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What is the name of a new drive in my FreeBSD box?

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User mezzantrop provides us with a simple script on how to find the name of your drives on FreeBSD. Check out the link below for more information on the GEOM script.

This is one of the trickiest question for a new (and sometimes for an experienced) FreeBSD user, and even Handbook advises to see the “dmesg” output to check the drives:

“Inspect `/var/run/dmesg.boot` to ensure the new disk was found. In this example, the newly added SATA drive will appear as `ada1`.”

Actually, there are many methods and utilities to check drives, and one of the most powerful tool is “camcontrol”. But what if you are dealing with GEOM stack or checking a partition?

Original post:

What is the name of a new drive in my FreeBSD box?

[How-To] Self-hosted mail server on FreeBSD for maximum data privacy

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Sophimail shows us how to set up your own FreeBSD mail server using various open source tools. Follow the link below for the full set of instructions.

Introduction

In this tutorial, we are going to configure a FreeBSD email server with virtual domains and users, using Postfix, Dovecot, MySQL and SpamAssassin, ClamAV (w/o Amavis), DKIM, DMARC, CalDAV, CardDAV, Dashboard and RoundCube on FreeBSD 11.0.

Package List (recommended) 

……

File: /etc/rc.conf

Full tutorial: http://www.sophimail.com/configure-freebsd-email-server-using-postfix-dovecot-mysql-spamassassin/

How to built a self-hosted mail server on FreeBSD for maximum data privacy from privacy

[How-To] FreeNAS: use your SSD efficiently

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User  shows us some tips and tracks on how to use your SSD efficiently with the ZIL (ZFS Intent Log) feature of FreeNAS. Follow the link below for the full set of instructions.

ZIL and Cache

Not open for discussion; I think it is a complete waste of resources to use a 120, or 250GB SSD for logs, let alone cache, as FreeNAS will (and should!) use RAM for that. So, I searched and found a way to create two partitions on a single SSD, and expose these as ZIL (ZFS Intended Log) and cache to the pool.
Mind you – there are performance tests around, questioning the efficiency of ZIL and cache. I am not going to test this, I will just add ZIL and cache – I have an SSD especially for this purpose, but I am just mentioning the fact that the use case might differ for you.

The pool?

Erhm, in the mean time, I have created a pool, existing of two virtual devices, existing of 6 harddisks each. According to several sources on the interweb, this will deliver resiliance, as well as performance.

Full tutorial: http://vanbortel.blogspot.com/2017/07/storage-server-freenas-use-your-ssd.html

 

 

[How-To] Building a BSD home router (pt. 4-8)

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In this tutorial, user eerielinux shows us how to set up a BSD home router with pfSense and OPNsense, both open-source router/firewall OS based on FreeBSD. Follow the links below for each part of the 8 part tutorial series.

Part 1 of this article series was about why you want to build your own router, and how to assemble the APU2 that I chose as the hardware to build this on. Part 2 gave some Unix history and explained what a serial console is. Part 3 demonstrated serial access to the APU and showed how to update its firmware.

This post is about the serial installation of pfSense, one of two FreeBSD-based router/firewall operating systems that we’re going to explore in this series (the other being OPNsense). As pfSense is the older and more established product, we’re beginning with that one.

Building a BSD home router (pt. 4): Installing pfSense

This post will show how to install OPNsense, a great alternative to pfSense.

Preparation

OPNsense was forked from pfSense (more on than in the next post) and thus you will find lots of similarities if you have read the post on installing pfSense. The OPNsense team decided to move forward more quickly and did lots of interesting but invasive changes. One strong point for example is that it is already based on FreeBSD 11.0. There is one drawback to this, however: a problem with the XHCI (USB3) driver can lead to the installation media not being able to mount the filesystem and boot up. This makes installing OPNsense a little bit more complicated since the APU2 only has UBS3 ports.

Building a BSD home router (pt. 5): Installing OPNsense

A little overview: In this post I will give you some background information, compare the appearance / usability of both products and then take a look at some special features before giving a conclusion.

pfSense vs. OPNsense: Who wins?

This article is about comparing both products and helping you to make a decision. It is not terribly in-depth, because that task would require its own series of articles (and a lot more free time for me to dig much deeper into the topic). But still there’s a lot you may want to know to get a first impression on which one you should probably choose. If you do some more research and write about it, please let me know and I will happily link to your work!

Building a BSD home router (pt. 6): pfSense vs. OPNsense

 

Revisiting the initial question

In the first post I asked the question “Why would you want to build your own router?” and the answer was “because the stock ones are known to totally suck”. I have since stumbled across this news: Mcafee claims: Every router in the US is compromised. Now Mcafee is a rather flamboyant personality and every is a pretty strong statement. But I’m not such a nit-picker and in general he’s definitely right. If you have a couple of minutes, read the article and/or watch the short Youtube interview that it has embedded.

Building a BSD home router (pt. 7): Advanced OPNsense installation

 

Fixing swap

This is the last part of this series of building a BSD home router. In the previous article we did an advanced setup of OPNsense that works but is currently wasting valuable disk space. We also configured OPNsense for SSH access. Now let’s SSH in and su – to root and continue! Choose shell (menu point 8) so that we can have a look around.

Building a BSD home router (pt. 8): ZFS and jails

[How-To] Installing FreeBSD 11

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User developerslogblog shows us how to install a fresh FreeBSD 11 server and explains each step of the installation process. See the link below on how to get started on this open source operating system.

Having played for a while with TrueOS, a desktop oriented FreeBSD based distribution, I have decided to try the original FreeBSD system: I intend to use it as a FAMP testing server for some projects.

