FreeBSD Wandboard r270855

One of the best things about the Pi is that it’s small, and portable.  It’s very tempting to use it on wireless networks, unattended.  Sadly, in the real world, any wireless network can be hacked, and any device on wireless should be considered vulnerable.  So, pf is an easy way to harden your Pi. The…

How the FDT works In specific, I’m looking at this file bcm2835.dtsi which contains the hardware definitions for the BCM2835, the SOC which powers a Raspberry Pi. Primarily, i’m interested in how to read it.   To really make sense of this, you should have this pdf at hand; it’s the hardware manual for BCM2835.  If…

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…

It’s been a goal of mine for a while to understand how FreeBSD device drivers work.  So, firstly I wrote a simple module; it’s here.  The next step is to write the skeleton of a device driver.  That is, a device driver that does nothing.  The resulting source code is here. The Makefile is very…

In this blog article, I described a way to use Netatalk3 to do Time Machine backups on FreeBSD.  This approach worked well, but it had some problems: The Time Machine backups are in every user’s home dir.  That’s messy and there is the potential that they’ll accidentally delete the backup. If I put the backups…

I recently got interested in the technical details of how ARM OS’s work, so I decided to try my hand at writing a simple one.  This blog post is not about the OS itself, but about setting up the development environment. In my case, I’m developing in a terminal session, on FreeBSD 10 on an…