain) DEPT3 (,india,test-domain) (,juliet,test-domain) ITINTERN (,kilo,test-domain) (,lima,test-domain) D_INTERNS (,able,test-domain) (,baker,test-domain) # # Now, define some groups based on roles USERS DEPT1 DEPT2 DEPT3 BIGSRV IT_EMP IT_APP SMALLSRV IT_EMP IT_APP ITINTERN USERBOX IT_EMP ITINTERN USERS # # And a groups for a special tasks # Allow echo and golf to access our anti-virus-machine SECURITY IT_EMP (,echo,test-domain) (,golf,test-domain) # # machine-based netgroups # Our main servers WAR BIGSRV FAMINE BIGSRV # User india needs access to this server POLLUTION BIGSRV (,india,test-domain) # # This one is really important and needs more access restrictions DEATH IT_EMP # # The anti-virus-machine mentioned above ONE SECURITY # # Restrict a machine to a single user TWO (,hotel,test-domain) # [...more groups to follow] If you are using some kind of database to manage your user accounts, you should be able to create the first part of the map with your database's report tools. This way, new users will automatically have access to the boxes. One last word of caution: It may not always be advisable to use machine-based netgroups. If you are deploying a couple of dozen or even hundreds of identical machines for student labs, you should use role-based netgroups instead of machine-based netgroups to keep the size of the NIS map within reasonable limits. There are still a couple of things that you will need to do differently now that you are in an NIS environment. Every time you wish to add a user to the lab, you must add it to the master NIS server only, and you must remember to rebuild the NIS maps. If you forget to do this, the new user will not be able to login anywhere except on the NIS master. For example, if we needed to add a new user jsmith to the lab, we would: &prompt.root; pw useradd jsmith &prompt.root; cd /var/yp &prompt.root; make test-domain You could also run adduser jsmith instead of pw useradd jsmith. Keep the administration accounts out of the NIS maps. You do not want to be propagating administrative accounts and passwords to machines that will have users that should not have access to those accounts. Keep the NIS master and slave secure, and minimize their downtime. If somebody either hacks or simply turns off these machines, they have effectively rendered many people without the ability to login to the lab. This is the chief weakness of any centralized administration system, and it is probably the most important weakness. If you do not protect your NIS servers, you will have a lot of angry users! FreeBSD's ypserv has some support for serving NIS v1 clients. FreeBSD's NIS implementation only uses the NIS v2 protocol, however other implementations include support for the v1 protocol for backwards compatibility with older systems. The ypbind daemons supplied with these systems will try to establish a binding to an NIS v1 server even though they may never actually need it (and they may persist in broadcasting in search of one even after they receive a response from a v2 server). Note that while support for normal client calls is provided, this version of ypserv does not handle v1 map transfer requests; consequently, it cannot be used as a master or slave in conjunction with older NIS servers that only support the v1 protocol. Fortunately, there probably are not any such servers still in use today. Care must be taken when running ypserv in a multi-server domain where the server machines are also NIS clients. It is generally a good idea to force the servers to bind to themselves rather than allowing them to broadcast bind requests and possibly become bound to each other. Strange failure modes can result if one server goes down and others are dependent upon it. Eventually all the clients will time out and attempt to bind to other servers, but the delay involved can be considerable and the failure mode is still present since the servers might bind to each other all over again. You can force a host to bind to a particular server by running ypbind with the -S flag. If you do not want to do this manually each time you reboot your NIS server, you can add the following lines to your /etc/rc.conf: nis_client_enable="YES" # run client stuff as well nis_client_flags="-S NIS domain,server" See &man.ypbind.8; for further information. NIS crypto library One of the most common issues that people run into when trying to implement NIS is crypt library compatibility. If your NIS server is using the DES crypt libraries, it will only support clients that are using DES as well. To check which one your server and clients are using look at the symlinks in /usr/lib. If the machine is configured to use the DES libraries, it will look something like this: &prompt.user; ls -l /usr/lib/*crypt* lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 13 Jul 15 08:55 libcrypt.a@ -> libdescrypt.a lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 14 Jul 15 08:55 libcrypt.so@ -> libdescrypt.so lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 16 Jul 15 08:55 libcrypt.so.2@ -> libdescrypt.so.2 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 15 Jul 15 08:55 libcrypt_p.a@ -> libdescrypt_p.a -r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 13018 Nov 8 14:27 libdescrypt.a lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 16 Nov 8 14:27 libdescrypt.so@ -> libdescrypt.so.2 -r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 12965 Nov 8 14:27 libdescrypt.so.2 -r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 14750 Nov 8 14:27 libdescrypt_p.a If the machine is configured to use the standard FreeBSD MD5 crypt libraries they will look something like this: &prompt.user; ls -l /usr/lib/*crypt* lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 13 Jul 15 08:55 libcrypt.a@ -> libscrypt.a lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 14 Jul 15 08:55 libcrypt.so@ -> libscrypt.so lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 16 Jul 15 08:55 libcrypt.so.2@ -> libscrypt.so.2 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 15 Jul 15 08:55 libcrypt_p.a@ -> libscrypt_p.a -r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 6194 Nov 8 14:27 libscrypt.a lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 14 Nov 8 14:27 libscrypt.so@ -> libscrypt.so.2 -r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 7579 Nov 8 14:27 libscrypt.so.2 -r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 6684 Nov 8 14:27 libscrypt_p.a If you have trouble authenticating on an NIS client, this is a pretty good place to start looking for possible problems. If you want to deploy an NIS server for a heterogenous network, you will probably have to use DES on all systems because it is the lowest common standard. Greg Sutter Written by Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol DHCP Internet Software Consortium (ISC) DHCP, the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, describes the means by which a system can connect to a network and obtain the necessary information for communication upon that network. FreeBSD uses the ISC (Internet Software Consortium) DHCP implementation, so all implementation-specific information here is for use with the ISC distribution. This section describes both the client-side and server-side components of the ISC DHCP system. The client-side program, dhclient, comes integrated within FreeBSD, and the server-side portion is available from the net/isc-dhcp3 port. The &man.dhclient.8;, &man.dhcp-options.5;, and &man.dhclient.conf.5; manual pages, in addition to the references below, are useful resources. UDP When dhclient, the DHCP client, is executed on the client machine, it begins broadcasting requests for configuration information. By default, these requests are on UDP port 68. The server replies on UDP 67, giving the client an IP address and other relevant network information such as netmask, router, and DNS servers. All of this information comes in the form of a DHCP lease and is only valid for a certain time (configured by the DHCP server maintainer). In this manner, stale IP addresses for clients no longer connected to the network can be automatically reclaimed. DHCP