Babak Farrokhi is an experienced UNIX system administrator and Network Engineer who worked for 12 years in the IT industry in carrier-level network service providers. He discovered FreeBSD around 1997 and since then he has been using it on a daily basis. He is also an experienced Solaris administrator and has extensive experience in TCP/IP networks.

In his spare time, he contributes to the open source community and develops his skills to keep himself in the cutting edge.

You may contact Babak at babak@farrokhi.net and his personal website at http://farrokhi.net/

This book is supposed to help Network Administrators to understand how FreeBSD can help them simplify the task of network administration and troubleshooting as well as running various services on top of FreeBSD 7 Operation System. FreeBSD is a proven Operating System for networked environments and FreeBSD 7 offers superior performance to run network services, as well as great flexibility to integrate into any network running IPv4, IPv6 or any other popular network protocol.

This book is divided into three segments—system configuration, network configuration, and network services.

The first segment of the book covers system configuration topics and talks about different aspects of system configuration and management, including disks management, patching and keeping the system up to date, managing software packages, system management and monitoring, jails and virtualization, and general improvements to system performance.

Second segment of the book actually enters the networking world by introducing basic network configuration in FreeBSD, network interface configuration for different layer 3 protocols, Tunnelling protocols, PPP over serial and Ethernet and IPv6. This segment also looks into bridging and routing in FreeBSD using various third party softwares. At the end, there is an introduction to various firewall packages in FreeBSD and details on how to configure them.

Third segment of the book deals with different daemons and network services that can be run on top of FreeBSD, including Local network services such as DHCP, TFTP, NFS, SMB as well as Internet services such as DNS, Web, Mail, FTP and NTP.