IPFW On IPFW / kernel

Caesar.Knight

Caesar.Knight

Years ago when customizing your kernel was a right of passage: - the bare metal servers I had would include three or four options to compile. I realize it wasn’t necessary but already configuring so..

After moving to “cloud” providers and hitting some issues when my provider was using jails and then being able to in a virtualized environment- haven’t really had any need to use anything other than GENERIC.

I’m now moving back to bare metal - I have seen different things being included then removed and added (something around 11)

Can anyone tell me if there are any considerations to be aware of, especially with ipv6?

These servers site in two different data centers both behind hardware and not functioning as gateways.

thanks!
 
Well I’ll be making changes to the kernels anyway (not updating) - so may as well if there’s any considerations with ipfw : ipv6

Plus - generic is just so… generic :-)
 
SirDice said:
There's rarely a reason to do so nowadays.
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Maybe for “standard users” … Personally I have lots of things in my own kernel configuration. For example device nda (you can’t load this as a module), options KDB_UNATTENDED (no way to set this via loader.conf), options DEVICE_POLLING (ditto), and a bunch of other things. And while I’m at it, I also use nooptions and nodevice to disable a lot of things from GENERIC that I don’t need and that would be a waste of resources. I never use freebsd-update(8), so this is not an issue (I always use source-level updates, a.k.a. “make world”).
 
However, I agree that there are less reasons to have your own kernel today, compared to “older times”. For example, options HZ and options MSGBUF_SIZE used to be kernel config(8) options only, but at some point they were moved to kernel tunables, so you can now change them via /boot/loader.conf.
 
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As everyone's said, it's no longer really necessary. It's fun and educational to look at, but for the last several versions, I've found nothing that needs changed. Between /boot/loader.conf (which I make very few changes to), and /etc/sysctl.conf (which I make a handful of changes to), I can get everything done.

I go back to the days when a custom kernel was the only way to get 'ipfw'! In fact, I remember a version where I had to manually specify the devices, as they weren't auto-detected. (So, I also built a custom kernel to remove the devices I didn't have.) It took several versions to break me of the habit of looking through the kernel config before I had to admit that I didn't need to do it, anymore.

Fun aside; I've finally got out of the habit of doing 'make' in /usr/ports/*/*, and just use 'pkg', now. After a while, I didn't need those customization options anymore, either.

It's not laziness (okay, it's partially laziness) but things seem so standardized for all purposes, now.
 
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