Post-installation configuration

Adding users

A freshly installed FreeBSD system has a number of users, nearly all for system components. The only login user is root, and you shouldn't log in as root. Instead you should add at least one account for yourself. If you're transferring a master.passwd file from another system, you don't need to do anything now. Otherwise select this item and then the menu item User, and fill out the resulting menu like this:

Рис. 6.2. Adding a user

You should not need to enter the fields UID and Home directory: sysinstall does this for you. It's important to ensure that you are in group wheel so that you can use the su command to become root, and you need to be in group operator to use the shutdown command.

Don't bother to add more users at this stage; you can do it later. We’ll look at user management in "Тaking control" , on page 112.

Setting the root password

Next, select Root Password. We’ll talk about passwords more on page 144. Select this item to set the password in the normal manner.

Time zone

Next, select the entry time zone. The first entry asks you if the machine CMOS clock (i.e. the hardware clock) is set to UTC (sometimes incorrectly called GMT, which is a British time zone). If you plan to run only FreeBSD or other UNIX-like operating systems on this machine, you should set the clock to UTC. If you intend to run other software that doesn't understand time zones, such as many Microsoft systems, you have to set the time to local time, which can cause problems with daylight savings time.

Рис. 6.3. Time zone select menu: USA

The next menu asks you to select a "region," which roughly corresponds with a continent. Assuming you are living in Austin, TX in the United States of America, you would select America -- North and South and then (after scrolling down) United States of America. The next menu then looks like this: Select Central Time and select Yes when the system asks you whether the abbreviation CST sounds reasonable.

This particular step is relatively cumbersome. You may find it easier to look in the directory /usr/share/zoneinfo after installation. There you find:

# cd /usr/share/zoneinfo/
# ls
Africa       Australia   Etc       MET       WET
America      CET         Europe    MST       posixrules
Antarctica   CST6CDT     Factory   MST7MDT   zone tab
Arctic       EET         GMT       PST8EDT
Asia         EST         HST       Pacific 
Atlantic     EST5EDT     Indian    SystemV

If you want to set the time zone to, say, Singapore, you could enter:

# cd Asia/
# ls
Aden       Chungking  Jerusalem     Novosibirsk  Tehran
Almaty     Colombo    Kabul         Omsk         Thimbu
Amman      Dacca      Kamchatka     Phnom_Penh   Tokyo
Anadyr     Damascus   Karachi       Pyongyang    Ujung_Pandang
Aqtau      Dili       Kashgar       Qatar        Ulaanbaatar
Aqtobe     Dubai      Katmandu      Rangoon      Ulan -Bator
Ashkhabad  Dushanbe   Krasnoyarsk   Riyadh       Urumqi
Baghdad    Gaza       Kuala_Lumpur  Saigon       Vientiane
Bahrain    Harbin     Kuching       Samarkand    Vladivostok
Baku       Hong_Kong  Kuwait        Seoul        Yakutsk
Bangkok    Hovd       Macao         Shanghai     Yekaterinburg
Beirut     Irkutsk    Magadan       Singapore    Yerevan
Bishkek    Istanbul   Manila        Taipei
Brunei     Jakarta    Muscat        Tashkent
Calcutta   Jayapura   Nicosia       Tbilisi
# cp Singapore /etc/localtime

Note that the files in /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia (and the other directories) represent specific towns, and these may not correspond with the town in which you are located. Choose one in the same country and time zone.

You can do this at any time on a running system.