Updated FreeBSD-Wandboard bootloader

There is no official pkgng repo for FreeBSD-arm, yet.  There is an unofficial one, here, however in order to use it, you have to have pkgng installed.  As far as I can tell, the only way to install pkgng on ARM is to builds and install from source. On the platform I’m using, Wandboard, the…

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 have a number of disks in my FreeBSD box which exist only as backups of data.  I prefer that they not be mounted all the time, but instead mounted on use.  They are 2x internal SATA disks and an external USB3 disk.   This blog post explains how they are set up to auto-mount….

I’ve been using FreeBSD jails for a while, and was looking for a simple way to create jail filesystems.   After some reading, I came up with this simple script which creates full FreeBSD filesystems.   The filesystem can then be used via jail.conf. #!/bin/bash JAILNAME=$1 echo “kjail “$1 JAIL_HOME=/tank/kjail/ FTP=http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/11.1-RELEASE/ # # get packages # if…

I’m upgrading the U-boot version used for Wandboard by Crochet-BSD.    The first step is to upgrade the Device Tree Compiler (DTC); there are instructions here. Once you have the U-boot 2014 source, the build is trivial: gmake SED=gsed HOSTCC=cc CROSS_COMPILE=armv6-freebsd- wandboard_quad_config gmake SED=gsed HOSTCC=cc CROSS_COMPILE=armv6-freebsd-  

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…