Articles about freebsd

1. Updating multiple systems using a pre-built FreeBSD

   Recently I updated my workstation to FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE-p1. Since my laptop runs the same OS, I wanted to update it without rebuilding the world and kernel locally. I used the folowing steps to accomplish that.

   • Using netcat in combination with tar, the directories /usr/src and /usr …

2. Should system backups be compressed?

   Every now and then I make backups of my FreeBSD system’s filesystems with the venerable dump program. This is the only program that can capture all features of the UFS filesystem. The filesystems to be backed up are:

   • The root filesystem.
   • The /usr filesystem.
   • The /var filesystem.

   Note

   My …

3. Updating to FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE-p1

   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 …

4. Writing speed on FreeBSD 9-RELEASE-p3 amd64

   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 …

5. Writing speed on FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE amd64

   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 …

6. Using nullfs and unionfs for the ports tree in a jail

   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 …

7. Updating to FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE

   Updating my desktop to 8.1-RELEASE from 8.0 was pretty straightforward. I used the following steps

   • Made a backup and verified that it can be restored. I cannot stress enough how important that is!
   • Using csup I updated my kernel sources, using the following supfile;

   *default host=cvsup …

8. Enlarging networking buffers

   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 …

9. Defining command completions for tcsh

   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 …

10. Creating a virtual server on FreeBSD with a jail

    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 …