This is not a full on tutorial on installing FreeBSD release-10, it's just notes I made as I went through it.

The problem was that I had provided the wrong IP address for "default router". This IP address was in use by a FreeBSD firewall box to my internal network. Once the new OS was installed, I was able to do a 'traceroute' to ftp.freebsd.org, but doing things like a package install or a ports install would fail. Paying careful attention to the output I found buried in the listing "no route to host". Most any install I tried would barf with a missing "pkg-1.2.4". When I googled this I found someone else who had this problem, but there was no reply indicating if/how they fixed it.

• On a windows box - http://www.freebsd.org/, download FreeBSD-10.0-RELEASE-memstick.img.


• http://www.sourceforge.net/, search for win32diskimager and download. Install and run against .img file.


• Reboot server, plug in memory key while shut down. Hit F2 (on Dell computers) to go into BIOS settings, set "boot usb" as first. (Note that in my Dell 2950 this option is only present if there is a memory stick in already in a USB slot.) Let it go on to boot.

• Gosub Dell Perc

  hit ctrl-R at boot
  Maybe I'll get back to this later...

• Warning! This is the new 'bsdinstall'. You must use arrow keys to move between fields -- 'tab' key takes you out to next menu (see below). The old 'sysinstall' used 'tab' key to move around - if you do that, you'll exit this menu unfinished.
• Disk config - Use "guided/auto".
  In disk screen you'll have a config shown. In my case, I have 8GB RAM, at boot time there was a message flew by that said "ignoring 4GB above 4GB" (we'll fix this later, see below). My rule-of-thumb is that your swap partition should be the same size as your memory.
  Arrow to the freebsd-ufs partition (in my case mfid0p2), note the size, and hit D to delete it.
  Arrow up to the main entry (in my case mfid0), and hit C to create new. Use tab and arrows to recreate it, with the appropriate smaller size (in my case 4gb less).
  Arrow down to swap partition (mfid0p3), delete, arrow to mifd0, create, and it should automatically use the rest of the disk, giving you the desired (in my case 8gb).
• You do want to install all src (needed to build custom kernel, more later) and ports (useful tools).


• If given opportunity to add users, add yourself. Be sure to use same userid as you've used on other systems, this will make your life easier in the future.


• Give it network info - full hostname including domain. For the "search" field, use the domain name.


• When asked if you want to do any last minute manual changes, say yes.

• vi hints
  Use arrow keys to move around, 'x' deletes a char, 'i' starts insert, 'esc' to leave insert, 'o' to open a new line below cursor, 'a' to append (insert) chars after cursor, 'r' replaces one char, 'R' replace until 'esc'.
  Lastly, ':wq' to save and quit. ':!q' to quit and not save. Other than this, you're on your own.
• I know it's a pain to do anything in 'vi', but this is really important to do this THE FIRST TIME you boot; set sytem time on startup.
  Edit /etc/rc.conf and add lines:
  ntpdate_enable="YES"
ntpdate_flags="-b time.nist.gov"

  And while you're at it, this will get you away from having to stand at the system console which may be in rack in a noisy server area as quickly as possible...
  Edit /etc/group
  and add your username to group zero line; add a comma, then the username.

• Reboot. Watch boot screen for network up, or just wait for a min or two.
  Test network by trying to ssh in from another machine.
  If this doesn't work, you probably have bad network settings - perhaps because you used tabs instead of arrows like I did the first time. Fix by:
  vi /etc/rc.conf
  and correct ip config. Also check /etc/resolv.conf. Reboot.


• Test network, via ssh. Be sure to use the new user/pass you added above as freebsd's sshd will not allow a direct login for 'root'.


• Once in, try su.
  If you cannot do 'su', back to console and use 'vi' to edit /etc/group (see above). (This takes effect immediately, no need to reboot.)


• 'xterm': Command not found - dang it. Must install XOrg.


• But first, must install the package manager.
  pkg
  is not installed, do you wanna? yes


• Now XOrg:
  pkg install xorg
  ready? yes.
  rehash
  Note! you may have to reboot after xorg install to make xterm actually work. Not sure why, not gonna spend the time to figure it out as I got things working on my system now.

pkg install xterm
ready? yes.
rehash
• While we're at it, let's install 'xload' which also dosn't come by default with XOrg:
  pkg install xload
  ready? yes.
  rehash


• Ugh, 'vi' is so pathetic, Gawd I hate 'vi'. (Yes, I know, it was pretty good when they wrote it back in the 1970's!)
  We'll install emacs. (Do not install emacs23 - keyboard doesn't work - I tried it.) [20200316 - old news, now just do emacs, you'll get emacs26.
  pkg install emacs22
  ready? yes.
  rehash


• And finally...
  Leave 'su' shell as 'xterm' will refuse to start in an 'su' shell)
  exit
  Get new xorg stuff into path
  rehash
  Tell x-windows where to send output - be sure that "Tunnel X11 connections" is enabled in your 'ssh' app)
  setenv DISPLAY localhost:10.0
  Start xterm as background program. You can add '-bg' (background color), '-fg' (foreground color), and '-name' to help make windows from multiple systems more obvious on your screen)
  xterm&
  In the new 'xterm' window, do your 'su'. In the future you will always 'ssh' in as yourself, start an 'xterm', then do 'su'.

