SOEKRIS image for FreeBSD-11

If you happen to have had an Apple][, you might be interested in retrieving your data from old DOS 3.3 floppies.  Or maybe you’re just interested in retrocomputing and downloaded some floppies at Apple2Online.  In my case, I had an ulterior motive.  I’ve been learning about FreeBSD device drivers and was wondering how difficult it…

I’ve been trying forever to get a mobile IPSec connection up between my OS X laptop and pfsense.   Finally, thanks to this outstanding blog post, it works.  I’m especially excited that it works with the default OS X and Android VPN clients. My pfsense config closely mirrors the one specified by Mike Murray pfsense…

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>;…

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…

Recently I found myself wanting to understand how I2C for FreeBSD ARM, on the Pi works.  The first step is to understand the GPIO implementation on Pi, since on a Pi, I2C is implemented on the GPIO. So, here’s the basic summary. Firstly, the FreeBSD source browser is here. In the directory /sys/ is the…

I often have a need for a fresh FreeBSD install, to host a server, or perhaps just experiment with. My usual solution is FreeBSD jails. However, I’ve recently gotten interested in Ansible and AWS. There are quite a few advantages to installing infra with AWS, however the one I’m most interested in is automating the…