What a wonderful conversation, discussing BSDs, communities and the joy of using cough legacy software, with @stefano, @gyptazy and a few more people whose handles I don't know yet.
The 20th BSDCan will include tutorials on PF, running your own email, TLS, BGP, and NSH, as well as two days of talks on everything from systems administration, networking, and programming.
I've been buying these little boxes from AliExpress for years to use as firewalls and routers. My oldest one is almost 9 years old now! OpenBSD installs just fine. Just a BIOS tweak to always boot up after power is restored.
It is nice to be able to move a VM from #FreeBSD to :omnios: #Omnios in a snap using the network just because they both ship with #ZFS and #bhyve. It nearly feels like vMotion.
It's been an incredibly intense week, and it's only Wednesday. This morning, I had to drive 200 km through icy fog and heavy traffic. However, this afternoon was dedicated to setting up a FreeBSD server.
The client wanted to retain some of the features from their old Linux system. I came up with the idea of directly passing the two physical disks to bhyve and booting them. The boot was immediate, and there were no issues. The new FreeBSD server was up and running, and the 'old' Linux was now operating as a VM, working perfectly on the physical disks.
The client was pleased with the outcome and asked me to set up a native FreeBSD desktop, encrypted because they will store important data. I hadn't installed a FreeBSD desktop recently, but it turned out to be easier than expected (no wifi involved).
I installed xorg, the Nvidia drivers, nvidia-xconfig (which generated the configuration file perfectly), kde5, sddm, Firefox, LibreOffice, the Nextcloud client, and made a few small adjustments to get the keyboard audio buttons working. Even suspend/resume functionality worked flawlessly, which amazed the client.
I then created a jail on the server and set up zfs-autobackup to back up the client's PC on the server (of course, on an encrypted dataset). Time to go home, satisfied with the outcome.
Apple Mac mini (M1, 2020)
Apple MacBook Air (13-inch, M2, 2022)
Apple MacBook Air (M1, 2020)
Apple MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020)
Apple MacBook Pro (13-inch, M2, 2022)
Apple MacBook Pro (14-inch, M1 Pro/Max, 2021)
Apple MacBook Pro (14-inch, M2 Pro/Max, 2023)
Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, M1 Pro/Max, 2021)
Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, M2 Pro/Max, 2023)
Apple MacBoot Air (15-inch, M2, 2023)
Apple Studio (M1 Max/Ultra, 2022)
Apple iMac (24-inch, M1, 2021)
Banana Pi BPI-M5
NanoPi A64
NanoPi R5S
Orange Pi PC2
Orange Pi Zero Plus
Pine64 H64
Pine64 Pine 64/64+
Pine64 Pinebook
Pine64 ROCK64
Pine64 ROCKPro64
Pinebook Pro
Qualcomm Snapdragon 7cx
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3
Raspberry Pi 3
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
Raspberry Pi 4
Raspberry Pi 400
Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4
In the coming days, we'll be adding more hacking tools for arm64. Stay tuned for updates!
What should I be doing? Going to sleep, or carrying on with any one of the 5 other projects I've already started.
What am I doing? Installing #openBSD on a #LattePanda Alpha my wife found in the attic.
All seems to work, even the, once I stopped being stupid, network via the USB-C dock it's connected to. Means that with one USB-C cable everything works: power, mouse, keyboard, network and 4k screen.
It truly is amazing how much you can do for the #BSD community in a #MSFT, #GOOGL, #AMZN, #IBM ( and friends ) sponsored #FOSS event of the year, with no:
The smallest things are always the ones that cause the biggest impact.
Let this be my public shout out and acknowledgement of the great work that the people behind #RUNBSD do to spread the word on #BSD
You have my uttermost respect and heartfelt gratefulness
It is your (and truly "yours only") altruistic and continued support that has enabled me to introduce dozens of people into the #BSD world. And I couldn't be more grateful for that!
Being part of the fediverse is great, but running mastodon for a single user instance is not the best fit in terms of maintenance and required resources.
So I'm happy to share that I succesfully deployed both gotosocial and snac2 on openbsd. Both are tiny, lighweight ActivityPub servers that I wll try out the coming weeks/months.
Well, it took most of last evening and a decent chunk of today but I managed to adapt a blog post and some patches for getting OpenBSD 7.0 running on the pinebook-pro to get OpenBSD 7.4 running on mine, so I'll be blogging about it shortly. #runbsd#openbsd
With my new-old router I'm now runnings two machines with #BSD at home, not counting Macs. What's the socially acceptable number of BSDs to be running before you're allowed to apply for your #RunBSD sticker?
Today, something odd happened to me, slightly concerning but which, fortunately, ended on a positive note and with deep reflection.
They're doing some renovations in my office, so I sat down at a café table to work. I had with me an old HP laptop running FreeBSD. Ferrara is generally a peaceful city, but lately, some groups of youngsters have been causing trouble, going around bothering people, and in extreme cases, starting fights.
Today, it was my turn.
As they roamed around trying to provoke others, two of them approached me and began touching my laptop. They mocked me, jesting (not so playfully) about how ancient my computer was and how "they needed a computer," picking it up and examining it. Politely, I told them I needed it for work and it had all my files, so I couldn't just hand it over. It was broad daylight, but no one else was around at that moment. One of them noticed something unusual - "Where's the Windows menu? Is this Linux?"
"No, it's FreeBSD. Have you ever heard of it?" Their surprised expressions said it all. The entire group gathered, sat on the ground, and listened intently for about 15 minutes. I stalled, hoping for other people to arrive, so I wasn't alone.
Eventually, they got up, told me I was "old" but cool, and that they would immediately try out the BSDs (they were particularly intrigued by OpenBSD's security features - which they didn't grasp fully but saw as "professional hacker stuff"). They gave me a high-five, peacefully, without bothering anyone further.
Now, I'm left wondering: did they leave me alone because they learned something intriguing from me, because other people arrived, or are they just bored teenagers causing issues to pass the time - and got engrossed in something new, hence shifting their focus temporarily? All I know is I was relieved to get back to my office and from there, hear the rain outside, which usually deters these boys from troubling others.
I can say that today, FreeBSD saved me from very different problems than it usually does 😃