Explain the importance of installing and running portsnap after installing a current version of FreeBSD. Portsnap is a system for securely distributing the FreeBSD ports tree. Approximately once an hour, a “snapshot” of the ports tree is generated, repackaged, and cryptographically signed. The resulting files are then distributed via HTTP. The first time portsnap…

Recently, I wanted to confirm that I was running the 64 bit version of the MySQL server as opposed to the 32 bit version… one of my admins had made a symlink from the mysql/bin directory to the 64 bit binary directory. On the command line, you could no longer tell if the mysqld…