There have been some changes in the FreeBSD update process. The csup program has been retired, source code updating is now done with subversion. Since I haven’t used that before, I’m documenting the steps that I took here.
I’m using source updates instead of freebsd-update because I ...
Now that I’ve switched to FreeBSD 9.0, I thought I’d repeat the write speed test I did in 2010 on my desktop machine.
The test is writing approximately 10 GB data from /dev/zero to /tmp/foo;
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/foo bs=10M count ...
Recently the question came up how fast the write speed of a disk drive on FreeBSD should be. I decided to test the hardware that I have at my disposal, which is a desktop machine and a laptop.
The test is writing approximately 10 GB data from /dev/zero to ...
When running a virtual server in a jail, one would like to avoid replication of files as much as practical. One candidate for sharing would be the ports tree in /usr/ports. One could just make a symbolic link from /usr/ports in the jail’s tree to the one ...
Updating my desktop to 8.1-RELEASE from 8.0 was pretty straightforward. I used the following steps
*default host=cvsup ...
In the hope of increasing networking performance, I’ve set the following sysctls in /etc/sysctl.conf;
# Increase send/receive buffer maximums from 256KB to 16MB. # FreeBSD 7.x and later will auto-tune the size, but only up to the max. net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_max=16777216 net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_max ...
The default interactive shell is tcsh. Recently I discovered that this shell also has the ability to complete your command-line by using the built-in complete command. After some experimentation, I’ve added the following lines to my /etc/csh.cshrc file:
complete cd 'p/1/d/' complete man 'p/1 ...
After Virtualbox crashed my machine, I decided to try my hand at building a virtual server using FreeBSD’s jail facility.
First, I created a directory to serve as the root directory for my jail;
slackbox# mkdir -p /usr/local/var/jails/192.168.0.100
Then I built the ...
In the previous item, we saw how to build, start and stop a jail. The rc scripts allow us to easily start and stop a jail.
Starting the jail (from the host):
slackbox# /etc/rc.d/jail onestart server Configuring jails:. Starting jails: server.erewhon.net.
Then log into the ...
By accident I managed to break X11. The symptoms were that Xorg could not open new programs, and after restarting it complained that it could not save a compiled keymap, so it unloaded the keayboard and mouse modules, leaving X unusable. :-(
After going into single-user mode, I ran fsck on ...