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# FreeBSD Challenge, Day 17

Don Harper

2014-04-17

Today, I got my new laptop dragon up on wireless with a little Edimax EW-7811Un 150 Mbps Wireless 11n Nano Size USB Adapter. Now, setup begins in ernest. I have disabled the on-board wireless NIC in the BIOS, and started to set up shop on it.

Next major task. Configure X. :)

d

# FreeBSD Challenge, Update

Don Harper

2014-04-15

Hey, Sorry about the lack of updates over the last two weeks, but my job sent me out of country for two weeks, and I had no time to work on this project. Once I unbury myself, I will return to this with a vengence. I am planning on upgrading my two servers to FreeBSD10 from Linux. One will involve a major disk reworking as one of the disks is about dead.

Stay tuned, and thanks for coming back!

d

# FreeBSD Challenge, Day 16

Don Harper

2014-03-29

Busy day with other things than play computers, but I found a little time. I have FreeBSD 10-STABLE loaded with the custom WiFi hack on my Elitebook Revolve 810. I would have to let it try to boot off the USB stick. After multiple tries, it would finally run the installer. I tried ZFS a few times, but if I did not select MBR format for the partition table, then it would not boot (no OS error). With MBR and ZFS, it would fail to mount the ZFS filesystem with error 2. After trying the various fixes listed on-line, I gave up and went with MBR and UFS.

Once installed, it was fairly easy to get going. I have not configured it to take on the role of daily driver yet. If I have time tomorrow, then I will do it then, otherwise, it will have to wait a bit as I am getting on a plane this weekend, and I will not have room for the second computer. I will try to get it as far as I can with ssh.

The neat thing I found based on this email post from 2005 and this blog post is that I can have a fancy screensaver at the console! Pretty rad. :) Next steps will be improving the screen resolution in text-mode.

# FreeBSD Challenge, Day 12-15

Don Harper

2014-03-27

Half-way point.

Much progress made in the world of a bootable USB stick to get my new-fangled WiFi chip working. I was able to make a new image, wrote it to a new USB stick, booted it, and was able to successfully scan for my Access Points! W00t!

Tomorrow, I will take the second laptop (HP EliteBook Revolve 810), and load it with 10-Release (slightly patched). I do not expect everything to work (it has a touch screen), but enough should work that I can start using it for the daily driver. Having real wifi will help a lot.

My updates have been a bit slow due to craziness at work. I am taking a trip, and the departure date has been reset many times. I am on my 5th set of airline tickets. With things settled, I need to decide if I am going to bring the second laptop (the R180) with me or not. Weight issues and all.

How do I think this is going? Well, the two major issues I thought I would have going in, WiFi and Photo editing/management, are for the most part solved. Can I use this for my daily non-work driver? Yes. Can I use it for my work daily driver? Maybe. I have set up a few jails on the FreeNAS box (btsync, dns/dhcp, taskwarrior's taskd, and Plex), and they are mainly working well together (the Plex will not play nice with btsync, yet), but I need to figure out a bit more, and set it up as a target to backup my laptop's ZFS snapshots.

Next steps are to find those performance monitoring tools/docs, and to look at something like puppet/chef/salt.

Thanks for reading....

# FreeBSD Challenge, Day 9-11

Don Harper

2014-03-22

Ah, life with kids...not enough spare time with soccer and volleyball practices and games.

Things are going well. Found a few more small utilities that I use under Linux and added them via pkgng, and all is good.

Next up: system debugging. The system will slow down at random points, so I need to go find a good performance debug guide. The only thing changed was I imported my music library (~60G), but my drive is still plenty empty (~37% used), so I do not think it is ZFS, but I am not sure.

The other is the custom boot stick I made does not work. The initial loader will start, but then it stops. So, I need to find the docs on the boot process there.

Oh, and welcome to all the folks from BSDNow, which is an awesome video/audio podcast on all things BSD.