The FreeBSD Foundation has been working towards the future of booting in x86 and catching up to our friends in Linux-land by sponsoring work on a UEFI enabled boot loader.  This work was taken on by Benno Rice (benno@freebsd.org) and Ed Maste (emaste@freebsd.org). So far, it appears that one can indeed boot FreeBSD as I […]

I was fortunate enough this year to be able to help the FreeBSD Foundation host the 2013 Fall Vendor Summit at my workplace, Yahoo.  Our facilities in Sunnyvale are very first class and I like to help out with my non-technical resources whenever possible (because, frankly, if you’ve seen my code, you would prefer it […]

FreeBSD has grown up a lot in this release cycle.  The most useful tool from the 10.0/11.0 world in a long time, poudriere (powder keg in French) has made my ports usage almost trivial now. More or less, poudriere is a tool that allows you to build ports packages compatible with the new PKGNG format […]

If you have configured wireless networks on your FreeBSD laptop/pc. You can use wpa_passphrase to make the password entries more obscure with the use of wpa_passphrase. For example, given the following network entry in wpa_supplicant.conf: network={ ssid=”BRUNO” scan_ssid=1 priority=5 key_mgmt=WPA-PSK psk=”Super Secret Plain Text Password” } wpa_passphrase can give you a psk entry that is […]

I had an opportunity at work to build up a new machine to do our FreeBSD builds at work this quarter and wanted to see how far I could take ZFS on high end OEM hardware. After evaluating HP and Dell gear, I settled on the Dell r720xd as my platform to move forward.  Primarily, […]

Sandybridge/Ivybridge/Haswell boxes take upwards of 10 minutes to just GET TO THE BOOT LOADER now.  When I want to get a box into single user, and not miss the loader prompt when using FreeBSD: nextboot -o “-s” -k kernel ZFS based systems will emit a terrifying warning of: WARNING: loader(8) has only R/O support for […]