clients can obtain a great deal of information from the server. An exhaustive list may be found in &man.dhcp-options.5;. FreeBSD fully integrates the ISC DHCP client, dhclient. DHCP client support is provided within both the installer and the base system, obviating the need for detailed knowledge of network configurations on any network that runs a DHCP server. dhclient has been included in all FreeBSD distributions since 3.2. sysinstall DHCP is supported by sysinstall. When configuring a network interface within sysinstall, the first question asked is, Do you want to try DHCP configuration of this interface? Answering affirmatively will execute dhclient, and if successful, will fill in the network configuration information automatically. There are two things you must do to have your system use DHCP upon startup: DHCP requirements Make sure that the bpf device is compiled into your kernel. To do this, add pseudo-device bpf to your kernel configuration file, and rebuild the kernel. For more information about building kernels, see . The bpf device is already part of the GENERIC kernel that is supplied with FreeBSD, so if you do not have a custom kernel, you should not need to create one in order to get DHCP working. For those who are particularly security conscious, you should be warned that bpf is also the device that allows packet sniffers to work correctly (although they still have to be run as root). bpf is required to use DHCP, but if you are very sensitive about security, you probably should not add bpf to your kernel in the expectation that at some point in the future you will be using DHCP. Edit your /etc/rc.conf to include the following: ifconfig_fxp0="DHCP" Be sure to replace fxp0 with the designation for the interface that you wish to dynamically configure. If you are using a different location for dhclient, or if you wish to pass additional flags to dhclient, also include the following (editing as necessary): dhcp_program="/sbin/dhclient" dhcp_flags="" DHCP server The DHCP server, dhcpd, is included as part of the net/isc-dhcp3 port in the ports collection. This port contains the full ISC DHCP distribution, consisting of client, server, relay agent and documentation. DHCP configuration files /etc/dhclient.conf dhclient requires a configuration file, /etc/dhclient.conf. Typically the file contains only comments, the defaults being reasonably sane. This configuration file is described by the &man.dhclient.conf.5; manual page. /sbin/dhclient dhclient is statically linked and resides in /sbin. The &man.dhclient.8; manual page gives more information about dhclient. /sbin/dhclient-script dhclient-script is the FreeBSD-specific DHCP client configuration script. It is described in &man.dhclient-script.8;, but should not need any user modification to function properly. /var/db/dhclient.leases The DHCP client keeps a database of valid leases in this file, which is written as a log. &man.dhclient.leases.5; gives a slightly longer description. The DHCP protocol is fully described in RFC 2131. An informational resource has also been set up at dhcp.org. Ceri Davies Written by

ceri@FreeBSD.org

This section provides information on how to configure a FreeBSD system to act as a DHCP server using the ISC (Internet Software Consortium) implementation of the DHCP suite. The server portion of the suite is not provided as part of FreeBSD, and so you will need to install the net/isc-dhcp3 port to provide this service. See for more information on using the ports collection. DHCP installation In order to configure your FreeBSD system as a DHCP server, you will need to ensure that the &man.bpf.4; device is compiled into your kernel. To do this, add pseudo-device bpf to your kernel configuration file, and rebuild the kernel. For more information about building kernels, see . The bpf device is already part of the GENERIC kernel that is supplied with FreeBSD, so you do not need to create a custom kernel in order to get DHCP working. Those who are particularly security conscious should note that bpf is also the device that allows packet sniffers to work correctly (although such programs still need privileged access). bpf is required to use DHCP, but if you are very sensitive about security, you probably should not include bpf in your kernel purely because you expect to use DHCP at some point in the future. The next thing that you will need to do is edit the sample dhcpd.conf which was installed by the net/isc-dhcp3 port. By default, this will be /usr/local/etc/dhcpd.conf.sample, and you should copy this to /usr/local/etc/dhcpd.conf before proceeding to make changes. DHCP configuration dhcpd.conf dhcpd.conf is comprised of declarations regarding subnets and hosts, and is perhaps most easily explained using an example : option domain-name "example.com"; option domain-name-servers 192.168.4.100; option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0; default-lease-time 3600; max-lease-time 86400; ddns-update-style none; subnet 192.168.4.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { range 192.168.4.129 192.168.4.254; option routers 192.168.4.1; } host mailhost { hardware ethernet 02:03:04:05:06:07; fixed-address mailhost.example.com; } This option specifies the domain that will be provided to clients as the default search domain. See &man.resolv.conf.5; for more information on what this means. This option specifies a comma separated list of DNS servers that the client should use. The netmask that will be provided to clients. A client may request a specific length of time that a lease will be valid. Otherwise the server will assign a lease with this expiry value (in seconds). This is the maximum length of time that the server will lease for. Should a client request a longer lease, a lease will be issued, although it will only be valid for max-lease-time seconds. This option specifies whether the DHCP server should attempt to update DNS when a lease is accepted or released. In the ISC implementation, this option is required. This denotes which IP addresses should be used in the pool reserved for allocating to clients. IP addresses between, and including, the ones stated are handed out to clients. Declares the default gateway that will be provided to clients. The hardware MAC address of a host (so that the DHCP server can recognise a host when it makes a request). Specifies that the host should always be given the same IP address. Note that a hostname is OK here, since the DHCP server will resolve the hostname itself before returning the lease information. Once you have finished writing your dhcpd.conf, you can proceed to start the server by issuing the following command: &prompt.root; /usr/local/etc/rc.d/isc-dhcpd.sh start Should you need to make changes to the configuration of your server in the future, it is important to note that sending a SIGHUP signal to dhcpd does not result in the configuration being reloaded, as it does with most daemons. You will need to send a SIGTERM signal to stop the process, and then restart it using the command above. DHCP configuration files /usr/local/sbin/dhcpd dhcpd is statically linked and resides in /usr/local/sbin. The dhcpd(8) manual page installed with the port gives more information about dhcpd. /usr/local/etc/dhcpd.conf dhcpd requires a configuration file, /usr/local/etc/dhcpd.conf before it will start providing service to clients. This file needs to contain all the information that should be provided to clients that are being serviced, along with information regarding the operation of the server. This configuration file is described by the dhcpd.conf(5) manual page installed by the port. /var/db/dhcpd.leases The DHCP server keeps a database of leases it has issued in this file, which is written as a log. The manual page dhcpd.leases(5), installed by the port gives a slightly longer description. /usr/local/sbin/dhcrelay dhcrelay is used in advanced environments where one DHCP server forwards a request from a client to another DHCP server on a separate network. The dhcrelay(8) manual page provided with the port contains more detail. Chern Lee Contributed by BIND FreeBSD utilizes, by default, a