You have the choice between two different ways of partitioning: The so-called "dangerous dedicated" mode and the "normal" mode.

The "dangerous dedicated" mode has its name because you dedicate a whole hard disk to FreeBSD. This makes partitioning very easy, because its done in the "Unix way" and you don't have to fight against the obnoxious way of the DOS-partitioning (primary, extended partions and logical drives). Its only "dangerous" because some DOS or Windows tools might not recognize that such a hard disk contains data. If you use your PC only with FreeBSD the "dangerous dedicated" mode is the way to go.

The normal mode will be used, if you don't have a complete hard disk to spare for FreeBSD. Than you have to put your FreeBSD partitions into a primary DOS partition. Now you have the strange situation that you have partitions (of FreeBSD) in a DOS-partition. To avoid confusion they were given different names slices and partitions. Which always confuses me because I can't remember which is which.

You should create the following filesystems:

If you do not create these additional filesystems they will reside in the root filesystem. This will lead to additional risks:

- Normally the root file system is will not change much. You could describe it as read-only filesystem.
- You might fill it up accidentally. Which could give you some headaches. (Try for example to use vi when / and /var are full.)

If you have a dialup-connection to the internet the eMail sent to you is remote on a computer of your provider. To retrieve this remote mail you need a program which fetches the email from your provider's computer. There are various programs for collecting eMail using POP or IMAP and forwarding via port 25 to the local SMTP listener (here sendmail), enabling all the normal forwarding/filtering/aliasing mechanisms that would apply to local mail or mail arriving via a full-time TCP/IP connection.

I recommend fetchmail by E. Raymond for that purpose.

• Since fetchmail is updated regularly install it by using a port.
• Generate a .fetchmailrc file in your home directory containing
  poll provider.com with proto POP3
     user "sam_miller" there with password "your_password" is sam here options fetchall
• Now you can test your installation (if you are connected via ppp) by calling:
  fetchmail -v
  (-v for verbose)
• If it works put a line like:
  !bg su sam -c fetchmail
  after the label for your provider in /etc/ppp/ppp.conf. This will trigger fetchmail after having been connected to your provider.

Suppose you have the username "sam" on your system. Suppose further you got the email address "sam_miller@provider.com" from your internet provider.

Now you want to masqerade your local name so that somebody receiving email by you will see your email address at your provider.

• Create a file named mailadr.txt
• Put in the file the following lines:
  sam:mailname sam_miller@provider.com
  sam_miller@provider.com:maildrop sam
• Execute the following command:
  makemap btree /etc/mailadr.db < mailadr.txt
• Search for the following line in sendmail.cf:
  # list of locations of user database file (null means no lookup)
• Change the next line to:
  O UserDatabaseSpec=/etc/mailadr.db
• Send a kill -1 to the sendmail daemon.