beerdy.io

Home Assistant on FreeBSD

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 18:52:29 -0600

After a drive failed in my build server caused me to lose all the work I did to build packages for Home Assistant, I finally got motivated to rebuild it again. It took a long time to figure it all out again and never wanted to have to start from scratch so all of it is pushed into a git repo¹ that can be used as a poudriere ports overlay.

Switching to arm64

Thu, 02 May 2024 18:09:22 -0600

Recently support for armv7 from Rust has been annoying to build, so I have decided to switch to arm64 for my Raspberry Pis. This makes building all of HomeAssistant much easier so I can get back to working on my setting up my Z-Wave switches again.

BSDCan 2023 Day 2

Sat, 20 May 2023 07:22:50 -0600

Some notes about the talks I attended at BSDCan 2023 on the first day.

BSDCan 2023 Day 1

Fri, 19 May 2023 13:50:31 -0600

Some notes about the talks I attended at BSDCan 2023 on the first day.

BSDCan 2023 Devsummit

Thu, 18 May 2023 13:47:31 -0600

At the BSDCan DevSummit I enjoyed multiple talks, included the Have, Need, Want and Axe Session. I started thinking about what items I could work on.

Zwave on FreeBSD

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Some random notes about using Z-Wave JS on FreeBSD.

The Zooz S2 ZST10 works well on FreeBSD using the uslcom(4) driver.

Creating Custom FreeBSD AMIs for Jenkins - Part 2

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

After creating a brand new AMI from the latest and greatest FreeBSD, we would be remiss if we did not properly test that it boots and can do a basic build.

Creating Custom FreeBSD AMIs for Jenkins - Part 1

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Currently one of my customers is using the FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE AMIs that are provided by the FreeBSD Release Engineering team. While at first these AMIs made our lives easier, as we have grown there are a couple of problems and opportunities for optimization that have become apparent:

OpenVPN Error calling protect() on a M1 MacBook Pro

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 10:53:10 -0600

After getting my new MacBook Pro with the new M1 Pro CPU and running the Migration Assistant I started seeing the following error:

Error calling protect()

Unfortunately I didn’t take a screenshot so this might not be the exact error, but it is pretty close.

The solution is kind of silly, but just download the latest version of OpenVPN from their website and reinstall it over the top of the existing install.

Jenkins with FreeBSD Agents in ec2

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 14:24:35 -0600

One of my customers needs to have builds done on arm64 hosts, but they lack the necessary hardware to do so in house and procuring such hardware can be very difficult due to vendors EoL some hardware without the replacement hardware being ready to ship. Currently they already have Jenkins configured with a couple of amd64 build agents that do most of the building, so we wanted something we could just drop in to their existing infrastructure. So we started evaluating different options like Equinix Metal (formerly Packet.net) and AWS ec2. Both provide nice options for being able to fire up a host and do a build and then shut it off when the build is complete.

Poudriere Missing param.h

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 13:27:02 -0600

Building a new FreeBSD poudriere jail, sometimes runs into the following error:

awk: can't open file /usr/local/poudriere/jails/aarch64/usr/include/sys/param.h
  source line number 1

This is a bug in poudriere-devel-3.3.99.20210907_1 and it is fixed in main already but not in a package yet.

Update: New package has been published with the fix.

Setting Up Hashicorp Vault on FreeBSD

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 17:56:56 -0600

Vault works well on FreeBSD, but there are a couple of quirks to be aware of. This guide will help take care of those.

Installing Vault

Follow the normal install method:

pkg install vault

Settings for use in Jail

Using vault in a jail requires the option allow.mlock to be set.

Using ezjail and a jail called vault just modify the config file /usr/local/etc/ezjail/vault on the host and set:

PXE Booting multiple Raspberry Pi 3s with FreeBSD

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

To make it easier to upgrade the various Raspberry Pis that are around, lets PXE boot them so they can be upgraded easily.

In this article we will use the following tools to create a shared base system and then individual mounts for each RPi:

NFS
Poudriere
PXE
TFTP
ZFS

To make cable management easier, each Raspberry Pi is connected to a PoE switch using one of these Adafruit PoE Splitter. Using PoE for power also has the additinal benefit of each Rasperry Pi being powered by the UPS that the switch is connected to.

Building FreeBSD cloudinit images for Terraform

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Setting up FreeBSD to run cloudinit to make custom images is pretty easy.

The first step is to boot a basic image or the install ISO and install FreeBSD. Once it is up and running then install cloudinit:

pkg install net/cloud-init

And enable cloudinit:

sysrc cloudinit_enable=YES

Currently there is a bug in cloud-init where it does not try to mount the correct filesystem with the correct type on FreeBSD. It tries to use the old outdated vfat type, instead of mosdosfs.

Testing Nomad & Consul with FreeBSD Jails

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 19:14:28 -0600

For awhile now I have been meaning to evaluate Nomad and Consul for managing servers as well as batch jobs. It has lots of features that are attractive and would make managing services very easy using the Consul service mesh and health checks. One of the downsides is that it takes some configuration and setup to get it configured for maximum success, with multiple copies of the Nomad Server and Consul Server running in each datacenter. The other side of the coin is other solutions require setting up an external database that will then have to be managed and monitored.

Building 32bit u-boot for the RPi3

Thu, 28 May 2020 17:57:12 -0600

Previously it has not been possible to use the camera module on FreeBSD due to the RPi tools not working on 64-bit architectures. I have recently added a version of the u-boot port for the Raspberry Pi 3 that is built in 32-bit mode.

MQTT and Graphite With mqtt2graphite

Fri, 22 May 2020 14:50:15 -0600

For the past few years I have been operating a small number of Arduino Ethernets with DHT22 sensors, push data into Graphite. They have worked reasonably well, but had one major issue. Graphite required that the data flow include the Unix Epoch time and the Arduino time counter over flows every ~50 days.

Updated Tarsnap Backup Script

Tue, 05 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

For awhile I have been using a Tarsnap backup script written by Tim Bishop. It is very handy but recently I was setting up Tarsnap again on a new machine and I noticed that it is not designed to be run more frequently than daily. So I decided to take a stab at making it handle being run more often and keeping the number of daily/weekly/monthly backups that are actually desired.

Changing the delete portion to something like this should do the trick:

Running PostgreSQL in a FreeBSD Jail

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 15:52:15 -0600

In the past we had to use the old SysV IPC sysctls and change the UID that each PostgreSQL server ran as under in each Jail. Which was annoying and error prone.

EuroBSDCon FreeBSD DevSummit 2013

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

For some reason I could not find any pictures online of the awesome shirt from the EuroBSDCon 2013 DevSummit. So here it is!