Bsd

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 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.

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.

I had a few problems on my quest to install FreeBSD. There are technical solutions that would involve a bit of monkeying around with iptables and the like. The simplest way to solve them is to throw a little money at it. I found a used eero on eBay for $15 and will use that as a bridge on my existing network so that all of my computers can see each other whether they are on WiFi or Ethernet.

An article about the boring reliability of BSD in The Register has me intrigued. I don’t have experience working with BSD but I like the concept of an operating system that limits the drama. A quiet backwater where things actually work sounds great. This is not a knock on Linux. Linux is popular for good reason and there are flavors of Linux that appeal to the “move slowly and don’t break things” philosophy in BSD with other distros aiming towards the bleeding edge.