• Misc tasks...
  
  
• Ensure that email destined for root on this box gets forwarded to your home account (assuming of course that this is as server, not your home mailbox):
  As root:
  echo youremailaddrhere>/root/.forward
  If you have other test accounts on this box, you may want to do this for them as well.


• Change username for root from that silly "Charlie" to your system name by editing /etc/passwd. [20200316] old news - use vipw.
  This way if you get email from multiple servers, each will have the systemname in the username - very useful for quick subject-line appraisal. Also check the root shell is 'csh', not 'sh'.
  


• Make console logs available remotely via logfile (FreeBSD Forums: Tip: Log console messages):
  edit /etc/syslog.conf
  uncomment line starting with "console.info" as directed in comments
  touch /var/log/console.log
chmod 640 /var/log/console.log


• Make it easy to move files in/out via a windows-based memory key (see freebsd handbook):
  cd /
mkdir /memkey
  edit /etc/fstab, add line (tabs between fields):
  /dev/da0s1 /memkey msdosfs rw,noauto,-m=644,-M=755 0 0
  Now to use it, insert key, wait a moment, then enter:
  mount /memkey
  when finished:
  umount /memkey
  Fyi: if you ever need to do this immediately from a command line and haven't gotten it into fstab yet:
  mount -t msdosfs -o -m=644,-M=755 /dev/da0s1 /memkey


• While you're there, add the magic for easy cd/dvd-rom access:
  mkdir /cdrom
  edit /etc/fstab
  add:
  /dev/cd0 /cdrom cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0


• You DO want to have your system time set automatically. If you didn't already, do it now - this is important:
  edit /etc/rc.conf and add lines
  ntpdate_enable="YES"
ntpdate_flags="-b time.nist.gov" [20200316] old news, omit this and let it default to the pool.


• Need ftpd:
  edit /etc/rc.conf
  add lines:
  ftpd_enable="YES"
ftpd_flags="-D -p /var/run/ftpd.pid"


• While you're in that file, enable a screen saver:
  allscreens_flags="MODE_277"
saver="snake"
blanktime="60"
scrnmap="no"
  [Note! In the old days this didn't work, something to do with changing over to PAE kernel (see below) Works now with this magic.]


• And while you're in there, enable 'named':
  named_enable="YES"
named_program="/usr/local/sbin/named"


• Now install 'named' (it's no longer there by default):
  pkg install bind99 [20200316 old news, now bind914]


• You'll need to merge named config in new dir (moved from /etc/named to /usr/local/etc/named/).
  New start command is:
  /usr/local/etc/rc.d/named start [20200306 old news, now service named start]
  I had to
  cd /usr/local/etc/namedb
chmod 770 slave working master
chgrp bind slave working master
  (Note: after the fact I bet you could just chown bind and it'd take care of the rest. If you try this, let me know if it works.
  Once BIND was running, I was getting errors like:
    Required root permissions to open '/var/run/named/pid'
  and same for session.key. Fixed this by:
  chown bind /var/run/named/*
chown bind /var/run/named
  FYI: To check for bind errors, do:
  tail -n 50 /var/log/messages
  I had to create links in the working directory to point to the data dirs:
  cd working
ln -s ../master
ln -s ../slave
ln -s ../dynamic
  


• You must get rid of the rndc.conf file - I renamed it in case some day I find I need to mess with it:
  mv rndc.conf rndc.conf.do-not-use [20200320] old news, didn't have to do this this time.
  


• You'll need to edit /etc/resolv.conf and add new first resolver (2nd line after 'search' directive):
  nameserver 127.0.0.1


• Set up to do auto-updates FreeBSD Update (Handbook 23.2). edit /etc/crontab, add the line:
  @daily root freebsd-update cron


• On my 8G RAM Dell server, at boot time I'm seeing a message about "ignoring memory above 4G". Google. Gotta make a custom kernel. Building and Installing a Custom Kernel (Handbook 9.5). Merde, this is the reason I'm upgrading from release-9.0, in the first place, I'd hoped this would be built-in by now...

