What can a Stata user do with a Samba server? Pretty much the same thing you would do with any computer. My Stata is installed on my Windows PC. Now Samba allows me to store either do-files or data on the remote FreeBSD server and access them easily. Suppose that the remote box were called [...]

It was about time, too. I'm an economist by trade and that harms my programming habits. But the more I program, the more I'm aware of that, so I guess all hope is not lost. I've been meaning to adopt some sort of version control for a long time now. I had already installed Subversion [...]

R took a long time to compile yesterday because it depends on all kinds of things that I didn't have installed already. One of them is the Tcl/Tk language, which apparently comes from two separate FreeBSD ports -- one named tcl85 and the other tk85. The latter made trouble. It aborted the installation and it [...]

My installation of R 2.8.1-1 is in progress as I write this. The original instructions for installing R on FreeBSD are at the R Wiki, but before you dash there, you may want to know that I had to make some changes. They are listed below: First, the good news: on my FreeBSD 7.0 installed [...]

I finally got around to configuring the Samba server on the FreeBSD machine. The instructions are here and they couldn't be clearer. One thing didn't work the way the book described it, not big enough to be worth investigating. That's the syntax of Samba commands. Rather than # smbpasswd -a username I had to do # [...]

Today I had to re-generate my key files for OpenSSH authentication. Between August and now I had forgotten how exactly that is done. So for next time this happens, here are detailed step-by-step instructions: 1) plug FAT32-formatted USB stick into PC-BSD laptop; it will be automatically mounted as /media/fattie 2) from terminal window, do this: [...]

Since I run FreeBSD, once in a while I also run portaudit. Parenthesis: if I let some time go by between such exercises, portaudit will complain that the database is too old, but that's easy to fix with portaudit -F. Usually the console message is "0 problems found with your installed packages", but sometimes problems [...]

My home server runs FreeBSD 7.0. I administer it from my Windows XP laptop, in the air-conditioned comfort of my home office, over wi-fi. The server runs OpenSSH. The laptop runs PuTTY. I wanted the added security of using SSH key files instead of password authentication. Google and the helpful bunch at the PC-BSD Forum [...]