New FreeBSD Wandboard Image

My preferred server OS is FreeBSD. Each time I install it, I have to go through numerous steps to secure it. So, to avoid that effort, and to make sure I get it right each time, I’ve created an Ansible playbook to automate the entire process. You can learn about it here. Some of the…

I recently got a Beaglebone Black.   I was very excited; it’s similar to a Pi, but has 60 GPIO ports! Getting a serial console up on it was not quite a simple as I thought, since the BeagleBone uses FTDI.  Following the instructions here I installed the OS X serial driver for FTDI.   After plugging…

Some printers, like the one I have (HP 8600 Pro), have “Print-to-Folder” capability.   Unfortunately, I have no Windows server, only a FreeBSD box to print to.  I can mount folders from the FreeBSD box on my MacBook.. if I can get files to scan there.   So, to do that, I need a Samba…

I was curious to see how difficult it would be to compile NetBSD on FreeBSD 10.  Once you have the source, there is a build.sh script which is very helpful.  The build is as simple as: ./build.sh -m i386 tools ./build.sh -m i386 kernel=GENERIC release In my case I have both clang and gcc installed.  I…

The FDT is the “Flattened Device Tree”, a simple device tree used in embedded FreeBSD, for example on a Pi.  Every architecture has a DTS file, which contains a human-readable list of hardware for that architecture.   For example, the Pi FTD is here.  You should notice that there are declarations for: cpu axi (the…

The FDT file for Raspberry Pi, declares UART.  I’ve had quite a bit of trouble understanding how declaring a uart in the FDT results in /dev/tty0 and /dev/cuau0 appearing in /dev/ Here are the relevant lines from the FDT: uart0: uart0 { compatible = “broadcom,bcm2835-uart”, “broadcom,bcm2708-uart”, “arm,pl011”, “arm,primecell”; reg = <0x201000 0x1000>; interrupts = <65>;…