version of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), which is the most common implementation of the DNS protocol. DNS is the protocol through which names are mapped to IP addresses, and vice versa. For example, a query for www.FreeBSD.org will receive a reply with the IP address of The FreeBSD Project's web server, whereas, a query for ftp.FreeBSD.org will return the IP address of the corresponding FTP machine. Likewise, the opposite can happen. A query for an IP address can resolve its hostname. It is not necessary to run a name server to perform DNS lookups on a system. DNS DNS is coordinated across the Internet through a somewhat complex system of authoritative root name servers, and other smaller-scale name servers who host and cache individual domain information. This document refers to BIND 8.x, as it is the stable version used in FreeBSD. BIND 9.x in FreeBSD can be installed through the net/bind9 port. RFC1034 and RFC1035 dictates the DNS protocol. Currently, BIND is maintained by the Internet Software Consortium (www.isc.org) To understand this document, some terms related to DNS must be understood. Term Definition forward DNS mapping of hostnames to IP addresses origin refers to the domain covered for the particular zone file named, bind, name server common names for the BIND name server package within FreeBSD resolver resolver a system process through which a machine queries a name server for zone information reverse DNS reverse DNS the opposite of forward DNS, mapping of IP addresses to hostnames root zone root zone literally, a ., refers to the root, or beginning zone. All zones fall under this, as do all files in fall under the root directory. It is the beginning of the Internet zone hierarchy. zone Each individual domain, subdomain, or area dictated by DNS zones examples Examples of zones: . is the root zone org. is a zone under the root zone example.org is a zone under the org. zone foo.example.org. is a subdomain, a zone under the example.org. zone 1.2.3.in-addr.arpa is a zone referencing all IP addresses which fall under the 3.2.1.* IP space. As one can see, the more specific part of a hostname appears to its left. For example, example.org. is more specific than org., as org. is more specific than the root zone. The layout of each part of a hostname is much like a filesystem: the /dev directory falls within the root, and so on. Name servers usually come in two forms: an authoritative name server, and a caching name server. An authoritative name server is needed when: one wants to serve DNS information to the world, replying authoritatively to queries. a domain, such as example.org, is registered and IP addresses need to be assigned to hostnames under it. an IP address block requires reverse DNS entries (IP to hostname). a backup name server, called a slave, must reply to queries when the primary is down or inaccessible. A caching name server is needed when: a local DNS server may cache and respond more quickly then querying an outside name server. a reduction in overall network traffic is desired (DNS traffic has been measured to account for 5% or more of total Internet traffic). When one queries for www.FreeBSD.org, the resolver usually queries the uplink ISP's name server, and retrieves the reply. With a local, caching DNS server, the query only has to be made once to the outside world by the caching DNS server. Every additional query will not have to look to the outside of the local network, since the information is cached locally. In FreeBSD, the BIND daemon is called named for obvious reasons. File Description named the BIND daemon ndc name daemon control program /etc/namedb directory where BIND zone information resides /etc/namedb/named.conf daemon configuration file Zone files are usually contained within the /etc/namedb directory, and contain the DNS zone information served by the name server. BIND starting Since BIND is installed by default, configuring it all is relatively simple. To ensure the named daemon is started at boot, put the following modifications in /etc/rc.conf: named_enable="YES" To start the daemon manually (after configuring it) &prompt.root; ndc start BIND configuration files Be sure to: &prompt.root; cd /etc/namedb &prompt.root; sh make-localhost to properly create the local reverse DNS zone file in /etc/namedb/localhost.rev. // $FreeBSD$ // // Refer to the named(8) manual page for details. If you are ever going // to setup a primary server, make sure you've understood the hairy // details of how DNS is working. Even with simple mistakes, you can // break connectivity for affected parties, or cause huge amount of // useless Internet traffic. options { directory "/etc/namedb"; // In addition to the "forwarders" clause, you can force your name // server to never initiate queries of its own, but always ask its // forwarders only, by enabling the following line: // // forward only; // If you've got a DNS server around at your upstream provider, enter // its IP address here, and enable the line below. This will make you // benefit from its cache, thus reduce overall DNS traffic in the Internet. /* forwarders { 127.0.0.1; }; */ Just as the comment says, to benefit from an uplink's cache, forwarders can be enabled here. Under normal circumstances, a name server will recursively query the Internet looking at certain name servers until it finds the answer it is looking for. Having this enabled will have it query the uplink's name server (or name server provided) first, taking advantage of its cache. If the uplink name server in question is a heavily trafficked, fast name server, enabling this may be worthwhile. 127.0.0.1 will not work here. Change this IP address to a name server at your uplink. /* * If there is a firewall between you and name servers you want * to talk to, you might need to uncomment the query-source * directive below. Previous versions of BIND always asked * questions using port 53, but BIND 8.1 uses an unprivileged * port by default. */ // query-source address * port 53; /* * If running in a sandbox, you may have to specify a different * location for the dumpfile. */ // dump-file "s/named_dump.db"; }; // Note: the following will be supported in a future release. /* host { any; } { topology { 127.0.0.0/8; }; }; */ // Setting up secondaries is way easier and the rough picture for this // is explained below. // // If you enable a local name server, don't forget to enter 127.0.0.1 // into your /etc/resolv.conf so this server will be queried first. // Also, make sure to enable it in /etc/rc.conf. zone "." { type hint; file "named.root"; }; zone "0.0.127.IN-ADDR.ARPA" { type master; file "localhost.rev"; }; zone "0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.IP6.INT" { type master; file "localhost.rev"; }; // NB: Do not use the IP addresses below, they are faked, and only // serve demonstration/documentation purposes! // // Example secondary config entries. It can be convenient to become // a secondary at least for the zone where your own domain is in. Ask // your network administrator for the IP address of the responsible // primary. // // Never forget to include the reverse lookup (IN-ADDR.ARPA) zone! // (This is the first bytes of the respective IP address, in reverse // order, with ".IN-ADDR.ARPA" appended.) // // Before starting to setup a primary zone, better make sure you fully // understand how DNS and BIND works, however. There are sometimes // unobvious pitfalls. Setting up a secondary is comparably simpler. // // NB: Don't blindly enable the examples below. :-) Use actual names // and addresses instead. // // NOTE!!! FreeBSD runs bind in a sandbox (see named_flags in rc.conf). // The directory containing the secondary zones must be write accessible // to bind. The following sequence is suggested: // // mkdir /etc/namedb/s // chown bind:bind /etc/namedb/s // chmod 750 /etc/namedb/s For more information on running BIND in a sandbox, see Running named in a sandbox. /* zone "example.com" { type slave; file "s/example.com.bak"; masters { 192.168.1.1; }; }; zone "0.168.192.in-addr.arpa" { type slave; file "s/0.168.192.in-addr.arpa.bak"; masters { 