This year I attended EuroBSDCon 2024 in Dublin. I always appreciate an excuse to head over to Ireland, and this seemed like a great chance to spend some time in Dublin and learn new things. Due to constraints on my time I didn’t go to the 2 day devsummit that precedes the conference, only the main event itself. The Event EuroBSDCon was attended by about 200-250 people, the hardcore of the BSD community! Attendees came from all over, I met Canadians, USAians, Germanians, Belgians and Irelandians amongst other nationalities! …

I’ve been running FreeBSD on my primary server for a while. There’s a number of things I like, and I’m enjoying the challenge of getting to grips with how the system is put together. It’s been a good challenge so far, with many highlights. The idea of the server was to be VM host - bhyve is a lovely hypervisor to interact with, and I’ve tried a few management tools for it. Initially, i used iohyve which was lovely. It’s a really nice command syntax for interacting with VMs, and understands zfs which makes snapshotting dead easy. My favourite thing I managed was accessing the UEFI frame buffer over VNC - that was super cool. Granted, this is a bhyve thing and not restricted to iohyve, but it was still cool. …

My notebook for this evening’s work states “This fucking computer is insanity”. I’ve clearly picked up the term from tj. I’ve spent a lot of time fucking about with this wifi nonsense. Here’s the compressed overview of how far I’ve got: I’m loading every module related to ipw and wlan under the sun in /boot/loader.conf: if_ipw_load="YES" legal.intel_ipw.license_ack=1 ipw_bss_load="YES" ipw_ibss_load="YES" wlan_scan_ap_load="YES" wlan_scan_sta_load="YES" wlan_wep_load="YES" wlan_ccmp_load="YES" wlan_tkip_load="YES" No idea what half that wlan stuff does, maybe I should read up some… …

So I’ve been curious about running more FreeBSD for a while, it’s kind of an interesting OS. I’ve been dipping my toes in the water by managing to install it on my hackbook (HP Compaq TC1100) with the intention of taking it to 32C3 as my main device. FreeBSD has some lovely architecture features that I really enjoy - the base system is more or less an immutable image between installs, bar a few files… At least it is in my use case. No fancy kernels for me, etc. Any tweaks you do make to the base system you can easily be reminded of by comparing yourself to it. …