This article was updated on May 23rd, 2007 to follow a stricter set of best practices.

I just successfully installed FreeBSD on the computer. The setup wizard was flawless and configured almost everything automatically. I’m using an entire hard drive so I chose the default partition and mounting schemes. I suggest you do the same to keep things simple. After the mounting screen it gives you the Distribution selection screen, I selected minimal, then went down to custom and additionally selected the Manual Pages (man), and the Ports System (ports).

For my network card I choose no IPv6, yes DHCP because my server will be behind my router. “Host” is similar to the “name” of your computer on Windows, except it has to be a fully qualified domain. If this is going to be a local server, you can enter anything you want with .localhost on the end. For example, I entered “freebsd.localhost”. For the domain just remove whatever is there (if anything) and enter localhost. All of the other fields should have been configured automatically by DHCP. From there you can select which ever services you want it to install, for the purposes of these guides we’re going to say no to everything except ssh.

Next you can choose which “ports” packages you want installed. “Ports” are special FreeBSD packages that are pretty much guaranteed to work. I choose the following “ports” packages from the installation wizard to get started remotely editing the server over SSH.

• Sudo - Sudo allows you to issue commands as root from a regular account. Very necessary since I’ll be handling all of the administration over SSH and you can’t login as root over SSH.
• Pico - To edit files. You’ll definitely want to install this, otherwise you’ll have to use Vi and no one likes using Vi.
• Bash - The default shell is called “sh”, it’s functional, but lacks more advanced and time saving features like tab-completion, which means instead of having to type out cd /usr/local, you’d just have to type /u[tab]lo[tab] and it would finish those for you.
• wget - Wget allows you to pull files off of the internet from the command line.

I’m almost ready to step away from the physical server, but before I do that I’ll need to configure sudo, I’ll show you how I configured my sudo in the next post.