The first step is, of course, installing FreeBSD: I am happy to say that for a system with a slightly intimidating reputation, the installation process has gone like a breeze: quick, and easy.

Downloading FreeBSD

I chose to download the boot iso: this is a smaller image of 2xx MB, it does not contains all the necessary packages to install FreeBSD, so it will need to connect to an Internet server during the installation process to download the rest of the stuff.

The official FreeBSD site has also available for download bigger images (up to a 2.x GB DVD). Some years ago, the first time I tried FreeBSD, I installed it in an old machine with a not very reliable Internet connection, I remember I used the standard CD iso.

Installing FreeBSD 11 …

Installing FreeBSD 11

[HOWTO] FreeNAS 11, RancherOS, & Portainer

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In this tutorial, user SaskiFX shows us how to get RancherOS set up on FreeNAS 11 via Docker, along with Portainer. RancherOS is a Linux is distribution designed for containers. See the link below for the full set of instructions.

So when FreeNAS 11 came, I updated from 9.10 to get rolling on the new options. Unfortunately this killed my VirtualBox jail that I was using to run some services I couldn’t get working in a jail. So I started looking on how to get Docker running under FreeNAS 11 so I could replace those services and get some future proofing for the 11.1 and onward releases that should support Docker out of the box. From the posts on the forums they look to be heading for RancherOS as the underlying Docker operating system.

I originally tried to get this working under the default VM tab in the new interface, but it was not cooperating. I then moved over to using iohyve and bhyve from the command line to get this working. Here are the basic steps I used to get this kicking.

Prep

Setup the iohyve pool and options. Select where the pool you want, and the main network card you want attached.
iohyve setup pool=<storage pool> kmod=1 net=<NIC>

Fetch the latest RancherOS iso for the install.
iohyve fetch https://releases.rancher.com/os/latest/rancheros.iso

Should see the ISO you downloaded above listed.
iohyve isolist

Create the VM, and give it a size of disk you need. I used 40G since I wouldn’t need tons of space.
iohyve create RancherOS <SIZE>G

Set the VM startup options. I’m keeping this minimal as I don’t want to take too many resources. Adjust the ram and cpu as you want.
iohyve set RancherOS loader=grub-bhyve ram=2G cpu=1 con=nmdm0 os=debian

Should see the VM listed now.
iohyve list

RancherOS Install …

Full tutorial: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/howto-freenas-11-rancheros-docker-and-portainer.54595/

[How-To] Speeding up builds on FreeBSD

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User xmj shows us how to speed up your builds on FreeBSD. Head over to their Github for the full set of instructions.

If you’re repeatedly building components of the FreeBSD operating system – kernel, base or userland – you will be interested in optimizing the build duration. Luckily, over time the various commercial users of FreeBSD have figured out various ways of speeding up that build process. The probably most obvious way of shaving off time is through to not rebuild things that have not changed. In this article I’d like to show a few ways of achieving this from a user’s perspective.

METAMODE

For kernel/base builds, one way of achieving this is using meta mode. This makes make(1) capture information that will be relevant for next builds in a .meta file, such as the compiler invocation, files read during compile (including includes, and their location), libraries used, interesting syscalls issued, etc. make(1) achieves that by using the filemon(4) interface (required for e.g. tracing syscalls issued during make(1) execution). On subsequent runs, if a .meta file can be found, make(1) determines if the information in this .meta file still contains uptodate information (e.g. by comparing the proposed to the past compiler invocation), comparing access times for libraries and code used to the object previously built), and if not, rebuilds the object.

Full tutorial: https://xmj.github.io/articles/sysadmin/builds_ccache_memcached.html

Other: Turning FreeBSD to HardenedBSD

[How-To] Running Nextcloud in a jail on FreeBSD

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This tutorial by user John Ramsden shows us how to get Nextcloud set up in a FreeBSD jail. Nextcloud is an open-source file syncing platform designed to set up a cloud on your own network. See the link below for the full set of instructions.

 I recently setup Nextcloud 12 inside a FreeBSD jail in order to allow me access to files I might need while at University. I figured this would be a optimal solution for files that I might need access to unexpectedly, on computers where I am not in complete control. My Nextcloud instance is externally accessible, and yet if someone were to get inside my Jail, I could rest easy knowing they still didn’t have access to the rest of my host server. I chronicled the setup process including jail setup using iocage, https with Lets Encrypt, and full setup of the web stack.

Full tutorial: https://ramsdenj.com/2017/06/05/nextcloud-in-a-jail-on-freebsd.html

[How-To] Sharing Files with macOS from FreeBSD with SMB and mDNS Service Discovery

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This tutorial by user cmcenroe shows us how to share your files from FreeBSD to macOS with the SMB protocol. See the link below for the full set of instructions.

This is an explanation of one way of sharing files with Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan from FreeBSD 11.0. It uses Samba, an implementation of the SMB protocol, and Apple’s mDNSResponder for service discovery. Alternatives are listed at the end.

Background

SMB is the protocol used for file sharing between Windows systems. Mac systems previously used their own Apple Filing Protocol, but deprecated it in favour of SMB with Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

mDNS, or multicast DNS, is a technology for resolving host names in a local network. On top of this, DNS service discovery, or DNS-SD, can be used to broadcast available services, such as SMB. This is how Finder discovers hosts to show in “Shared” or “Network.”

Samba

First, install Samba. There are two versions available in FreeBSD. This is the newer one.

pkg install samba42

Full tutorial: https://cmcenroe.me/2017/01/08/freebsd-macos-file-sharing.html