Geek Style

I suddenly came across this old post from 2004 in which I explained my early experiments in OS X. Now after being a hardcore OS X user for more than a year, I found how much the world has changed since. The Firefox is a really usable browser now and IM clients are up to date. I still hate iChat for no good reason. Maybe because I hate IM on the whole.
And guess what. My favorite OS X app is Terminal.
In fact OS X offers an intuitive interface that is very usable and hassle-free. I would call it a real productivity booster. Beside the interface, the OS itself is based on a mature BSD skeleton, and as a Unix fanatic and really enjoy poking around OS X.

I seriously urge you to switch to Mac if you care about your productivity and performance.

Keeping accurate time on a host (either a server or a workstation) is important because:

1- You need to know accurately when you should go for lunch or back home
2- You need accurate time in your event log files for further analysis
3- Many programs need to have the correct date and time to function (e.g. MTA)
4- You need correct timestamps on your files

Given above facts, you will need to enable NTP on your hosts and keep your system clock in sync with public time servers.

First you should make sure that your timezone setting is correct. The latest timezone information can be updated by installing “zoneinfo” port from /usr/ports/misc/zoneinfo:


# cd /usr/ports/misc/zoneinfo/
# make install clean


and run tzsetup(8) to make sure you have selected the correct timezone.

Now, to enable automatic time sync during system startup, you need to add a few lines to your /etc/rc.conf file:

ntpdate_enable="YES"
ntpdate_flags="-b pool.ntp.org"


This will make your system to sync the clock upon startup. I use NTP pool at “pool.ntp.org” that suggests a NTP server from a large pool of available time servers. However you may use your favorite/local NTP server.

You can also synchronize your time manually by invoking ntpdate(8) from command line, passing an NTP server address to it:

# ntpdate time.nist.gov


I managed to migrate my blog to WordPress after more than 5 years. I had a bad feeling about the old MT and perhaps that was the reason I was not posting too often.

I redirected the old feed URLs to the new one, but I suggest you update your links and let me know if you are having difficulties accessing content on this website.

So after a while, I finally managed to launch a website for my book, “Network Administration with FreeBSD 7“. The new website is actually a blog and I would cross-post the topics related to the book on both websites.

I would really appreciate your feedbacks on the current book and suggestions for future editions.