Static in the Ether » FreeBSD

RIP LT box

Barry Irwin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:43:15 +0000

This morning I move the last of the services and data off the system I’ve had at LayeredTech since November 2005. This little AMD XP 2400 has given great service over the years, but the hardware got increasingly flaky and the cost of hosting at LT just keeps increasing for old kit. These factors in combination with a change of datacenters prompted me to bid it a fond farewell and relocate much of my offshore stuff to a shiny new host at hetzner.de, along with the chance to move to FreeBSD7.x, and free myself of the cruft that accumulates with 4.x -> 5.x -> 6.x migrations without clean installs.

Stable builds

Barry Irwin — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:37:02 +0000

I was cleaning out some old notes the other day and came across a pile of work relating to the development of some custom FreeBSD firewall solutions that Neil and I developed while at Itouch Labs, many years back in 2002.

The majority of the code is completely out dated, given these were based on the the then bleeding edge 4.3 branch. The only thing thats probably of value, is to sometime dust off the extensions we did to natd to provide an interactive console and the ability to reload rules without dumping its state table. Possibly post PhD.

I also found a link to a post made by Arri when he decommissioned them some four and a bit years later, with some impressive uptimes:

4.3-RELEASE-p28 FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE-p28 #0
8:56AM up 1175 days, 14:25, 1 user, load averages: 0.01, 0.00, 0.00
4.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE #3: Thu Aug 9 08:24:10 SAST 2001
8:55AM up 1353 days, 13:07, 1 user, load averages: 0.07, 0.03, 0.004.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE #3: Thu Aug 9 08:24:10 SAST 2001
8:57AM up 1636 days, 12:16, 2 users, load averages: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00

BSD is great to work with! I see that the 2nd edition of Absolute FreeBSD is now finally available, and am eagerly awaiting for my copy to arrive.

Systems Administration Cheet Sheets

Barry Irwin — Sun, 18 May 2008 08:25:09 +0000

Colin Barschel has published a rather complete listing of how to perform common unix related tasks in Linux and FreeBSD, and even some Solaris examples. Even better hes got a booklet version as well for easy printing. Something to keep on the back burner/bookmarks for when you get stuck trying to remember just how broken ‹insert os of choice›’s fooblat command is.

Remote FreeBSD install – Depenguinator TNG

Barry Irwin — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 10:39:11 +0000

Daniel Gerzo, has recently published an article as part of the FreeBSD documentation project on how to install FreeBSD on a remote system, when one doesn’t have the luxury of a IP KVM or other remote console. Unfortunately most hosting providers seem to think Linux in its gazillions of flavors (really who would want to run Gentoo?) is the preferable option to windows.

The basic process is about creating a magic memory File System 9MFS) based mini FreeBSD install one can then ddover the base MBR on the system This gets you jsut enough of a Real OS to carry on with the rest of your install.

What this means for me is the possibility of doing some nice rmeote upgrade, or more acuratlye nuke and paves on some remorely hosted equipment. The big cath of course is your remote systems should have sufficient bandwidth (, or at least a local copy of the ISO or CD handy and mounted. Exploring other hosting providers may also now be feasible, now that I can run my favorite server OS without having to try persuade remotes upport to just put a BSD CD in and let me pay for a KVM access window :-)