192.168.1.1; }; }; */ In named.conf, these are examples of slave entries for a forward and reverse zone. For each new zone served, a new zone entry must be added to named.conf For example, the simplest zone entry for example.org can look like: zone "example.org" { type master; file "example.org"; }; The zone is a master, as indicated by the type statement, holding its zone information in /etc/namedb/example.org indicated by the file statement. zone "example.org" { type slave; file "example.org"; }; In the slave case, the zone information is transferred from the master name server for the particular zone, and saved in the file specified. If and when the master server dies or is unreachable, the slave name server will have the transferred zone information and will be able to serve it. An example master zone file for example.org (existing within /etc/namedb/example.org) is as follows: $TTL 3600 example.org. IN SOA ns1.example.org. admin.example.org. ( 5 ; Serial 10800 ; Refresh 3600 ; Retry 604800 ; Expire 86400 ) ; Minimum TTL ; DNS Servers @ IN NS ns1.example.org. @ IN NS ns2.example.org. ; Machine Names localhost IN A 127.0.0.1 ns1 IN A 3.2.1.2 ns2 IN A 3.2.1.3 mail IN A 3.2.1.10 @ IN A 3.2.1.30 ; Aliases www IN CNAME @ ; MX Record @ IN MX 10 mail.example.org. Note that every hostname ending in a . is an exact hostname, whereas everything without a trailing . is referenced to the origin. For example, www is translated into www + origin. In our fictitious zone file, our origin is example.org., so www would translate to www.example.org. The format of a zone file follows: recordname IN recordtype value DNS records The most commonly used DNS records: SOA start of zone authority NS an authoritative name server A A host address CNAME the canonical name for an alias MX mail exchanger PTR a domain name pointer (used in reverse DNS) example.org. IN SOA ns1.example.org. admin.example.org. ( 5 ; Serial 10800 ; Refresh after 3 hours 3600 ; Retry after 1 hour 604800 ; Expire after 1 week 86400 ) ; Minimum TTL of 1 day example.org. the domain name, also the origin for this zone file. ns1.example.org. the primary/authoritative name server for this zone admin.example.org. the responsible person for this zone, email address with @ replaced. (admin@example.org becomes admin.example.org) 5 the serial number of the file. this must be incremented each time the zone file is modified. Nowadays, many admins prefer a yyyymmddrr format for the serial number. 2001041002 would mean last modified 04/10/2001, the latter 02 being the second time the zone file has been modified this day. The serial number is important as it alerts slave name servers for a zone when it is updated. @ IN NS ns1.example.org. This is an NS entry. Every name server that is going to reply authoritatively for the zone must have one of these entries. The @ as seen here could have been example.org. The @ translates to the origin. localhost IN A 127.0.0.1 ns1 IN A 3.2.1.2 ns2 IN A 3.2.1.3 mail IN A 3.2.1.10 @ IN A 3.2.1.30 The A record indicates machine names. As seen above, ns1.example.org would resolve to 3.2.1.2. Again, the origin symbol, @, is used here, thus meaning example.org would resolve to 3.2.1.30. www IN CNAME @ The canonical name record is usually used for giving aliases to a machine. In the example, www is aliased to the machine addressed to the origin, or example.org (3.2.1.30). CNAMEs can be used to provide alias hostnames, or round robin one hostname among multiple machines. @ IN MX 10 mail.example.org. The MX record indicates which mail servers are responsible for handling incoming mail for the zone. mail.example.org is the hostname of the mail server, and 10 being the priority of that mail server. One can have several mail servers, with priorities of 3, 2, 1. A mail server attempting to deliver to example.org would first try the highest priority MX, then the second highest, etc, until the mail can be properly delivered. For in-addr.arpa zone files (reverse DNS), the same format is used, except with PTR entries instead of A or CNAME. $TTL 3600 1.2.3.in-addr.arpa. IN SOA ns1.example.org. admin.example.org. ( 5 ; Serial 10800 ; Refresh 3600 ; Retry 604800 ; Expire 3600 ) ; Minimum @ IN NS ns1.example.org. @ IN NS ns2.example.org. 2 IN PTR ns1.example.org. 3 IN PTR ns2.example.org. 10 IN PTR mail.example.org. 30 IN PTR example.org. This file gives the proper IP address to hostname mappings of our above fictitious domain. BIND caching name server A caching name server is a name server that is not authoritative for any zones. It simply asks queries of its own, and remembers them for later use. To set one up, just configure the name server as usual, omitting any inclusions of zones. Ceri Davies Contributed by BIND running in a sandbox chroot For added security you may want to run &man.named.8; as an unprivileged user, and configure it to &man.chroot.8; into a sandbox directory. This makes everything outside of the sandbox inaccessible to the named daemon. Should named be compromised, this will help to reduce the damage that can be caused. By default, FreeBSD has a user and a group called bind, intended for this use. Various people would recommend that instead of configuring named to chroot, you should run named inside a &man.jail.8;. This section does not attempt to cover this situation. Since named will not be able to access anything outside of the sandbox (such as shared libraries, log sockets, and so on), there are a number of steps that need to be followed in order to allow named to function correctly. In the following checklist, it is assumed that the path to the sandbox is /etc/namedb and that you have made no prior modifications to the contents of this directory. Perform the following steps as root. Create all directories that named expects to see: &prompt.root; cd /etc/namedb &prompt.root; mkdir -p bin dev etc var/tmp var/run master slave &prompt.root; chown bind:bind slave var/* named only needs write access to these directories, so that is all we give it. Rearrange and create basic zone and configuration files: &prompt.root; cp /etc/localtime etc &prompt.root; mv named.conf etc && ln -sf etc/named.conf &prompt.root; mv named.root master &prompt.root; sh make-localhost && mv localhost.rev localhost-v6.rev master &prompt.root; cat > master/named.localhost $ORIGIN localhost. $TTL 6h @ IN SOA localhost. postmaster.localhost. ( 1 ; serial 3600 ; refresh 1800 ; retry 604800 ; expiration 3600 ) ; minimum IN NS localhost. IN A 127.0.0.1 ^D This allows named to log the correct time to &man.syslogd.8; Build a statically linked copy of named-xfer, and copy it into the sandbox: &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/lib/libisc && make clean all &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/lib/libbind && make clean all &prompt.root; cd /usr/src/libexec/named-xfer && make NOSHARED=yes all &prompt.root; cp named-xfer /etc/namedb/bin && chmod 555 /etc/namedb/bin/named-xfer This step has been reported to fail occasionally. If this happens to you, then issue the command: &prompt.root; cd /usr/src && make cleandir && make cleandir This will clean out any cruft from your source tree, and retrying the steps above should then work. Make a dev/null that named can see and write to: &prompt.root; cd /etc/namedb/dev && mknod null c 2 2 &prompt.root; chmod 666 null Symlink /var/run/ndc to /etc/namedb/var/run/ndc: &prompt.root; ln -sf /etc/namedb/var/run/ndc /var/run/ndc This simply avoids having to specify the -c option to &man.ndc.8; every time you run it. Since the contents of /var/run are deleted on boot, if this is something that you find useful you may wish to add this command to root's crontab, making use of the @reboot option. See &man.crontab.5; for more information regarding this. Configure &man.syslogd.8; to create an extra log socket that named can write to. To do this, add -l /etc/namedb/dev/log to the syslogd_flags variable in /etc/rc.conf. Arrange to have named start and chroot itself to the sandbox by adding the following to /etc/rc.conf: named_enable="YES" named_flags="-u bind -g bind -t /etc/namedb /etc/named.conf" Note that the configuration file /etc/named.conf is denoted by a full pathname relative to the sandbox, i.e. in the line above, the file referred to is actually /etc/namedb/etc/named.conf. The next step is to edit /etc/namedb/etc/named.conf so that named knows which zones to load and where to find them on the disk. There follows a commented example (anything not specifically commented here is no different from the setup for a DNS server not running in a sandbox): options { directory "/"; named-xfer "/bin/named-xfer"; version ""; // Don't reveal BIND version query-source address * port 53; }; // ndc control socket controls { unix "/var/run/ndc" perm 0600 owner 0 group 0; }; // Zones follow: zone "localhost" IN { type master; file "master/named.localhost"; allow-transfer { localhost; }; notify no; }; zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" IN { type master; file "master/localhost.rev"; allow-transfer { localhost; }; notify no; }; zone "0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.ip6.int" { type master; file "master/localhost-v6.rev"; allow-transfer { localhost; }; notify no; }; zone "." IN { type hint; file "master/named.root"; }; zone "private.example.net" in { type master; file "master/private.example.net.db"; allow-transfer { 192.168.10.0/24; }; }; zone "10.168.192.in-addr.arpa" in { type slave; masters { 192.168.10.2; }; file "slave/192.168.10.db"; }; The directory statement is specified as /, since all files that named needs are within this directory (recall that this is equivalent to a normal user's /etc/namedb. Specifies the full path to the named-xfer binary (from named's frame of reference). This is necessary since named is compiled to look for named-xfer in /usr/libexec by default. Specifies the filename (relative to the directory statement above) where named can find the zonefile for this zone. Specifies the filename (relative to the directory statement above) where named should write a copy of the zonefile for this zone after successfully transferring it from the master server. This is why we needed to change the ownership of the directory slave to bind in the setup stages above. After completing the steps above, either reboot your server or restart &man.syslogd.8; and start &man.named.8;, making sure to use the new options specified in syslogd_flags and named_flags. You should now be running a sandboxed copy of named! Although BIND is the most common implementation of DNS, there is always the issue of security. Possible and exploitable security holes are sometimes found. It is a good idea to subscribe to CERT and freebsd-security-notifications to stay up to date with the current Internet and FreeBSD security issues. If a problem arises, keeping sources up to date and having a fresh build of named would not hurt. BIND/named manual pages: &man.ndc.8; &man.named.8; &man.named.conf.5; Official ISC Bind Page BIND FAQ O'Reilly DNS and BIND 4th Edition RFC1034 - Domain Names - Concepts and Facilities RFC1035 - Domain Names - Implementation and Specification Tom Hukins Contributed by NTP Over time, a computer's clock is prone to drift. As time passes, the computer's clock becomes less accurate. NTP (Network Time Protocol) is one way to ensure your clock is right. Many Internet services rely on, or greatly benefit from, computers' clocks being accurate. For example, a Web server may receive requests to send a file if it has modified since a certain time. Services such as &man.cron.8; run commands at a given time. If the clock is inaccurate, these commands may not run when expected. NTP ntpd FreeBSD ships with the &man.ntpd.8; NTP server which can be used to query other NTP servers to set the clock on your machine or provide time services to others. NTP choosing servers In order to synchronize your clock, you will need to find one or more NTP servers to use. Your network administrator or ISP may have setup an NTP server for this purpose—check their documentation to see if this is the case. There is a list of publicly accessible NTP servers which you can use to find an NTP server near to you. Make sure you are aware of the policy for any servers you choose, and ask for permission if required. Choosing several unconnected NTP servers is a good idea in case one of the servers you are using becomes unreachable or its clock is unreliable. &man.ntpd.8; uses the responses it receives from other servers intelligently—it will favor unreliable servers less than reliable ones. NTP configuration ntpdate If you only wish to synchronize your clock when the machine boots up, you can use &man.ntpdate.8;. This may be appropriate for some desktop machines which are frequently rebooted and only require infrequent synchronization, but most machines should run &man.ntpd.8;. Using &man.ntpdate.8; at boot time is also a good idea for machines that run &man.ntpd.8;. &man.ntpd.8; changes the clock gradually, whereas &man.ntpdate.8; sets the clock, no matter how great the difference between a machine's current clock setting and the correct time. To enable &man.ntpdate.8; at boot time, add ntpdate_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf. You will also need to specify all servers you wish to synchronize with and any flags to be passed to &man.ntpdate.8; in ntpdate_flags. NTP ntp.conf NTP is configured by the /etc/ntp.conf file in the format described in &man.ntp.conf.5;. Here is a simple example: server ntplocal.example.com prefer server timeserver.example.org server ntp2a.example.net driftfile /var/db/ntp.drift The server option specifies which servers are to be used, with one server listed on each line. If a server is specified with the prefer argument, as with ntplocal.example.com, that server is preferred over other servers. A response from a preferred server will be discarded if it differs significantly from other servers' responses, otherwise it will be used without any consideration to other responses. The prefer argument is normally used for NTP servers that are known to be highly accurate, such as those with special time monitoring hardware. The driftfile option specifies which file is used to store the system clock's frequency offset. &man.ntpd.8; uses this to automatically compensate for the clock's natural drift, allowing it to maintain a reasonably correct setting even if it is cut off from all external time sources for a period of time. The driftfile option specifies which file is used to store information about previous responses from the NTP servers you are using. This file contains internal information for NTP. It should not be modified by any other process. By default, your NTP server will be accessible to all hosts on the Internet. The restrict option in &man.ntp.conf.5; allows you to control which machines can access your server. If you want to deny all machines from accessing your NTP server, add the line restrict default ignore to /etc/ntp.conf. If you only want to allow machines within your own network to synchronize their clocks with your server, but ensure they are not allowed to configure the server or used as peers to synchronize against, add restrict 192.168.