FreeBSD Platform Notes

FreeBSD has a number of differences from our supported Linux distributions that result in somewhat different behavior and default configuration for Virtualmin. It also imposes a few limitations that are not present on Linux platforms. All Virtualmin users running FreeBSD should be aware of these issues, but they are particularly important if you are migrating from a Linux-based platform to FreeBSD, as the changes may remove expected functionality and they will also alter permissions requirements within users home directories.

The username length on FreeBSD is quite short (16 characters), and thus the default username convention of appending the first part of the domain name to the end of each username in Virtualmin isn't generally possible. Abbreviations must be used, instead. For example, instead of johnsmith.virtualmin, the username would be shortened johnsmith.virtual.

FreeBSD has a limit on the number of secondary groups that a user can participate in. Because of this, Virtualmin cannot add the Apache user to each new virtual server group, and thus all home directories need to have the executable bit set, so that Apache can traverse them to get to the public_html directory (or other document root).

Home directories on FreeBSD systems are set to 751, rather than 750 as on Linux platforms.

Extreme caution should be exercised by users and administrators to insure data within user homes is not exposed to other users of the system. It's a good practice on all platforms to completely avoid world readable and writable files (e.g. never use chmod 777 as an approach for dealing with permissions issues), but on FreeBSD it is absolutely vital.

It is difficult to accurately detect the default network interface on FreeBSD systems (at least, difficult in the limited context of our installation script, which is relatively stupid about the systems that it runs on), and thus you should check to be sure Virtualmin is using the right network interface, if you have more than one on your system.

Check this in the Module Configuration in the Server Settings section, in the field labeled Network interface for virtual addresses.

In keeping with our policy of using system-native packages whenever possible, we install most of the packages we depend on, like Apache, Postfix, ProFTPd, MySQL, PHP, etc. using either pkg_add or ports. Because pkg_add and ports are a fundamentally different package management model from the Linux distributions we support, our package updates module is unable to check for system updates, and thus only provides information about available Virtualmin-provided software updates (this includes Webmin, Usermin, and all of the Virtualmin modules).

You should regularly use freebsd-update and portupgrade to keep your system up to date with the latest software in order to insure security and reliability. Because of the way these systems work, they do not provide an easy means for detecting out of date software and installing it via an automated GUI tool (but we're still working on it, anyway).

ProFTPd is currently known to be broken when installed using pkg_add or the ports tree. We've been told that upgrading the package after installation using portupgrade may correct this issue. The issue is caused by a version mismatch with the OpenSSL library.