Setting up mfsBSD for receiving ZFS snapshots on systems with low memory

I recently had a need to boot into a fresh server (a VirtualBox VM, actually) with FreeBSD in order to partition the disk and make it ready to restore another machine onto it.

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Restore FreeBSD from a ZFS Snapshot

This was a beautiful sight this morning. The image below is a VirtualBox console showing a booted FreeBSD system. That system has been restored from a ZFS snapshot taken last November. So, how did we do it?

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acme.sh revisited: ECC & Wildcards

A while ago I wrote about using acme.sh to automate my HTTPS certificates.
In the post I used a domain (bnix.club) along with a number of specific subdomains (“logs.bnix.club”, “f.bnix.club”, “www.bnix.club”).

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FreeBSD Ports unable to use multiple Github repos with the same name

I maintain the hugo (www/gohugo) FreeBSD Port. In a recent release (0.51) a situation arose where the dependency “mitchellh/mapstructure” required a fix. The Github repository for the dependency was forked to “bep/mapstructure” and a Pull Request to the original repository made. The Pull Request wasn’t pulled into the original repo in time for the 0.51 release (and still haven’t at time of writing), so the developers have instead specified both the original and forked repos as dependencies.

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Ansible ad-hoc command on multiple hosts

Quite often I want to run an ad-hoc command against a number of hosts, usually this is a subset of an existing group (and often new nodes added to a group).

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VNC over SSH via a Raspberry Pi

Often when I’m away from home I leave my iMac on in case I need to grab anything from it remotely, plus it’s ready to go when I get home. Usually I access it using SSH, via a Raspberry Pi:

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acme.sh, plus Linode, plus DNS, plus FreeBSD

I’ve been meaning to use Let’s Encrypt for some time now, I don’t really have a good excuse as to why it’s taken so long, other than I wanted to use DNS to verify I owned the relevant domains, and I hadn’t found an easy enough tool to use.

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freebsd-upgrade In A Boot Environment

Yesterday FreeBSD 11.1 was released. Once I got into work I started upgrading the VM I use for day to day activities. After creating a Boot Environment (BE) using beadm(1), and running the upgrade and install parts of freebsd-update(8), I rebooted into a newly activated BE only to find I had an 11.1 kernel, but a 11.0 userland…

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BSD Desktop Week

Last week on Twitter I was promoting BSD on the desktop.

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Raspberry Pi USB-GPIO OS X and FreeBSD

I play with my Raspberry Pi so rarely that I forget how to use my CP2102 serial converter to connect from my iMac or FreeBSD laptop to the Raspberry Pi, so I thought I’d write a blog post and then I’d have an easy place to go back to remember how…

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