Questions relating to configuration

[esh]

I seem to have an intermittent problem with "starting sshd." and the system hanging for a good 90 seconds on boot. I believe I have tracked this down to my IP Address occasionally being blanked and I have to re-enter it using /stand/sysinstall. I am not sure why this is occurring, but since this problem has survived multiple reformats I'd appreciate any ideas.

Also, while I'm at it.. I appear to have broken my BSD installation again while trying to set up another user (this will be the 4th reinstall in a week;)), KDE now complains none of the configuration files are writable on bootup and it prompts me with some wizard instead. Don't worry if you're not sure, it doesn't take too long to reformat and install BSD again.

A couple more questions, since I've never actually owned a Unix system before (I need BSD for one specific program and PCBSD seemed a reasonable bet) it would be handy to know what the equivalent of "dir" is, and also what "mkfifo" is, as this is the program that is complaining when I am installing my software.

Thank you for any assistance!

[scottro]

Heh, I had to ask a WIndows using friend the opposite.

The dir command is ls

As for mkfifo it's a command I hadn't run into until your post. I took a quick look at the man page

man mkfifo

It makes fifo's. However, the man page doesn't explain what a fifo is, though in Cisco routers it means first in first out.

I've never run into that error though, so I'm not really sure.

[esh]

I believe it's something to do with mapping devices.

I'm reinstalling PCBSD now, so I'll give my software another try if I can avoid breaking the whole thing within an hour as I did last time :(

If I find the exact error I'll post it here. Thanks for the directory listing command.

Edit: the new install is, unfortunately, repeatedly resetting my network IP configuration so I haven't been able to download the software yet.