After upgrading some workstations from 14.0 to 14.1 the microphone (audio recording) in Firefox stopped working. This came as a surprise because it worked for years without any issues. So, time to do some debugging! :-)

I even cannot remember why I started using the ssh daemon from ports (openssh-portable) but it might have been some feature I needed at that time.

However, ever since then one of my first things done on a fresh install was disabling the base sshd and replacing it with the one from ports.

Thinking about it recently I realised that this very likely a pretty dumb idea, so I checked if I really still needed the ports version and … surprise … I don’t. ;-)

If you upgrade your FreeBSD installation you should also upgrade your bootloader (bootcode) too. However in many cases you don’t need to, so you might never have done it. ;-) However if you’re booting from a ZFS pool which you upgrade to a newer version than the bootloader can handle then you’re in for trouble.

An example is upgrading directly from FreeBSD 13.2 to 14.0 which resulted in problems for quite some people that forgot to update the bootloader. The regular examples are however always directed at legacy (BIOS) boot scenarios. There is nothing wrong booting via BIOS but you might be in an environment where the system is booted via UEFI.

But how do we find out?

There are scenarios when you might want to automatically create snapshots via ZFS to have a backup ready if needed. The features of ZFS make this straightforward and easy. However this also means that you might run into trouble because of having too many snapshots.

Some days ago I ran my regular pkg upgrade command under FreeBSD and lost my input devices under X11 (Xorg). :-(

However with help from several people we were able to find a fix for it.

Quite some time ago I started noticing that the mouse in dosbox was starting to “jump” occasionally. But since I don’t get to play games quite often I ignored and filed it under “possibly driver issues”.

Das Thema Datensicherung (Backup) ist ein großes und jeder, der sich ernsthafter mit Computertechnik beschäftigt, sollte damit Berührung gehabt haben. Im Guten wie im Schlechten. ;-)

In dieser kleinen Anleitung möchte ich kurz beschreiben wie man mit wenig Aufwand in die Lage versetzt wird die Snapshots von ZFS zu nutzen, um verschlüsselte Sicherungen auf eine externe Festplatte zu ziehen.

If you’re upgrading your FreeBSD installation to 11.2-RELEASE please ensure that you disable custom kernel modules first. The usual suspects are the nvidia driver and the virtualbox kernel module.

In some cases you may need the sources (kernel source) for your FreeBSD installation. However if you did not select the source package in the installer it will not be installed.

If you upgrade cups on your FreeBSD installation or maybe you install some foomatic packages this may lead to the removal of the cups-filters package. In some cases this package is needed for your printer to work correctly.

The prompt of lftp can be configured in the config file via the set prompt directive. A while ago I found a prompt on the internet but forgot where, here it is: