It’s always the last little things that bite you in the ass.
After (s-l-o-w-l-y) getting a couple of freebsd 4.8 cdroms, the business of restoring downbelow became mostly easier. It took 45 minutes from the loading of the first CD to the point where the machine was downbelow again, with only three exceptions.
Those exceptions were
dhcpd, which has a tremendous case of "we're free software, we don't NEED to be user friendly!", failed to start because the goddamn piece of open source crapware will not start if it can't find a leases file in /var/db. The sensible thing to do would be to just create the goddamn file and, perhaps, spit up a warning message saying that it had to create this file. So dhcpd doesn't do that; no, what it does is put a long series of messages in the syslog which say, in effect "we're ISC, we're smarter than you, and no you can't get support from us unless you pay us the big bucks" with a little postscript saying "heyy, I can't find dhcpd.leases, so I'm going to die! Try touching the file and restarting me!"
Wankers.
dhcpd, again, combined with its fellow adventurer in user-unfriendliness named. All the zonefiles were in /var, so they were gone, leaving me to spend Two Fucking Hours tweaking the config files and restarting dhcpd (which, because it was written by the beforementioned "smarter than you" ISC, doesn't let you HUP it to make it reread config files. No, you have to kill the bastard and restart it, because that's User Friendliness™ ISC-style. [And don't get me started on the mighty rube goldberg machine known as omshell, which is the dhclient answer to kill -HUP])
Last, but definitely not least, are our good friends yellow pages, which have spent the last couple of decades single-handedly redefining "user-unfriendly" for people stuck on Un*x machines. Yellow pages are, for lack of a better word, fried crap on a crap-bread sandwich, garnished with crap. And it doesn't help that in FreeBSDland they've got their own bizarre version of shadow passwords (one of the two essential steps for systems insecurity; combine shadow passwords with "strong passwords" and you've got a recipe for people keeping all of their passwords stored on little easy-to-steal slips of paper.
This one, after a hour or so of poking at the damned yellow pages files, still doesn't work, so I'm going to punt on the whole thing and set the sole surviving yellow pages client up to pick usernames out of my Windows domain. (Because, unlike yellow pages, the stupid undocumented secret proprietary windows domain crap appears to work without having to fight with it EVERY SINGLE TIME the YP master craps itself.
To be fair, this isn't all yellow pages fault. A large part of it is the too-clever-by-half way that FreeBSD sets up user+password databases. Throwing shadow passwords into the mix (and chasing down the name of the password file) is always one of the fun ways of rediscovering how fucked up FreeBSD is in the systems administration department. Christ, it makes Linux look functional (and Linux has 1/10th the manpages, and most of _those_ are out of date or just plain wrong) -- Linux, for all of its failings, at least lets me kill off sendmail by putting the boot to a single configuration file.