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 notrust nomodify notrap instead, where 192.168.1.0 is an IP address on your network and 255.255.255.0 is your network's netmask. /etc/ntp.conf can contain multiple restrict options. For more details, see the Access Control Support subsection of &man.ntp.conf.5;. To ensure the NTP server is started at boot time, add the line xntpd_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf. If you wish to pass additional flags to &man.ntpd.8; edit the xntpd_flags parameter in /etc/rc.conf. To start the server without rebooting your machine, run ntpd being sure to specify any additional parameters from xntpd_flags in /etc/rc.conf. For example: &prompt.root; ntpd -p /var/run/ntpd.pid ntpd does not need a permanent connection to the Internet to function properly. However, if you have a temporary connection that is configured to dial out on demand, it is a good idea to prevent NTP traffic from triggering a dial out or keeping the connection alive. If you are using user PPP, you can use filter directives in /etc/ppp/ppp.conf. For example: set filter dial 0 deny udp src eq 123 # Prevent NTP traffic from initiating dial out set filter dial 1 permit 0 0 set filter alive 0 deny udp src eq 123 # Prevent incoming NTP traffic from keeping the connection open set filter alive 1 deny udp dst eq 123 # Prevent outgoing NTP traffic from keeping the connection open set filter alive 2 permit 0/0 0/0 For more details see the PACKET FILTERING section in &man.ppp.8; and the examples in /usr/share/examples/ppp/. Some Internet access providers block low-numbered ports, preventing NTP from functioning since replies never reach your machine. Documentation for the NTP server can be found in /usr/share/doc/ntp/ in HTML format. Chern Lee Contributed by natd FreeBSD's Network Address Translation daemon, commonly known as &man.natd.8; is a daemon that accepts incoming raw IP packets, changes the source to the local machine and re-injects these packets back into the outgoing IP packet stream. natd does this by changing the source IP address and port such that when data is received back, it is able to determine the original location of the data and forward it back to its original requester. Internet connection sharing IP masquerading The most common use of NAT is to perform what is commonly known as Internet Connection Sharing. Due to the diminishing IP space in IPv4, and the increased number of users on high-speed consumer lines such as cable or DSL, people are increasingly in need of an Internet Connection Sharing solution. The ability to connect several computers online through one connection and IP address makes &man.natd.8; a reasonable choice. Most commonly, a user has a machine connected to a cable or DSL line with one IP address and wishes to use this one connected computer to provide Internet access to several more over a LAN. To do this, the FreeBSD machine on the Internet must act as a gateway. This gateway machine must have two NICs--one for connecting to the Internet router, the other connecting to a LAN. All the machines on the LAN are connected through a hub or switch. _______ __________ ________ | | | | | | | Hub |-----| Client B |-----| Router |----- Internet |_______| |__________| |________| | ____|_____ | | | Client A | |__________| Network Layout A setup like this is commonly used to share an Internet connection. One of the LAN machines is connected to the Internet. The rest of the machines access the Internet through that gateway machine. kernel configuration The following options must be in the kernel configuration file: options IPFIREWALL options IPDIVERT Additionally, at choice, the following may also be suitable: options IPFIREWALL_DEFAULT_TO_ACCEPT options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE The following must be in /etc/rc.conf: gateway_enable="YES" firewall_enable="YES" firewall_type="OPEN" natd_enable="YES" natd_interface="fxp0" natd_flags="" gateway_enable="YES" Sets up the machine to act as a gateway. Running sysctl net.inet.ip.forwarding=1 would have the same effect. firewall_enable="YES" Enables the firewall rules in /etc/rc.firewall at boot. firewall_type="OPEN" This specifies a predefined firewall ruleset that allows anything in. See /etc/rc.firewall for additional types. natd_interface="fxp0" Indicates which interface to forward packets through (the interface connected to the Internet). natd_flags="" Any additional configuration options passed to &man.natd.8; on boot. Having the previous options defined in /etc/rc.conf would run natd -interface fxp0 at boot. This can also be run manually. Each machine and interface behind the LAN should be assigned IP address numbers in the private network space as defined by RFC 1918 and have a default gateway of the natd machine's internal IP address. For example, client a and b behind the LAN have IP addresses of 192.168.0.2 and 192.168.0.3, while the natd machine's LAN interface has an IP address of 192.168.0.1. Client a and b's default gateway must be set to that of the natd machine, 192.168.0.1. The natd machine's external, or Internet interface does not require any special modification for natd to work. The drawback with natd is that the LAN clients are not accessible from the Internet. Clients on the LAN can make outgoing connections to the world but cannot receive incoming ones. This presents a problem if trying to run Internet services on one of the LAN client machines. A simple way around this is to redirect selected Internet ports on the natd machine to a LAN client. For example, an IRC server runs on Client A, and a web server runs on Client B. For this to work properly, connections received on ports 6667 (irc) and 80 (web) must be redirected to the respective machines. The -redirect_port must be passed to &man.natd.8; with the proper options. The syntax is as follows: -redirect_port proto targetIP:targetPORT[-targetPORT] [aliasIP:]aliasPORT[-aliasPORT] [remoteIP[:remotePORT[-remotePORT]]] In the above example, the argument should be: -redirect_port tcp 192.168.0.2:6667 6667 -redirect_port tcp 192.168.0.3:80 80 This will redirect the proper tcp ports to the LAN client machines. The -redirect_port argument can be used to indicate port ranges over individual ports. For example, tcp 192.168.0.2:2000-3000 2000-3000 would redirect all connections received on ports 2000 to 3000 to ports 2000 to 3000 on Client A. These options can be used when directly running &man.natd.8; or placed within the natd_flags="" option in /etc/rc.conf. For further configuration options, consult &man.natd.8; address redirection Address redirection is useful if several IP addresses are available, yet they must be on one machine. With this, &man.natd.8; can assign each LAN client its own external IP address. &man.natd.8; then rewrites outgoing packets from the LAN clients with the proper external IP address and redirects all traffic incoming on that particular IP address back to the specific LAN client. This is also known as static NAT. For example, the IP addresses 128.1.1.1, 128.1.1.2, and 128.1.1.3 belong to the natd gateway machine. 128.1.1.1 can be used as the natd gateway machine's external IP address, while 128.1.1.2 and 128.1.1.3 are forwarded back to LAN clients A and B. The -redirect_address syntax is as follows: -redirect_address localIP publicIP localIP The internal IP address of the LAN client. publicIP The external IP address corresponding to the LAN client. In the example, this argument would read: -redirect_address 192.168.0.2 128.1.1.2 -redirect_address 192.168.0.3 128.1.1.3 Like -redirect_port, these arguments are also placed within natd_flags of /etc/rc.conf. With address redirection, there is no need for port redirection since all data received on a particular IP address is redirected. The external IP addresses on the natd machine must be active and aliased to the external interface. Look at &man.rc.conf.5; to do so. Chern Lee Contributed by &man.inetd.8; is referred to as the Internet Super-Server because it manages connections for several daemons. Programs that provide network service are commonly known as daemons. inetd serves as a managing server for other daemons. When a connection is received by inetd, it determines which daemon the connection is destined for, spawns the particular daemon and delegates the socket to it. Running one instance of inetd reduces the overall system load as compared to running each daemon individually in stand-alone mode. Primarily, inetd is used to spawn other daemons, but several trivial protocols are handled directly, such as chargen, auth, and daytime. This section will cover the basics in configuring inetd through its command-line options and its configuration file, /etc/inetd.conf. inetd is initialized through the /etc/rc.conf system. The inetd_enable option is set to NO by default, but is often times turned on by sysinstall with the medium security profile. Placing: inetd_enable="YES" or inetd_enable="NO" into /etc/rc.conf can enable or disable inetd starting at boot time. Additionally, different command-line options can be passed to inetd via the inetd_flags option. inetd synopsis: inetd [-d] [-l] [-w] [-W] [-c maximum] [-C rate] [-a address | hostname] [-p filename] [-R rate] [configuration file] -d Turn on debugging. -l Turn on logging of successful connections. -w Turn on TCP Wrapping for external services (on by default). -W Turn on TCP Wrapping for internal services which are built into inetd (on by default). -c maximum Specify the default maximum number of simultaneous invocations of each service; the default is unlimited. May be overridden on a per-service basis with the max-child parameter. -C rate Specify the default maximum number of times a service can be invoked from a single IP address in one minute; the default is unlimited. May be overridden on a per-service basis with the max-connections-per-ip-per-minute parameter. -R rate Specify the maximum number of times a service can be invoked in one minute; the default is 256. A rate of 0 allows an unlimited number of invocations. -a Specify one specific IP address to bind to. Alternatively, a hostname can be specified, in which case the IPv4 or IPv6 address which corresponds to that hostname is used. Usually a hostname is specified when inetd is run inside a &man.jail.8;, in which case the hostname corresponds to the &man.jail.8; environment. When hostname specification is used and both IPv4 and IPv6 bindings are desired, one entry with the appropriate protocol type for each binding is required for each service in /etc/inetd.conf. For example, a TCP-based service would need two entries, one using tcp4 for the protocol and the other using tcp6. -p Specify an alternate file in which to store the process ID. These options can be passed to inetd using the inetd_flags option in /etc/rc.conf. By default, inetd_flags is set to -wW, which turns on TCP wrapping for inetd's internal and external services. For novice users, these parameters usually do not need to be modified or even entered in /etc/rc.conf. An external service is a daemon outside of inetd, which is invoked when a connection is received for it. On the other hand, an internal service is one that inetd has the facility of offering within itself. Configuration of inetd is controlled through the /etc/inetd.conf file. When a modification is made to /etc/inetd.conf, inetd can be forced to re-read its configuration file by sending a HangUP signal to the inetd process as shown: &prompt.root; kill -HUP `cat /var/run/inetd.pid` Each line of the configuration file specifies an individual daemon. Comments in the file are preceded by a #. The format of /etc/inetd.conf is as follows: service-name socket-type protocol {wait|nowait}[/max-child[/max-connections-per-ip-per-minute]] user[:group][/login-class] server-program server-program-arguments An example entry for the ftpd daemon using IPv4: ftp stream tcp nowait root /usr/libexec/ftpd ftpd -l service-name This is the service name of the particular daemon. It must correspond to a service listed in /etc/services. This determines which port inetd must listen to. If a new service is being created, it must be placed in /etc/services first. socket-type Either stream, dgram, raw, or seqpacket. stream must be used for connection-based, TCP daemons, while dgram is used for daemons utilizing the UDP transport protocol. protocol One of the following: Protocol Explanation tcp, tcp4 TCP IPv4 udp, udp4 UDP IPv4 tcp6 TCP IPv6 udp6 UDP IPv6 tcp46 Both TCP IPv4 and v6 udp46 Both UDP IPv4 and v6 {wait|nowait}[/max-child[/max-connections-per-ip-per-minute]] wait|nowait indicates whether the daemon invoked from inetd is able to handle its own socket or not. dgram socket types must use the wait option, while stream socket daemons, which are usually multi-threaded, should use nowait. wait usually hands off multiple sockets to a single daemon, while nowait spawns a child daemon for each new socket. The maximum number of child daemons inetd may spawn can be set using the max-child option. If a limit of ten instances of a particular daemon is needed, a /10 would be placed after nowait. In addition to max-child, another option limiting the maximum connections from a single place to a particular daemon can be enabled. max-connections-per-ip-per-minute does just this. A value of ten here would limit any particular IP address connecting to a particular service to ten attempts per minute. This is useful to prevent intentional or unintentional resource consumption and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to a machine. In this field, wait or nowait is mandatory. max-child and max-connections-per-ip-per-minute are optional. A stream-type multi-threaded daemon without any max-child or max-connections-per-ip-per-minute limits would simply be: nowait The same daemon with a maximum limit of ten daemons would read: nowait/10 Additionally, the same setup with a limit of twenty connections per IP address per minute and a maximum total limit of ten child daemons would read: nowait/10/20 These options are all utilized by the default settings of the fingerd daemon, as seen here: finger stream tcp nowait/3/10 nobody /usr/libexec/fingerd fingerd -s user The user is the username that the particular daemon should run as. Most commonly, daemons run as the root user. For security purposes, it is common to find some servers running as the daemon user, or the least privileged nobody user. server-program The full path of the daemon to be executed when a connection is received. If the daemon is a service provided by inetd internally, then internal should be used. server-program-arguments This works in conjunction with server-program by specifying the arguments, starting with argv[0], passed to the daemon on invocation. If mydaemon -d is the command line, mydaemon -d would be the value of server program arguments. Again, if the daemon is an internal service, use internal here. Depending on the security profile chosen at install, many of inetd's daemons may be enabled by default. If there is no apparent need for a particular daemon, disable it! Place a # in front of the daemon in question, and send a hangup signal to inetd. Some daemons, such as fingerd, may not be desired at all because they provide an attacker with too much information. Some daemons are not security-conscious and have long, or non-existent timeouts for connection attempts. This allows an attacker to slowly send connections to a particular daemon, thus saturating available resources. It may be a good idea to place ip-per-minute and max-child limitations on certain daemons. By default, TCP wrapping is turned on. Consult the &man.hosts.access.5; manual page for more information on placing TCP restrictions on various inetd invoked daemons. daytime, time, echo, discard, chargen, and auth are all internally provided services of inetd. The auth service provides identity (ident, identd) network services, and is configurable to a certain degree. Consult the &man.inetd.8; manual page for more in-depth information. PLIP Parallel Line IP PLIP lets us run TCP/IP between parallel ports. It is useful on machines without network cards, or to install on laptops. In this section, we will discuss: Creating a parallel (laplink) cable. Connecting two computers with PLIP. You can purchase a parallel cable at most computer supply stores. If you cannot do that, or you just want to know how it is done, the following table shows how to make one out of a normal parallel printer cable. A-name A-End B-End Descr. Post/Bit DATA0 -ERROR 2 15 15 2 Data 0/0x01 1/0x08 DATA1 +SLCT 3 13 13 3 Data 0/0x02 1/0x10 DATA2 +PE 4 12 12 4 Data 0/0x04 1/0x20 DATA3 -ACK 5 10 10 5 Strobe 0/0x08 1/0x40 DATA4 BUSY 6 11 11 6 Data 0/0x10 1/0x80 GND 18-25 18-25 GND - Get a laplink cable. Confirm that both computers have a kernel with &man.lpt.4; driver support. &prompt.root; dmesg | grep lp lpt0 at 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa lpt0: Interrupt-driven lp0: TCP/IP capable interface Plug in the laplink cable into the parallel interface on both computers. Configure the network interface parameters for lp0 on both sites as root. For example, if you want connect the host host1 with host2: host1 <-----> host2 IP Address 10.0.0.1 10.0.0.2 Configure the interface on host1 by doing: &prompt.root; ifconfig lp0 10.0.0.1 10.0.0.2 