  [Note! Am leaving the following failed attempts here so that search engines will find them, in that others may also have done this wrong, and find this page by searching for these error messages. Continue past the following attempts for the actual solution. Don't actually do anything 'til you see "start here".]

  cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf
  For filename I suggest using your system's hostname in all caps.
  cp SAMPLE filename
  edit file, somwhere down a ways add line (using tabs):
  options PAE
  Make a copy of file outside of source tree as this whole dir struct may be rewritten by external tools
  cp [filename] /root
make buildkernel KERNCONF=[filename]
  Blew up in "malo" with BUS_SPACE_MAXADDR. Commented out PAE, tried again, all went well. Will try to disable "malo" and see if I can get around it that way. Now we're blowing (same error) in "mwl" which is also commented as a Marvell product. We'll comment that out too and try again. nope -- back to breaking in malo again, weird.

  Trying again days later with all wireless and all sound removed. Didn't work, same error.

  Tried all sorts of stuff, including building as amd64 -- still blows chunks on malo. Commented out tons of stuff that I didn't think I needed, stuff blew up on malo.

  I thought I'd found the answer, but no... gmane.org: freebsd-current: PAE broken on -current. However, this did lead me to the real answer -- there is a PAE config file already there, you just need to know to look for it. It's at /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/PAE

  (I recommend making a symbolic link with your systemname to PAE to help make it clear that you're using the default PAE file, then building using your name.)
  cd /usr/src/sys/conf
ln -s PAE [systemname]
cd /usr/src
make buildkernel KERNCONF=[systemname]
make installkernel KERNCONF=[systemname]

• Reboot to new kernel.


• In dmesg (boot messages) am seeing some warning about needing to increase kern.maxswzone. Back to Google. Found that to fix this simply add line to /boot/loader.conf
kern.maxswzone=[multiple of 32]
  dmesg gave me a number, so I used that, it didn't fix it - same error. Oh well, seems benign, gonna ignore for now.


• Tried setting hw.physmem="8G" in /boot/loader.conf -- very, very bad idea. System hangs immediately after giving the "ignoring" message. Had to go into loader parms, unset hw.physmem then autoboot. System comes back up, remove that parm from loader file.

[20200626]
Related email thread response by Greg Lehey in freebsd-stable list


I strongly suggest you don't have more than one swap device on spinning rust - the VM system will stripe I/O across the available devices and that will give particularly poor results when it has to seek between the partitions.

Also, you can't actually use 64GB swap with 4GB RAM. If you look back through your boot messages, I expect you'll find messages like:
warning: total configured swap (524288 pages) exceeds maximum recommended amount (498848 pages).
warning: increase kern.maxswzone or reduce amount of swap.
or maybe:
WARNING: reducing swap size to maximum of xxxxMB per unit

The absolute limit on swap space is vm.swap_maxpages pages but the realistic limit is about half that. By default the realistic limit is about 4xRAM (on 64-bit architectures), but this can be adjusted via kern.maxswzone (which defines the #bytes of RAM to allocate to swzone structures - the actual space allocated is vm.swzone).

As a further piece of arcana, vm.pageout_oom_seq is a count that controls the number of passes before the pageout daemon gives up and starts killing processes when it can't free up enough RAM. "out of swap space" messages generally mean that this number is too low, rather than there being a shortage of swap - particularly if your swap device is rather slow.

---

Start here!
20141222 - back to this again.
• Did some more googling - turns out 'amd64' is a gross misnomer due to historical reasons. For any modern 64 bit cpu, regardless of mfr (Intel vs. AMD), you should be using the amd64 kernel. As described in FreeBSD handbook:
  mkdir /root/kernels
cd /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf
cp GENERIC /root/kernels/MYKERNEL.amd64
ln -s /root/kernels/MYKERNEL MYKERNEL
cd /root/kernels
  Edit MYKERNEL.pae, change ident to your kernel name, and make any other changes if you wish. For example this server has no floppy drive, so I added nodevice fdc. (You can look at /var/log/messages to find errors that occured at boot time and take out any unneeded drivers.)
  cd /usr/src
make buildkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNEL TARGET=amd64
  This starts erroring out at 'malo'. Edit file, comment out 'malo'. Now breaks somewhere else, that doesn't seems to be some external module I can simply omit. Merde. If this works for you, great, this is the way you're supposed to do it. Oh well, scrap it.


• Decided to try PAE again.
  cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf
cp PAE /root/kernels/MYKERNEL.pae
ln -s /root/kernels/MYKERNEL MYKERNEL
cd /root/kernels
  As above, edited 'ident' parm to my system name and fixed 'fdc'.
  ln -s MYKERNEL MYKERNEL.pae
cd /usr/src
make buildkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNEL TARGET=i386
make installkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNEL TARGET=i386
  Reboot, login.
  dmesg | grep memory
  Yay!


• On to my specific stuff: new machine move.