Fastd is nice and small secure tunneling daemon. A bit like OpenVPN, if you wish, but geared toward small devices, simpler in its design and in some ways more generic.
There was a FreeBSD port, but it has been marked as broken. The fix, however, is very simple, if you accept to get rid of AES128 and instead use the SALSA stream cipher:
cmake -DWITH_CIPHER_AES128_CTR=FALSE CMakeLists.txt make make install
Good news everyone! Chromium is now perfectly usable on FreeBSD.
The longstanding hanging tab bug has been resolved. See also PR 212812 and this this FreeBSD forum post.
This was fixed in r337328 but is not yet available in 11.2-RELEASE. Fortunately there are temporary fixes too that you can use while waiting for the patch to be included in the next release.
First add this line to /etc/sysctl.conf:
net.local.stream.recvspace=16384
Second use a memory backed filesystem for the chromium cache. A script to do so was included in the chromium package, but it has since been removed now that a proper fix is coming in.
But if you want to do this manually, first ensure that ~/.cache/chromium directory exists and is empty. Then in /etc/fstab add this line with $USER changed accordingly:
md /home/$USER/.cache/chromium mfs rw,late,noatime,noexec,nosuid,-w$USER:$USER,-s300m 2 0
This will mount the chromium cache path on an UFS partition over a memory backed virtual disk.
I’ve been testing this for several days now and it works like a charm. Don’t forget to remove this workaround when you are past r337328 though.
I disagree with RFC6797 on HTTP Strict Transport Security, especially Section 12.1: No User Recourse. If you want to stop users to randomly press the big red BYPASS button because they have no clue what they are doing, you might as well stop them to use a computer.
If you ever want to randomly change your wallpapers every few minutes, hours or whatever, I just made a script to do just that. You can find it here.
This script will at regular interval select a random file within the specified directory and use the specified command to use it as a wallpaper. For example if you want to change your wallpaper every 10 minutes with a picture in ~/Pictures/wallpapers.
wp-random.sh 600 ~/Pictures/wallpapers/ feh --bg-scale
Note that we use feh here to setup the wallpaper, but you can use any command you like.
You can use SIGUSR1 to redraw the current wallpaper (for example if you just enabled the VGA output and the background needs a redraw), or SIGUSR2 to force the selection of another wallpaper:
WP_RANDOM_PID=$(cat /tmp/wp-random_$DISPLAY.pid)
# Redraw current wallpaper
kill -SIGUSR1 "$WP_RANDOM_PID"
# Select another wallpaper
kill -SIGUSR2 "$WP_RANDOM_PID"
If you have one of those very common D-Link DIR WiFi router/AP (such as the DIR-605L rev B2), you should know that they don’t get very well with IPv6. At least the vendor firmware doesn’t. Probably most people around here don’t even know and probably don’t even care. But that’s really no good 🙁
Apparently not all IPv6 messages seem to get through. ICMP6 echo-request on link-local addresses are not a problem. However RS messages between Ethernet ports don’t always get through. Here is a little diagram of what goes through and what doesn’t:
This was tested with FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p9 and Debian 9.4.0 and on two different hosts (my trusty ol’ ThinkPad X201 and a homemade station with a Ralink Ethernet card). Still a lot of packets to test though. Don’t know if IPv6 packets themselves go through or not. However RS/RA don’t and that’s sufficient to make IPv6 completely unusable.
I will update the figure above when I know more. Although that may be never, don’t know yet. One solution would be to upgrade the firmware to either DD-WRT or Tomato router. However those are not supporter on the DIR 605L rev B2. Also this was supposed to be a replacement and we already bought a much better alternative.
Around two years ago I posted about using FreeBSD 10 on the X250. A great deal has happened since then.
It is now possible to use the Intel Broadwell integrated graphic card (among others) under FreeBSD-CURRENT FreeBSD-STABLE! Also if I’m right, this will be integrated in FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE. What a great day it is for FreeBSD on the desktop. I bet FreeBSD 12 will be truly great!
Note that it works much better on STABLE now than CURRENT because CURRENT is -well- not that stable…
So if you want to try this now, what you first need to do is to upgrade to the STABLE branch. For this you need to fetch the source, buildworld, buildkernel and installworld. Here is a very quick tuto (that you may need to adapt though). You can also find this here.
# Don't forget to upgrade RELEASE
# in any case that there were any bugs in the building tools.
freebsd-update fetch
freebsd-update install
reboot
freebsd-update install
# Replace the current source tree with STABLE.
mv /usr/src /usr/src-RELEASE
svn checkout svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/stable/11 /usr/src
# Build! Build! Build!
cd /usr/src
make buildworld -j4
# Customize (while you are at it) and build STABLE kernel.
cd /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf
cp GENERIC {YOUR-CONF}
vim {YOUR-CONF}
cd /usr/src
make buildkernel KERNCONF={YOUR-CONF}
make installkernel KERNCONF={YOUR-CONF}
reboot
# Now it's time to install world over the new kernel.
# In the meantime we also update configuration files
# with mergemaster.
mergemaster -p
cd /usr/src
make installworld
mergemaster -Ui
reboot
Now that your are on the latest STABLE, you can update the ports tree and install drm-next.
# Install ports tree if needed.
portsnap fetch
portsnap extract
# Install drm-next.
cd /usr/ports/graphics/drm-next-kmod
make install clean
Finally you must tell rc.conf to use the new i915 module instead. That is, add in /etc/rc.conf:
kld_list="/boot/modules/i915kms.ko"
Just one final reboot and you are done! Test this with the xorg and mesa-demos ports. Just startx from your user and check /var/log/Xorg.0.log to see if the intel driver was correctly loaded.
We might not have April fool fishes, but we got buns instead.
This is my new portable C64, at least the screen part is. It is convenient not having to carry a several kilograms CRT. Although maybe it is a bit overkill.
Trying to weight the pros and cons between two alternatives.
Several hours later, I now have three alternatives.
I’m not good at this…