I’m writing this primarily for myself, but also for others to reference and improve upon. I run FreeBSD CURRENT in a VM. I use a VM for the inevitable situation where it crashes. I prefer to use Qemu on KVM, almost exclusively because of the ease of using the graphical virt-manager over ssh, and the ease of rebooting. FreeBSD cannot do crash dumps to VT disks (vtdb0) so I make sure the Disk type is SATA.

I rebuilt this blog after a few months of having it down. Long story short, I ran the blog off of WordPress and self-hosted on my personal server for years. When I moved into a house and migrated off my personal server, I somehow lost the wp_content.sql file, and only that file, somewhere in the mix. An accidental deletion? Who knows. So all posts died. Bummer. Fortunately, I was able to rebuild the content from Wayback Machine (seriously) and Google Cache (yeah, seriously).

Linux has some strange default IPv6 behavior. Here are a few things I noticed… You can bind to a port on an IPv4 address while all of your tools will report that the port is on IPv6. For example, if your host is 198.51.100.1, you can bind to ::FFFF:198.51.100.1 and all state-checking tools like netstat, ss or lsof will report the listener as on an IPv6-port. You can do this in netcat with nc -6 -l ::FFFF:192.

In my travels in C programming, I periodically need to run another process and redirect its standard output back to the first process. While it is straight forward to perform, it is not always obvious. This article will explain the process of how this is done in three sections. High Level Overview Explanation of each line Code Sample High Level Overview Create a three pipe(2)s for standard input, output and error fork(2) the process The child process runs dup2(2) to over the pipes to redirect the new processes’s standard input, output and error to the pipe.

I am currently writing OpenGit, a BSD-licensed re-implementation of Linus Torvald’s Git (lower-cased going forward). This frequently involves reviewing git’s source code to understand how it works under the hood. One of the things I consistently encounter is git performing similar and sizable tasks in multiple different ways and places, resulting in redundancy and a higher maintenance cost. In this brief entry, I will discuss a classic problem and how I solve it: When minor variants of a routine result in multiple implementations.

Here’s a quick bash script I used to generated a “vanity” PGP key with the last two bytes (four characters) set to FFFF. #!/usr/bin/env bash while : do gpg --debug-quick-random -q --batch --gen-key << EOF Key-Type: RSA Key-Length: 2048 Name-Email: user@domain Name-Real: Real Name Passphrase: yourverylongpassphrasegoeshere EOF if gpg -q --list-keys | head -4 | tail -c 5 | grep FFFF then echo Break exit 1 else gpg2 --batch -q --yes --delete-secret-and-public-key `gpg -q --list-keys | head -4 | tail -n 1` fi done I also added no-secmem-warning to ~/.

The C programming language has no built-in garbage-collection mechanism – and it very likely never will. This can (and does) lead to memory leaks by even the best programmers. It is also an imputes for the Rust language. However, depending on your use-case, it is still possible to structure your code to use the stack as a sort of zero-cost “garbage collector”. Lets jump directly into the code! This is how many applications instantiate and utilize a structure or arbitrary object.

I needed some code that produces SHA1 digests for a project I am working on. I hunted through the FreeBSD’s sha1(1) code and produced this minimal snippet. Hopefully this helps someone else in the future.

Warning: This is a hack that involves modifying the build scripts. tldr; modify /usr/src/sys/conf/kern.pre.mk to change all references of -O2 to -O0. Have you ever had dtrace(1) on FreeBSD fail to list a probe that should exist in the kernel? This is because Clang will optimize-out some functions. The result is ctfconvert(1) will not generate debugging symbols that dtrace(1) uses to identify probes. I have a quick solution to getting those probes visible to dtrace(1).

In my third installment of FreeBSD vs Linux, I will discuss underlying reasons for why Linux moved away from ifconfig(8) to ip(8). In the past, when people said, “Linux is a kernel, not an operating system”, I knew that was true but I always thought it was a rather pedantic criticism. Of course no one runs just the Linux kernel, you run a distribution of Linux. But after reviewing userland code, I understand the significant drawbacks to developing “just a kernel” in isolation from the rest of the system.