Thought Bricks

One thing that I’ve noticed and appreciated about FreeBSD is that it is a monolithic project. In Linux, you have the kernel and then all of the user space stuff that is part of a distribution. Sometimes, it just seems strange to have these different parts being updated with one command. FreeBSD does it differently. freebsd-update fetch gets the updates for the OS and pkg update gets them for the installed packages.

My Dell R620 server has an iDRAC 7 card in it. Since the server is very loud compared to my other computers (laptops and a custom build micro tower), it’s nice to be able to control it from across the house. It’s not exactly in the most accessible place in my office and I hate crawling around to hit a power button. Due to the noise and power consumption, I tend to switch the system off (shutdown -p now) when I’m done with it and it’s very nice to have a system that you can just ssh into and run /admin1-> racadm serveraction powerup to start it up.

I had some passing familiarity with ZFS in Linux and it seemed interesting. On FreeBSD, ZFS is more core to the platform. There is lot to it but the concepts aren’t difficult. One of the core elements of ZFS are datasets. A dataset is sort of like a partition but more flexible. You can use them for snapshots and other things. A list of the datasets in a system is produced with zfs list:

Having been an Ubuntu user for many years, a new OS is taking some getting used to. Although there is a nice quickstart guide for Linux users on the FreeBSD website, there are still some things that are muscle memory for me that is requiring some more time. They are mostly around shell differences. sh is definitely not bash. I understand why bash isn’t in the base system due to licensing and a preference for simple solutions, but sh has a few limitations that seem to bite me.

I was poking around on my recently installed FreeBSD system and I noticed a strange message in /var/run/dmesg.boot that said est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.. That seemed odd, so I looked it up and found some information about what it was. It seems that the system was not set in the BIOS to allow the OS to manage the performance profile. It also led me to look at powerd to enable the performance mode.

After a good experience running FreeBSD on LXD, I decided to install it directly on the server. As I discovered earlier, it seemed to be a good idea to update the storage adapter to support IT mode. I found a great set of instructions and updated the H310 card to LSI IT firmware. Essentially, it was just following a recipe. It took about an hour or so with much of that time spent creating the bootable vFlash partitions(pdf) and rebooting the server a few times.

I hadn’t updated my theme for a while. I have been getting deprecation warnings on a few things for some time and they turn into deprecation errors in the next version of Hugo, so it was time to fix them. The hardest part was making git understand that I wanted to use an ssh-key to update the submodule. Updating should have been as simple as: cd theme\harbor $ git add .

I sorted out the DHCP issue I saw yesterday. There was a discussion on this topic that was very helpful. There was a checksum problem in the request for an address. The fix was to apply sudo ethtool --offload lxdbr0 tx off to disable checksum offloading on the bridged network in LXD. This site has a nice description of the what that means: Checksum offloading is usually beneficial as it allows the checksum to be calculated (outgoing) or verified (incoming) in hardware at a much faster rate than it could be handled in software.

I was finally able to get FreeBSD installed on LXD: rob@bsd:~ $ uname -a FreeBSD bsd 14.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE releng/14.1-n267679-10e31f0946d8 GENERIC amd64 After all of the Ubuntu upgrades, I found that I had done some strange configuration on my LXD system. It’s been a bit since I looked at it and instead of trying to fix it, I just uninstalled (sudo snap remove --purge lxd) and reinstalled. After LXD was installed and configured, I downloaded the FreeBSD 14.

Another interesting problem cropped up in my quest to install BSD. The presence of a RAID adapter in my server that presents the disks as a virtual disk. Based on some research, it seems that ZFS doesn’t do well unless the adapter can use Initiator Target (IT) mode which presents each disk individually to the operating system. Since ZFS seems to be the way to go for a modern FreeBSD installation, I would like to use it.