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Gemlog
Over year six my visitor count skyrocketed: In all years except the first one, my blog had had around 7,000 page hits. 2017 saw over _32,000_. This was due to two series of articles that were very well received: One about an experiment of exploring and updating an ancient FreeBSD 4.11 system and one about building your own little home router. With 8 posts straight, the latter was also my longest up to this point. I also wrote about jails as well as package management and ports on FreeBSD and a couple of other things.
(Jan 2017) Updating FreeBSD 4.11 (1/4) - Blast from the past
In this post I write about legacy systems in the IT in general and about installing FreeBSD 4.11 in particular.
(Jan 2017) Updating FreeBSD 4.11 (2/4) - Digging up old graves
In this post I describe how to configure the system for remote connection, how to bootstrap pkgsrc, install subversion and update the system to FreeBSD 4.11-STABLE.
(Feb 2017) Updating FreeBSD 4.11 (3/4) - Neophyte's notorious necromancy
This third post of this mini series is mostly about updating OpenSSH and getting newer compilers installed.
(Feb 2017) Updating FreeBSD 4.11 (4/4) - Reflecting radical resurrection
The final part of this mini series deals with updating a lot of the programs installed previously to recent releases. The most important one is a current version of OpenSSH.
(Mar 2017) FreeBSD jails (1/2): Introduction and frameworks
This post introduces FreeBSD jails and gives a very short overview of the various jail management frameworks that there are.
(Apr 2017) FreeBSD jails (2/2): 4.11 sentenced to jail
The second part deals with how to use iocage in general and details putting a FreeBSD 4.11 system into a jail on FreeBSD 11.0!
(May 2017) Building a BSD home router (pt. 1): Hardware (PC Engines APU2)
This post discusses the need for a custom built home router and shows how to assemble the APU2c4 board properly into a case.
(Jun 2017) Building a BSD home router (pt. 2): The serial console (excursion)
This is an article about the serial console and the history of TTYs, terminals as well as terminal emulators.
(Jun 2017) Building a BSD home router (pt. 3): Serial access and flashing the firmware
This article shows how to connect to a headless device using the serial console. It also shows how to optionally flash a new firmware on the APU2.
(Jun 2017) Building a BSD home router (pt. 4): Installing pfSense
A little howto on installing pfSense.
(Jun 2017) Building a BSD home router (pt. 5): Installing OPNsense
This howto shows the installation of OPNsense.
(Jun 2017) Building a BSD home router (pt. 6): pfSense vs. OPNsense
This article attempts to provide some information useful to decide on which of the two products you want to use.
(Jun 2017) Building a BSD home router (pt. 7): Advanced OPNsense installation
In this howto manual OPNsense installation is performed that creates two slices (MBR partitions), a user is created and connection via OpenSSH allowed.
(Jul 2017) Building a BSD home router (pt. 8): ZFS and jails
The last article of this series deals with fixing swap on the advanced installation, creating a ZFS pool and datasets and building the iocell jail manager from ports.
Eerie Linux: (Jul 2017) 5 years of bloggin'!
This is the "fifth birthday" article. I'm looking back at the first half-decade of blogging, the shift from Linux to BSD and from the humble beginnings to the exciting most recent events.
(Aug 2017) The history of *nix package management
This article deals with the questions: Where do the package management tools for Unix-like systems really come from? And what was *nix like before they were invented?
(Aug 2017) FreeBSD package management with Pkg (1/2)
Want to quickly get to know the basics of FreeBSD package management and some explanations about the background of the Pkg tool? This post might be for you.
(Sep 2017) FreeBSD package management with Pkg (2/2)
This post builds upon the previous one, giving some more examples on how to use Pkg. A large part deals with doing updates.
(Sep 2017) FreeBSD: Building software from ports (1/2)
This post gives a general introduction to FreeBSD's _Ports system_ for the newcomer.
(Oct 2017) FreeBSD: Building software from ports (2/2)
The second part of the introduction to using FreeBSD's ports system discusses actually working with ports. It covers configuring, building and installing from ports as well as using recursive operations.
(Nov 2017) "Permissive licensing is wrong!" - Is it? (1/2)
This article tries to sum up what the essence of copyleft and permissive licenses is. It's meant as a neutral introduction into the topic.
(Dec 2017) Spam blacklisting: Its dark side
We definitely have a problem with email spam today. Fighting spam is a necessity. But what if spam fighters are abusing their power to actually threaten the the business of innocent people? Unfortunately this is not a hypothetical question...