Category Archives: Uncategorized

Chromium on FreeBSD

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Random wallpapers

Posted on by
Reply

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"

D-Link DIR AP and IPv6

Posted on by
Reply

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.

FreeBSD on Intel Broadwell

Posted on by
2

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.

Samba denied on FreeNAS

Posted on by
Reply

If you recently discovered that some of your authenticated samba shares on your FreeNAS refuse to well authenticate. And maybe you did your own investigation and found that it failed with NT_STATUS_NO_SUCH_USER. Do not worry, you are not alone!

From what I understand, the last update changed the constraints on the user accounts metadata. In particular it seems that the E-Mail field must now point to a real e-mail address (something@domain) and cannot just be an alias to another local user.

Don’t know if that’s intended or not or why it would be. Going to IRC right now to find out.

Long story short, users that don’t match the new constraints are not recognized anymore by samba (and probably other services too), hence the permission denied and NT_STATUS_NO_SUCH_USER. So for those user using a local alias as E-Mail, use a fully qualified E-Mail. That will fix the shares. However it seems that "user"@localhost doesn’t work either. And you will also have to retype their password.