Anatiferous blog | Move every zig.

Howdy! This is my (William Reading's) webpage. At the moment, I only have this blog script and my gallery up, but I hope to get more stuff on this page at some point, or so I thought when I created this site years ago. Updates and shiny new copy to eventually go here. If you'd like to contact me to point out that I've done something to break XHTML/CSS standards or heaven forbid--look at my Vita--drop me a line at my e-mail address bill +spam @ [ELEPHANT] aggienerds.org. Simply remove "+spam", the spaces and the pachyderm along with its brackets and that address will reach me. I'm also available on Jabber/GChat/AIM/MSN with the same address above.

Well, I finally did get BeServed acting about as it should, but I’m slightly disappointed in the fact that the configuration files *must* go in /etc, instead of /usr/local/etc on FreeBSD. This is kind of an oversight on their part. The other bit is that they didn’t take the effort to make a console based configuration tool for the users on Non-BeOS systems, forcing me to use BeOS to set it up. One last bone to pick is that their installer doesn’t create the correct directories to store users in by default. This means that their GUI configuration tool doesn’t even work! After talking to someone over there, I was handed the following information:

DomainManager, as you noticed, can be used to create user accounts. Each account is represented by a single configuration file. Unfortunately, sometimes during installation, the directories that store these user account files do not get created properly. On FreeBSD, they should be:

mkdir /etc/domains
mkdir /etc/domains/default
mkdir /etc/domains/default/groups
mkdir /etc/domains/default/groups/everyone
mkdir /etc/domains/default/servers
mkdir /etc/domains/default/users

and on BeOS they should be:

mkdir /boot/home/config/domains
mkdir /boot/home/config/domains/default
mkdir /boot/home/config/domains/default/groups
mkdir /boot/home/config/domains/default/groups/everyone
mkdir /boot/home/config/domains/default/servers
mkdir /boot/home/config/domains/default/users

You can create these manually if necessary to ensure that the files can be properly created. That should prevent the user accounts you create from disappearing. You can create the files manually on FreeBSD, although MD5 encoding of the password will be an issue without a tool for doing it. The easiest approach is to create the files using DomainManager and then move them to your FreeBSD machine. When adding a user to a group, you simply create a directory for the group name, such as “salespeople", as in /etc/domains/default/groups/salespeople. Then within that directory you create symbolic links to each of the user files that should belong to that group. Removing a user from a group is then done by removing the symbolic link.

So after making the directories and creating my user, I copied over the domain tree to /etc on my FreeBSD box, copied besure_server to /usr/local/sbin (it’s not installed by their script), then fixed their lackluster init script to start besure_server. Their script is no better than putting it in rc.local, so I might redo it later on, but it works for now. I haven’t been disappointed by the file transferring part of the software, but the fact that I had to do these things to get the user authentication to work with the almost nonexistant documantation is really unacceptable. On the other hand, they only charge $5 for the FreeBSD license and $15 for the BeOS one, so it’s not as bad of a deal as it might seem. I guess you do get what you pay for though.