Configure the interface on host2 by doing: &prompt.root; ifconfig lp0 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.1 You now should have a working connection. Please read the manual pages &man.lp.4; and &man.lpt.4; for more details. You should also add both hosts to /etc/hosts: 127.0.0.1 localhost.my.domain localhost 10.0.0.1 host1.my.domain host1 10.0.0.2 host2.my.domain To confirm the connection works, go to each host and ping the other. For example, on host1: &prompt.root; ifconfig lp0 lp0: flags=8851<UP,POINTOPOINT,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 inet 10.0.0.1 --> 10.0.0.2 netmask 0xff000000 &prompt.root; netstat -r Routing tables Internet: Destination Gateway Flags Refs Use Netif Expire host2 host1 UH 4 127592 lp0 &prompt.root; ping -c 4 host2 PING host2 (10.0.0.2): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=2.774 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=2.530 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=2.556 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=2.714 ms --- host2 ping statistics --- 4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.530/2.643/2.774/0.103 ms Aaron Kaplan Originally Written by Tom Rhodes Restructured and Added by IPv6 (also know as IPng IP next generation) is the new version of the well known IP protocol (also know as IPv4). Like the other current *BSD systems, FreeBSD includes the KAME IPv6 reference implementation. So your FreeBSD system comes with all you will need to experiment with IPv6. This section focuses on getting IPv6 configured and running. In the early 1990s, people became aware of the rapidly diminishing address space of IPv4. Given the expansion rate of the Internet there were two major concerns: Running out of addresses. Today this is not so much of a concern anymore since private address spaces (10.0.0.0/8, 192.168.0.0/24, etc.) and Network Address Translation (NAT) are being employed. Router table entries were getting too large. This is still a concern today. IPv6 deals with these and many other issues: 128 bit address space. In other words theoretically there are 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses available. This means there are approximately 6.67 * 10^27 IPv6 addresses per square meter on our planet. Routers will only store network aggregation addresses in their routing tables thus reducing the average space of a routing table to 8192 entries. There are also lots of other useful features of IPv6 such as: Address autoconfiguration (RFC2462) Anycast addresses (one-out-of many) Mandatory multicast addresses IPsec (IP security) Simplified header structure Mobile IP IPv4-to-IPv6 transition mechanisms For more information see: IPv6 overview at Sun.com IPv6.org KAME.net 6bone.net There are different types of IPv6 addresses: Unicast, Anycast and Multicast. Unicast addresses are the well known addresses. A packet sent to a unicast address arrives exactly at the interface belonging to the address. Anycast addresses are syntactically indistinguishable from unicast addresses but they address a group of interfaces. The packet destined for an anycast address will arrive at the nearest (in router metric) interface. Anycast addresses may only be used by routers. Multicast addresses identify a group of interfaces. A packet destined for a multicast address will arrive at all interfaces belonging to the multicast group. The IPv4 broadcast address (usually xxx.xxx.xxx.255) is expressed by multicast addresses in IPv6. Reserved IPv6 addresses: ipv6-address prefixlength(Bits) description Notes :: 128 Bits unspecified cf. 0.0.0.0 in IPv4 address ::1 128 Bits loopback address cf. 127.0.0.1 in IPv4 ::00:xx:xx:xx:xx 96 Bits embedded IPv4 The lower 32 bits are the address IPv4 address. Also called IPv4 compatible IPv6 address ::ff:xx:xx:xx:xx 96 Bits IPv4 mapped The lower 32 bits are the IPv6 address IPv4 address. For hosts which do not support IPv6 fe80:: - feb:: 10 Bits link-local cf. loopback address in IPv4 fec0:: - fef:: 10 Bits site-local ff:: 8 Bits multicast 001 (base 2) 3 Bits global unicast All global unicast addresses are assigned from this pool. The first 3 Bits are 001. The canonical form is represented as: x:x:x:x:x:x:x:x, each x being a 16 Bit hex value. For example FEBC:A574:382B:23C1:AA49:4592:4EFE:9982 Often an address will have long substrings of all zeros therefore each such substring can be abbreviated by ::. For example fe80::1 corresponds to the canonical form fe80:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001 A third form is to write the last 32 Bit part in the well known (decimal) IPv4 style with dots . as separators. For example 2002::10.0.0.1 corresponds to the (hexadecimal) canonical representation 2002:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:000a:0001 which in turn is equivalent to writing 2002::a:1 By now the reader should be able to understand the following: &prompt.root; ifconfig rl0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 inet 10.0.0.10 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255 inet6 fe80::200:21ff:fe03:8e1%rl0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1 ether 00:00:21:03:08:e1 media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX ) status: active fe80::200:21ff:fe03:8e1%rl0 is an auto configured link-local address. It includes the enscrambled Ethernet MAC as part of the auto configuration. For further information on the structure of IPv6 addresses see RFC2373. Currently there are four ways to connect to other IPv6 hosts and networks: Join the experimental 6bone Getting an IPv6 network from your upstream provider. Talk to your Internet provider for instructions. Tunnel via 6-to-4 Use the freenet6 port if you are on a dial-up connection. Here we will talk on how to connect to the 6bone since it currently seems to be the most popular way. First take a look at the 6bone site and find a 6bone connection nearest to you. Write to the responsible person and with a little bit of luck you will be given instructions on how to set up your connection. Usually this involves setting up a GRE (gif) tunnel. Here is a typical example on setting up a &man.gif.4; tunnel: &prompt.root; ifconfig gif0 create &prompt.root; ifconfig gif0 gif0: flags=8010<POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST> mtu 1280 &prompt.root; ifconfig gif0 tunnel MY_IPv4_ADDR HIS_IPv4_ADDR &prompt.root; ifconfig gif0 inet6 alias MY_ASSIGNED_IPv6_TUNNEL_ENDPOINT_ADDR Replace the capitalized words by the information you received from the upstream 6bone node. This establishes the tunnel. Check if the tunnel is working by &man.ping6.8; 'ing ff02::1%gif0. You should receive two ping replies. In case you are intrigued by the address ff02:1%gif0, this is a multicast address. %gif0 states that the multicast address at network interface gif0 is to be used. Since we ping a multicast address the other endpoint of the tunnel should reply as well). By now setting up a route to your 6bone uplink should be rather straightforward: &prompt.root; route add -inet6 default -interface gif0 &prompt.root; ping6 -n MY_UPLINK &prompt.root; traceroute6 www.jp.freebsd.org (3ffe:505:2008:1:2a0:24ff:fe57:e561) from 3ffe:8060:100::40:2, 30 hops max, 12 byte packets 1 atnet-meta6 14.147 ms 15.499 ms 24.319 ms 2 6bone-gw2-ATNET-NT.ipv6.tilab.com 103.408 ms 95.072 ms * 3 3ffe:1831:0:ffff::4 138.645 ms 134.437 ms 144.257 ms 4 3ffe:1810:0:6:290:27ff:fe79:7677 282.975 ms 278.666 ms 292.811 ms 5 3ffe:1800:0:ff00::4 400.131 ms 396.324 ms 394.769 ms 6 3ffe:1800:0:3:290:27ff:fe14:cdee 394.712 ms 397.19 ms 394.102 ms This output will differ from machine to machine. By now you should be able to reach the IPv6 site www.kame.net and see the dancing tortoise - that is if you have a IPv6 enabled browser such as mozilla. There are two new types of DNS records for IPv6: AAAA records, A6 records Using AAAA records is straightforward. Assign your hostname to the new IPv6 address you just got by adding: MYHOSTNAME AAAA MYIPv6ADDR To your primary zone DNS file. In case you do not serve your own DNS zones ask your DNS provider. Current versions of bind (version 8.3 and 9) support AAAA records.