Blogs

Here’s the link to the excellent guide on how to install Mastodon instance on FreeBSD. If you’re doing it in FreeBSD Jail you may find use for “Installing PostgreSQL in FreeBSD jail” article.

CSH is the default shell for root user on FreeBSD system. Basic usage is pretty much the same as any other shell like bash, zsh, fish or whatever. Until you try to execute some bash specific for loops, or attempt to use Delete key. Whaaaat? - Yes, apparently delete doesn’t give the correct character in csh and just prints ~. I don’t know if that’s xterm (or xterm compatible) terminal thing or just a csh thing but it doesn’t matter....

So I’ve been battling with this issue for quite some time now. Every time I try to log out of Gnome Shell it simply freezes for anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds or so. This has been grinding my gears and finally I’ve stumbled upon this reddit post. And you know what? Turns out they are right! Removing Caffeine extension immediately resolves this issue.

Install sassc which is a dependency for building assets: sudo dnf install sassc Clone GIT repository: git clone https://github.com/system76/pop-gtk-theme.git Switch directory and build the themes: cd pop-gtk-theme make make assets Finally, install the themes: sudo make install You need root privileges for that as themes get installed to /usr/share/themes directory.

To run latest Minecraft 1.12.1 (as of this writing) within FreeBSD Jail you need few things. First of, you need to install Java 8: pkg install openjdk8 openjdk8-jre After Java is installed, you’ll notice that there’s a warning like: This OpenJDK implementation requires fdescfs(5) mounted on /dev/fd and procfs(5) mounted on /proc. If you have not done it yet, please do the following: mount -t fdescfs fdesc /dev/fd mount -t procfs proc /proc To make it permanent, you need the following lines in /etc/fstab: fdesc /dev/fd fdescfs rw 0 0 proc /proc procfs rw 0 0 This obviously needs to be done on the host system level as it is not allowed within Jail....

One of the main reasons for setting up ZNC bouncer for me was to be able to have same IRC account on multiple computers and have messages synced across them. This isn’t “default functionality” so you need to install additional ClientBuffer plugin. To install the module on ZNC installed from binary package on FreeBSD you need to: Fetch the module fetch –no-verify-peer https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jpnurmi/znc-clientbuffer/master/clientbuffer.cpp Build module znc-buildmod clientbuffer.cpp Copy module to ZNC library directory cp clientbuffer....

I’ve recently set up ZNC - an IRC bouncer, to help me stay logged in on IRC. Although I’m not yet done with the whole setup, I’ve decided to add a valid certificate. Of course, I use Let’s Encrypt for this purpose. To issue a certificate you can use: certbot certonly --standalone -d DOMAIN -n -m YOUREMAIL --agree-tos Certificate for the ZNC service on FreeBSD is located at: /usr/local/etc/znc/znc.pem and it’s structured like:...

This one is fairly simple. All of thee zone info files are located in /usr/share/zoneinfo/, divided by region. I’m in Croatia so setting up time to be the same as in Zagreb is done by sym-linking appropriate zone file to /etc/localtime: ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Zagreb /etc/localtime As I use jails on FreeBSD, to avoid setting this up on every single jail, I have flavor within ezjail defined which has default settings that I usually have on all jails....

Using Ansible with FreeBSD as a managed node might not be straight forward as using some Linux distribution as, by default, FreeBSD doesn’t have Python interpreter installed which is needed for remote command execution in Ansible. To bootstrap the FreeBSD host you first need to install python and needed dependencies with raw module: ansible YOURHOST -m raw -a "pkg install -y python py27-simplejson" This will provide you with Python interpreter, but since it is installed from package/ports it will be installed in /usr/local/bin/python while Ansible expects it to be in /usr/bin/python....