FreeBSD 11 was formally released last month and we’re very excited to start rolling it out to our clients in the coming weeks. FreeBSD 11.0 brings a host of new features and improvements including: Improved BHyve: BHyve is FreeBSD’s type-2 native hypervisor which boots virtually any FreeBSD and Linux version and now includes a native… Read more »
HOW TO: Windows 10 Under Bhyve /w FreeBSD 11
Thursday, October 27, 2016
With FreeBSD 11 comes a new version of Bhyve with a feature that makes installing Windows 10 a snap: a VNC accessible framebuffer driver! This lets any GUI OS, such as Windows, boot into graphics mode on the console. Previously getting Windows working was possible but required a lot of effort to create a custom… Read more »
SOLVED: FreeBSD + pip + virtualenv = file not found
Friday, August 19, 2016
We love python virtual environments, but under FreeBSD we occasionally see issues where pip is not correctly using the /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib paths to compile installable modules. The Problem This can produce errors such as the below, which we saw when doing a ‘pip install pycrypto’ operation: src/_fastmath.c:36:11: fatal error: ‘gmp.h’ file not found Even… Read more »
NginX “service nginx upgrade” / kill SIGUSR2 results in shutdown() failed (54: Connection reset by peer)
Friday, July 22, 2016
Huge thanks to Ganbold Tsagaankhuu who finally got to the bottom of this issue. NginX is a great web server, and is built from the ground up for high volume, zero down time environments. One of the most basic features of such a service is the ability to restart completely (not just child processes, which… Read more »
ZTE Falcon Z-917 via USB with pfSense and FreeBSD
Friday, May 6, 2016
One of the things on our list has been to setup a proper dedicated cellular backup system setup here at the office. This was harder than it seemed due to the fact that T-Mobile here uses the 700 Mhz band for LTE. This is really an odd frequency and 700 Mhz is not supported by… Read more »
FreeBSD Hangs on “Trying to mount root from zfs:zroot”
Friday, April 8, 2016
There are many reasons this can happen, but this one I believe is unique in terms of searching the internet for the error. We’d see a newly imaged (or restored from backup) ZFS-based server boot fine then hang here: Trying to mount root from zfs:zroot After banging my head into it for some time thinking… Read more »
FreeBSD / pfSense on a Zotac ZBox: link state down and ‘re0: watchdog timeout’ errors
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Recently we purchased a Zotac ZBOX-CI321NANO to replace our existing pfSense PC which was in a much larger case. There are a few variations but ours has dual 1 Gbps NICs, many USB 3.0 ports, 2 GiB of RAM, a 32 GiB SSD and is powered by a Celeron 2961Y (1.10 GHz). It has plenty… Read more »
Poudriere “Error: Invalid port origin ‘/usr/local/sbin/pkg’ not found”
Sunday, January 10, 2016
This was quite the random error I ran across this week and could not find anything similar or a solution. After years of faithfully building our FreeBSD pkg repository poudriere started reporting these weird errors and refused to build anything: ====>> Error: Invalid port origin ‘/usr/local/sbin/apxs’ not found. ====>> Error: Invalid port origin ‘/usr/local/sbin/pkg’ not… Read more »
Logentries (logentries.com) Under FreeBSD
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Logentries is a SaaS service which lets you stream logs (and lots of other things) from multiple locations and servers for review and processing on their platform. They provide out-of-the-box installers and packages for a number of Linux and UNIX operating systems but don’t directly support FreeBSD (yet). However their agent consists of a few… Read more »
FreeBSD Hardware RAID vs. GMIRROR vs. ZFS
Thursday, September 3, 2015
The ultimate storage shootout! With years of building and testing servers in various configurations we have always suspected hardware RAID was not all that it’s cracked up to be. FreeBSD’s GMIRROR and ZFS are great, but up until now it’s been a gut feeling combined with anecdotal evidence. Today, we change that. The Test Setup… Read more »