Miscellaneous Tech Bits

Various tech notes, howtos and possibly useful information

My First FreeBSD Driver with Copilot AI Assistance

Several years ago I got the NUC D33217CK mini PC. I decided to install FreeBSD there. For networking I found it was equipped with RTL8821AE WiFi chip. However FreeBSD does not support it out of the box. There is a bug report opened on FreeBSD bug tracker. But so far it was not addressed and […]

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GhostBSD Major Version Upgrade

The following instructions from Eric worked great when upgrading GhostBSD 13.2-STABLE to 14.0-STABLE First you need to ensure to update or comment out following configuration line in /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf: to Eric Turgeon, [1/1/24 2:37 PM] Eric Turgeon, [1/19/24 7:34 AM]For those who want to test upgrade to 24.01.1 here is how you can do it.subectl create […]

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GitLab: SSH key does not work

After setting up GitLab server I found git operations via SSH did not work. I tried the following: Everything from the above seemed to check out. However the root cause in my case turned out to be that the location of the authorized_keys file for git user needed to be updated in the GitLab YAML […]

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UPS Monitoring With NUT On FreeBSD

Some uninterruptible power supplies offer a serial interface. The Network UPS Tools project provides an ability to interact with such devices, usually via USB. On FreeBSD NUT is available as a port and it is possible to install from the package manager: In my case I have the CyberPower EC750G device so the configuration /usr/local/etc/nut/ups.conf […]

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Manually Booting Board Via U-Boot

Many micro-controllers or single-board computers use U-Boot system to boot the loader. Sometimes it may happen that such a board fails to boot. If the board in question uses U-Boot it should be possible to interrupt the failing boot process in order to enter U-Boot command-line interface by pressing any key as the boot-up prompt […]

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Importing ZFS Data Pool From Older FreeBSD System

CAUTION: after the following instructions are executed the older system will become unbootable. Please ensure the data is backed up If we have two FreeBSD systems with ZFS and would like to access data from one on the other we will need to import the ZFS pool in such the way that mount points from […]

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Migrating From MySQL 8 to MariaDB

CAUTION Please ensure backing up a MySQL database directory before proceeding with the below steps. There is a couple of things to change when migrating MySQL server configuration and databases to MariaDB. First on startup MariaDB fails to come up due to unsupported configuration settings from the MySQL server my.cnf. The following settings need to […]

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Recover MySQL Database After Page Corruption

When a server outage happens MySQL may not shut down cleanly and upon restart it may fail with the following error: CAUTION Please ensure backing up a MySQL database directory before proceeding with the below steps. First we need to start MySQL in recovery mode by the setting the following configuration in /usr/local/etc/mysql/my.cnf: Once MySQL […]

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MySQL Changes When Moving Web Server

Sometimes it happens that the web server IP address changes and previously working database connection for a PHP engine such as WordPress suddenly stops working. There need to be a couple of SQL adjustments done to fix the issue. Update the web server privileges to use the data base: 2. Update the web server host […]

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FreeBSD Release Branch: Current To Stable

During initial installation of Project Trident it was based on FreeBSD CURRENT branch. As of time of migration from Project Trident to GhostBSD, FreeBSD CURRENT version was 13.0. GhostBSD does have a repository based on FreeBSD-13.0-CURRENT. However all of the latest updates are coming to FreeBSD-12.1-STABLE branch. Here is a simple walkthrough of what I […]

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