Sparkling Brand New FreeBSD Admin

[Keith Phipps]

Good Day,

    My name is Keith and I"ve just been promoted to our Unix SysAdmin at 
work. I'll be working with a team of guys in the Ops department but the 
majority are Windows Admins. I'm not completely lost when it comes to 
using *nix, I use it as my Desktop and know Slackware and Ubuntu fairly 
well. I've installed FreeBSD a few times on servers, but that's about 
the extent of my server knoweledge and BSD.

    My duties in the beginning are not going to be that complex, I'll be 
building out boxes, racking them, health checks, running backups, 
generating keys, etc.. However, soon after my promotion date (11th of 
September I start) I'll be given more and more boxes to manage. Most of 
our infastructure is built on BSD, so I'm going to have upwards of 40 
appliances to manage and maintain.

    My questions really come down to this; I'll be working with 4.x and 
6.1 boxes. Are there any global issues with them I should be concerned 
about, something you guys as admins have to deal with regularly. The 
boss also said something that confused me, said I'd need to make the 
builds and compile php, perl, and mysql into the Kernel. I've never done 
much Kernel work (much, lets start with any) but it's always been my 
understanding that with BSD if I wanted to install PHP, PERL, and MySQL 
on a box, I'd just pkg_add it. I've never heard of it actually being 
compiled in the kernel.

    Right now my biggest resources have to be google and the O'Reilly 
book "Essential Sys. Admin." but I'd like to have a reference guide more 
suited to only the FreeBSD platform. Any recommendations on this as well?

    Thanks for your time,
    -Keith