Techbits

Some recent work: Crash Recovery with ZFS Did your FreeBSD system crash and burn and won’t boot? Read on! IPFW is one of the firewalls that has been available in FreeBSD for over twenty years. Perhaps not as well known as PF (Packet Filter, of OpenBSD fame), IPFW is nevertheless a very capable network firewall. This book length primer will teach you all the essentials of IPFW. Its hands-on style uses QEMU for setting up multiple FreeBSD instances and harnesses some Bourne shell scripting gems to provide an easy way to learn IPFW. Phorging Your Own Way - Bringing up a Phorge Instance Set up a professional software engineering environment for multiple teams on FreeBSD. Can You Hear Me Now? - Getting Sound Working on FreeBSD Swim through the maze of configurations to getting sound working. Conky Weather Or Not - Getting Weather Data into Conky, Part II Utilize Conky to get weather data and show the forecast for your location Conky Weather Or Not - Getting Weather Data into Conky Utilize Conky to get weather data and show the forecast for your location Tapping into Qemu - Be your own hosting provider Pair up Qemu with FreeBSD, and the if_bridge(4) and tap(4) interfaces to create a complete virtualized network inside your host machine. xstackutils - Getting fancy with the ffmpeg ‘xstack’ filter Forget the ffmpeg overlay filter. Use the xstack filter to create an awesome mosaic/matrix of live video feeds. Read this techbits article and click here for some scripts to help get started. (sha256 checksum) Setting up a Time Stamping Authority with OpenSSL This paper describes how to set up a Time Stamp Authority process with OpenSSL. Cracking Passwords with hashcat and Comboleetor Forget your password? Try comboleetor.pl and hashcat. Specifying the Order of Files on a DVD This paper shows how to specify the order of files on a DVD you create with mkisofs(1). Securely Wiping Disks With OpenBSD This paper came from a project to wipe hundreds of disk drives on old, hard to disassemble eqipment. Click here for the iso and here for the sha256 checksum

Well… I got caught with my pants down last month. I made a change to my FreeBSD website and rebooted, which I do from time to time. But … it crashed. And not only did it crash, but it trashed the boot code and would not boot at all. Not for nothing, but (insert whiny voice) this was not my fault! Regardless, I had to do the laborious rounds of installation, restore, test, restore, test, restore, test, etc. Wash, rinse, repeat. If you are in the tech world, this will not surprise you at all. ... Read more …

IPFW - A Primer IPFW is one of the firewalls that has been available in FreeBSD for over twenty years. Perhaps not as well known as PF (Packet Filter, of OpenBSD fame), IPFW is nevertheless a very capable network firewall. This book length primer will teach you all the essentials of IPFW. It’s hands-on style uses QEMU for setting up multiple FreeBSD instances and harnesses some Bourne shell scripting gems to provide an easy way to learn IPFW. ... Read more …

Introduction to Phorge phorge is the successor project to phabricator after that project ceased operation in June, 2021. phorge is essentially a team-based code review tool capable of supporting large organizations that use it with source code management tools like git, SVN, or Mercurial. It enables pre-commit review, tracking changes (down to individual characters) and enables easy comparison of earlier and later revisions. Like phabricator, phorge uses differentials, queues, reviews, and kanban boards to manage software development workflows. The project is managed by a community driven effort using phorge itself to guide future development. ... Read more …

Introduction FreeBSD uses the Open Source Sound (OSS) system in the base install. This techbits article will show you how to set up and use OSS on FreeBSD. First, let’s clear up some terminology. The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) performs the same role in Linux systems as the OSS system does in FreeBSD. Other products like Pulse Audio, and the JACK subsystem, are essentially sound servers. They provide sound distribution, filtering, and other services to local and remote applications. However, they are not required to use sound on FreeBSD. ... Read more …

In the previous article on this topic, we introduced Conky, and explored how it can be used to display weather data from the US National Weather Service, automatically retrieving the data and formatting it for display with Conky. In this article, we want to expand on those capabilities and get Conky to show all the relevant data including alerts and those moving weather maps. To start, let’s decide what we actually want to see on the display. In my case, I want to see: ... Read more …

Conky - is a light-weight system monitor for Unix like systems capable of showing a wide variety of system information such as disk, memory, and network utilization, process information, and information from external programs such as popular music players, and IMAP/POP email stats. It is also capable of running external programs or scripts to collect and display other events and information of interest. It is this last capability - displaying data and events from external sources that will be useful to us in collecting and displaying weather data. Note that Conky has a lot of options, all of which are described in their extensive documentation and in their manual pages. We will touch on several capabilities, focusing on getting and displaying weather data. Getting it to look exactly how you want it to look takes some trial and error so get Conky installed on your system and test out some simple configuation elements first. ... Read more …

Qemu - the virtualization software and system emulator by Fabrice Bellard and the fine folks at www.qemu.org is capable of emulating a wide variety of systems. When you pair it up with FreeBSD, and the if_bridge(4) and tap(4) interfaces you can create a complete virtualized network inside your host machine. Figure 1: Qemu Setup on FreeBSD Host This techbits article will show you how to set up and run the virtual machines in the above image. They were developed with Qemu version 7.2.0 along with a number of custom scripts that allow easy bridge and tap setup and virtual machine setup. ... Read more …

Comboleetor - Password Fragment Combinator with Optional Leetspeak comboleetor.pl combines word blocks, numbers, and punctuation in any order determined by an input specification. The resulting output can be further subjected to ’leetspeak’ substitutions and serial capitalization. Say you have to create a password list with some words, numbers, and punctuation such as: foo000! foo001! ... foo000~ foo001~ ... bar000# bar001# ... baz000^ baz001^ comboleetor.pl can do what you need. Read on below for more details. ... Read more …

If you burrow into the documentation of ffmpeg, the excellent audio/visual toolkit, you will find, deep inside the section on Video Filters, the description of a filter called xstack. This filter allows you to create a mosaic or matrix of video feeds, like a wall of videos: Figure 1: Simple 3x3 matrix of video feeds. The above figure shows how nine videos might look in such a matrix. The example feeds shown above are just a color source input, each one including a drawtext element that identifies the feed. The scripts in the code described in this techbits article created this exact image. ... Read more …