FreeBSD

ports-mgmt/git-proxy – caching proxy for package registries, including FreeBSD pkg

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I’ve heard about and thought about proxies for pkg servers for some time. Perhaps years, but definitely months. I never took action until I saw this commit in today’s FreshPorts new ports email: ports-mgmt/git-proxy Caching proxy for package registries, including FreeBSD pkg Today. This morning, during coffee at my local shop, I implemented one in my basement. The following shows you how I did it. Every host in the basement fetches packages: base

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Turning Mailman 2.1 into static archives, at the same URLs

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I have been running Mailman 2.1 since at least 2006. It is long past end of life, it still needs Python 2.7, and the lists it carries have all gone quiet. Some moved elsewhere (BSDCan went in April 2024), the rest just stopped. Time to turn it off. The one thing I did not want to lose was the archives. Lots of old links point at them, from mailing list posts, from blog

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Search gate traffic – how a cookie helped performance

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On 17 October, at 10:17 UTC, the search gate went live on www.freshports.org. A search from a visitor without a login or a search_ok cookie now gets a small challenge page instead of a search. I wrote about the first day in the FreshPorts October speed-up post. This post looks at the twelve days since. I expected the traffic to drop once the bots got nothing for their trouble. It didn’t. What dropped

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Quieting a jail’s mail, and a prompt that wasn’t mine

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I was looking inside the index jail today and found this: root@index:/ # ls -l /var/mail/ total 25 -rw–w—- 1 root mail 51258 Oct 27 03:27 root That jail doesn’t do much. Nobody reads that mail. I wanted it gone. Along the way, I fixed something else which had been bothering me for a while: a broken prompt whenever I used jexec. What was in the mailbox Before turning anything off, I checked

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FreeBSD backup libraries such as base/FreeBSD-kerberos-lib-backup-libkrb5profile.so

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I build my own FreeBSD packages using poudriere. I do this for various reasons, which include: Getting security updates faster because I build nightly Some packages I install use non-default build options One of the monitoring checks I have in place will identify any installed package which is not in the package repository. That helps me identify any failed package builds or packages I have build once, installed, and did not added to

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Replacing security/pam-ssh-agent-auth with security/pam_ssh_agent

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Yesterday, I learned that security/pam-ssh-agent-auth is abandoned and deprecated. Looking back, I first used this about 13 years ago, and wrote about it while describing how I set up ansible clients. Today, I tried one of the two recommended replacement: security/pam_rssh – mentioned by Romain Tartière security/pam_ssh_agent – the one I’m trying Note the package vs the port Note this point. The package name is: [15:03 empty dvl ~] % pkg info -x

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Attempting to reproduce the missing etcmerge from 15.0 to 15.1 upgrade

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This post documents my attempt to reproduce the problem outlined in FreeBSD – /etc/pam.d/sshd was updated/overwritten – no merge attempt FYI, this bug report was created before I did this work: pkgbase upgrade to 15.1 restores default /etc/pam.d/* configuration I have a working test jail: testingmerge Snapshot of 15.0 [12:11 r730-03 dvl /usr/local/share] % zfs list | grep testingmerge data01/jails/testingmerge 374M 7.62T 374M /jails/testingmerge [12:16 r730-03 dvl /usr/local/share] % sudo zfs snapshot data01/jails/testingmerge@clean-15.0

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FreeBSD – /etc/pam.d/sshd was updated/overwritten – no merge attempt

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I was wondering why hare did not seem to be working anymore. FYI, this bug report was created before I did this work: pkgbase upgrade to 15.1 restores default /etc/pam.d/* configuration I tracked it down to a missing line in /etc/pam.d/sshd. The file is there in this snapshot: [12:24 r730-01 dvl /jails/serpico/.zfs/snapshot] % diff -ruN autosnap_2026-08-04_00:00:18_daily/etc/pam.d/sshd /jails/serpico/etc/pam.d/sshd — autosnap_2026-08-04_00:00:18_daily/etc/pam.d/sshd 2023-12-03 16:38:51.359135000 +0000 +++ /jails/serpico/etc/pam.d/sshd 2026-06-12 09:42:15.000000000 +0000 @@ -21,4 +21,3 @@ # password

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Running pkgbasify on a FreeBSD 15.0 host to convert a jail

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Not long ago, I ran pkgbasify on a FreeBSD 15.0 jail – this time I’m going to do it slightly differently. I’m going to run the script on the host. In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 the jail is named dns1 I’ll use the variable MYJAIL to make your copy/paste easier and my future runs easier Following the instructions at https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify I did the following. Download [23:03 r730-01 dvl ~/bin] % fetch https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify/raw/refs/heads/main/pkgbasify.lua pkgbasify.lua

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Updating a FreeBSD 15.0 jail to FreeBSD 15.1 (via pkgbase)

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NOTE: I suspect some configuration file changes happened silently. See FreeBSD – /etc/pam.d/sshd was updated/overwritten – no merge attempt On Friday, I finished upgrading all my FreeBSD hosts from FreeBSD 15 to FreeBSD 15.1 (the first host I did is in this blog post ). Before that, I had run pkgbasify on each of those hosts. I also ran pkgbasify in a jail, but I learned that I can run it from the

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