Thought Bricks

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.

I updated my desktop to Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS the other day. Although everything seemed fine, I was unable to get the system to suspend. Both from the command line (systemctl suspend) and the GUI, it would blank the screen and log me off but not suspend. Since it used to work, that was definitely something to do with the upgrade. After searching around a bit based on the logged messages, I found a somewhat related bug.

I received my used eero and switch to set up a network connection for my to-be BSD server. Adding the eero to my existing network was easy. It did require a reset of the new-to-me eero and then an update of the entire network to the latest software version which took a few minutes. After that, I shutdown the Raspberry Pi I had setup the other day and put the eero in its place.

It was time to upgrade to the latest LTS version of Ubuntu on my desktop. I had thought about doing it six months ago, but I don’t need the leading edge functionality and there is always a chance something goes awry. The upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS from 20.04 was quick and uneventful. I haven’t fully tested everything, but the apps I consistently use (Firefox, Evolution and Joplin) were fine after re-entering my credentials.

As someone who takes the train to DC from time to time, the construction of a new rail bridge across the Potomac River is great news. Amtrak is a fairly convenient way to get to DC but it is not reliable. Last time I took the train, I had a 7 hour delay on the way back. That was due to equipment problems, not the bridge, but it is typically a slow go once you get up to the Potomac and anything that will make the trip quicker and more reliable is welcome.

As part of the project to install BSD on a server, I’ve been using the iDRAC 7 command line in my Dell 620 server to manage it via the Raspberry Pi I set up to the other day as plugging in a monitor and keyboard is not that convenient. However, since I hadn’t touched it in a very long time, the SSL certificate for the iDRAC had expired. /admin1-> racadm sslcertview -t 1 -A 01 US Texas Round Rock Dell Inc.