According to their homepage headline, PostgreSQL is world's most advanced open source relational database. More and more services here at Mimar rely on it, of which perhaps most popular would be GitLab, Synapse and Mattermost. While basic administrative tasks in PostgreSQL can be performed by means of interactive terminal, psql, most admins will find pgAdmin a better tool for the job. This article gives exact steps how to configure pgAdmin4 as web application hosted in Apache HTTP Server name-based VirtualHost on FreeBSD.
FreeBSD offers two basic technologies for installing third-party applications. The easiest way is installing precompiled packages from official FreeBSD's package repositories. Somewhat more complicated, but more flexible way is compiling and installing applications using ports. Main shortcoming of official precompiled packages is the fact that they are being built with default set of options, whereas advanced setups often need to enable non-default option (e.g. LDAP authentication), change target database support (e.g. PostgreSQL instead of MySQL), or to disable undesirable default option (e.g. X11 support on headless servers). Luckily, there's additional way which combines flexibility of ports with simplicity of packages provided by Poudriere. The following article will help you set your own FreeBSD package repository where you will be able to compile your own packages from ports, and serve them to your other FreeBSD boxes. In a jail, of course!
In previous post we have prepared our jail host to be jail-friendly. In this one we will set up our first jail.
Contrary to advertising pitches of many, hosting one's own Internet services has many advantages over using publicly available ones. Besides having the ability to preserve control over important aspects of our digital lives, it also make for great learning platform. In the following series, "Host Your Own Services With FreeBSD Jails", I will provide detailed information about setting various Internet services, such as DNS, email, web, LDAP, database and other services using FreeBSD jails.
Regarding FreeBSD and RAID, first thing that comes to mind is surely ZFS and RAIDZ. But in some cases, good old gmirror of UFS partitions can be useful as well, for example when we want to place OS on a pair of smaller SSDs for speed, while having another set of slower SATA HDDs for ZFS storage. This article shows exact steps how to install FreeBSD in UEFI mode onto (mostly) UFS partitions residing on gmirror RAID1.