Recently in FreeBSD Category

This weekend they were having this big 25% computer sale at Media Markt, so I went there and decided to splurge on an ASUS X59SL-AP275C for my upcoming birthday.

Although it comes pre-installed with Windows Vista, the first thing I'm going to do is remove it and replace it with the latest version of my favorite operating system.

I'll go for the bleeding edge version FreeBSD 7.1-BETA and recompile the kernel with the new and vastly improved ULE scheduler.

cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf
cp GENERIC LAPTOP
vi LAPTOP

There are two things to change in this file then we can move to compiling and installing the new and improved kernel.

ident      LAPTOP
options    SCHED_ULE

That's all there is to it. I certainly hope that it works.

Hurrah, the book I ordered last week from amazon.co.uk has arrived and it's called "Building a Server With FreeBSD 7" by Bryan J. Hong, and I can't wait to read it

Sub-titles "A Modular Approach" it's full of valuable hints on how to install and configure your very own dream machine.

I'm a little bit weary about upgrading FreeBSD, but the new version has so many new features and improvements that I'd be foolish to wait much longer.

Appendix D gives a nice, succinct overview of the protocols.

One of the aggravating issues I still have is that my wifi connection will get dropped once in awhile, and the only way to reconnect is by manually running this script that I created.

Ideally I want to have this happen automatically, but much investigation and googling has turned up little information.

Someone mentioned that wpa_supplicant might offer a solution, so I'll have a look there when I get more time.

Those regular ssh attacks to my web server have been bugging me now for some time. Those jerks needed to be taught a lesson.

This evening I gathered up my courage and decided to finally do something about it. Printed out a document about firewalling, studied them well and became an expert in no time.

So I fired up the good old PF packet filter firewall, added a simple pass rule which inserts the baddies into a table, blocking them for good.

That's more like it.

I struggled last night into the wee hours of the morning scratching my head and yanking out my hair trying to figure out why I kept getting those awful 403 forbidden error pages when all I was trying to do was run a simple CGI-script.

That's when all of a sudden I realized that I had forgotten that all import asterisk, meaning that the correct apache directive should be:

<Directory /var/www/*>
    Options +ExecCGI
</Directory>


Let's be more careful the next time, alright?!

I upgraded my Gnome desktop to 2.20 and everything went perfectly well.

Well, almost.

My fonts looked overly large and botched, but this was quickly remedied by firing up the good old gnome-control-panel and changing the appearance of the fonts to 96 dots per inch.

Trying to get OpenVPN to work properly under FreeBSD is turning out to become quite a bear, e.g. a much bigger bummer than I had originally expected it to be.

Up to now all this effort has become almost a complete waste of time, because I haven't accomplished anything (though of course I've learned an awful lot).

What's funny is that according to the installation instructions it should be a piece of cake, but it isn't.

This is yet another ongoing goal in life which hopefully someday I will be able to resolve in my spare time, depending on how sharp my technical acumen remains.

For quite some time now my APCUPSD daemon has been broken, and such an aggravation is something one typically postpones fixing forever. I'd expected the worst.

However, just a quick look and I figured it out fairly quickly. In the newer versions of apcupsd, the syntax of two parameters in the configuration file /usr/local/etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf have changed to:

UPSCLASS standalone
UPSMODE disable

Check it out for yourself by having your own look at my APCUPSD UPS Network Monitor on the kiffingish.com webserver.

Didn't realize it would be so trivial, should have checked it out earlier.

After several weeks now, I finally got my X.org environment up and running after my ill-fated 7.2 upgrade mess.

The last obstacle was a mysterious error which popped up every time I ran startx, namely:

fatal server error: caught signal 10.

   server aborting.

Yuk! So how did I fix this? The answer is simple: I simply commented out the following line in the /etc/xorg.conf file:

Section "Module"
    ...
    #Load "glx"
    ...
EndSection

Seems to be something wrong with the OpenGL file included with the FreeBSD NVidia driver I downloaded and installed. I'll have to deal with this at a later time if ever.

I should have never gotten started with the X.org 7.2 upgrade.

Two weeks later and my poor FreeBSD laptop is a complete mess, despite me having followed the upgrade instructions to a tee.

I'll give it one last try this weekend and see what happens.

Perhaps it is finally time to migrate over to Ubuntu.