The POP3 server which comes together with QMail had some severe problems: it stopped working after 1 or 2 days. Before that, it worked like a charm, but at some point it just decided to stop accepting incoming calls. The server process didn't die, it was still active and listening on port 110 (according to sockstat -l).

After setting up a QMail SMTP server, it seems some spammers found a way to relay through our host. Of course, I installed the rcpthosts file with a list of allowed domains, but somehow they got through.

Setting up a POP server with the QMail/VPopmail combination wasn't too much hassle until the point I tried to authenticate.

Telnetting into the POP server and giving authenticating myself resulted in the following error:

Maybe it was not so smart to do after all to remove all files in the QMail queue while QMail was running.

When trying to start the QMail POP server with the svc command (daemontools), the following error appeared.

The problem got solved by restarting the daemon:

To me, NFS is like black magic. Getting it to work consists of trial and error and feel lucky afterwards.

The big plan was to use a /usr/ports directory from another machine on the same network. Shouldn't be too hard, right?

When trying to install FreeBSD 6.2 on a 2 GB compact flash card, the following error appeared:

In order to decrease our backup size we decided to skip some files and directories which were not critical. With chflags(1) you can skip entire directories:

Situation: a FreeBSD webserver needs a backup system. dump and restore are your friends then. Restoring all that data is not that trivial, if you don't know how dump operates. But the manpages of these commands should help a lot already.