onCourse Server on FreeBSD

You need to download both the server and client for onCourse to work

FreeBSD is a highly reliable server platform which has its root in the original Unix platform built by At&T. It is solid, fast and reliable. And free.

Installing onCourse Server to a FreeBSD machine

Download the FreeBSD server package (onCourseServer.tgz) onto your FreeBSD box.

Run as root:

pkg_add onCourseServer.tgz
echo 'onCourseServer_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf

It’s as simple as that. Our package places onCourse Server into the FreeBSD default location and creates a startup script to run when the machine reboots.

If you choose to uninstall it:

Type as root in a shell:

pkg_delete onCourseServer

press tab, which should be autocomplete to something like:

pkg_delete onCourseServer-0.7.p1

press enter to safely remove all components of onCourse Server except for your very valuable data.

Starting the Server

onCourse Server is not started immediately after the install, you will need to execute

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/onCourseServer start

as root.

And of course stopping the server is just:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/onCourseServer stop

Upgrading onCourse Server

In order to upgrade to a newer version of onCourse Server:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/onCourseServer stop
pkg_delete onCourseServer-<package version>
pkg_add onCourseServer.tgz
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/onCourseServer start

Note:
You can figure out what packagename and version of oncourse is installed by running
pkg_info -v | grep -i onCourse

Other notes

You will need Java installed. Consult the FreeBSD docs on how to best do that.

You can set the amount of memory that Java will allocate to onCourse Server by adding to /etc/rc.conf:

onCourseServer_mem="256M" replacing 256 with however much memory you wish.

Timezone

Make sure you have the latest timezones installed via the ports system something akin to:
portinstall zoneinfo

You will also need to add an argument to the startup parameters of onCourseServer in rc.conf along
the lines of onCourseServer_flags="-Duser.timezone=Australia/Sydney" replacing Australia/Sydney with the timezone that you wish the server to be in.