Christopher J. Umina

Ever wanted to install without a keyboard and mouse on the system? Do it over serial console! Here’s how to make a CD that can do it.

Extract the ISO

Get your install ISO from somewhere and extract it to some directory.

mkdir ./iso
tar -C ./iso -pxf 8.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso
cd ./iso

loader.conf

Next thing to do is to tell the boot loader to start using the serial port. This can be done by putting:

console="comconsole"

somewhere inside boot/loader.conf (obviously inside the iso directory)

Make the ISO!

Now wrap it all up into an iso using:

mkisofs -J -r -b boot/cdboot -no-emul-boot -o 8.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1-serial.iso ./iso

or something of the sort.

You’re done!

Go burn the ISO file and boot a system off the CD. Set your terminal’s baud rate to 9600 and you’ll eventually see things booting up!

We ordered one of these little Aleratec Disk Cloner things about 2 or 3 months ago. It finally came yesterday.

The thing works nicely, it accepts laptop & desktop SATA drives and clones with one button push.

It cloned a 160GB deathstar in about an hour, which isn’t bad for that junky of a drive. I just wish it had a secure erase function…

Recently, I needed to roll a port back to a much older revision. While I usually dislike this type of thing, I found it to be necessary this time. Somebody recommended that I use portdowngrade to revert the ports tree to the older version, so I could install it.

Here’s my process:

Verify Anonymous CVS Connectivity

First, you must verify that you can connect to the anoncvs server. You can find instructions in the FreeBSD Handbook for this process.

One thing you should probably be aware of is that there are a very limited number of anoncvs mirrors, which is why I chose the .tw one.

Prepare Your Ports Tree

You need to be sure that you have an updated portsdb installed so portdowngrade is able to find the matching ports with a search.

portsdb -u

Installing & Using portdowngrade

cd /usr/ports/*/portdowngrade && make DEFAULT_CVS_SERVER=\":pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.tw.freebsd.org:/home/ncvs\" install clean

Note that you may replace the server name with whichever mirror you chose in the earlier step.

Once installed, you may now downgrade the port using:

portdowngrade devel/bugzilla

for instance. From here the documentation will be more than enough to show you how to get the downgraded port checked out and installed.

The Missing Step: Making portupgrade Ignore the Port!

This is easy as pie, but there are two ways to do it. I chose to do both.

Option 1: Edit the pkgtools.conf file

Usually located in /usr/local/etc/, pkgtools.conf will allow you to specify an additional port in the HOLD_PKGS array like such:

HOLD_PKGS = [
    'bsdpan-*',
    'devel/bugzilla*'
]

Option 2: +IGNOREME

Creating a +IGNOREME file in the package directory will stop both portaudit and portmaster from upgrading the port.

touch /var/db/pkg/bugzilla/+IGNOREME

This is a confirmed bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=540554

To fix it, you just need to go in the config editor and set

mail.server.default.use_condstore

to false, supposedly.

Just a simple way to test that an ATX power supply is functional (or dead).

ATX Power Supply Test