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23 posts
FreeBSD's default shells didn't evolve from the Bourne shell lineage Bash and Zsh belong to — they descend from an entirely separate design philosophy, one built to feel more like C than like a scripting language.
How FreeBSD's branch model turns ongoing kernel development into predictable, supported releases.
Released November 22, 1994 and rebased on 4.4BSD-Lite, FreeBSD 2.0 was the first release legally clear of the USL v. BSDi lawsuit's shadow — the release that secured the project's legal future.
Why and how to build a custom FreeBSD kernel configuration, from copying GENERIC to installing the result.
How FreeBSD names and configures network interfaces, manages routing tables, and exposes the tools to inspect both.
How bhyve uses hardware virtualization extensions to run guest operating systems, and the moving parts behind a running virtual machine.
How GEOM's graph of providers and consumers underlies partitioning, RAID, encryption, and disk labels on FreeBSD.
A stage-by-stage walkthrough of how a FreeBSD machine goes from power-on to a login prompt, and where to intervene at each step.
How pf's rule evaluation model, tables, and anchors fit together on FreeBSD, with a ruleset you can adapt for a real host.
How FreeBSD jails partition a single kernel into isolated userlands, and why they predate Linux containers by more than a decade.
How ZFS's storage pools, datasets, and copy-on-write snapshots fit together on FreeBSD, with the commands you'll actually use day to day.
A practical comparison of the FreeBSD Ports Collection and the pkg binary package manager, and how to use both together without breaking your system.
How FreeBSD began in 1993 as a patchset for a struggling hobbyist Unix, who started it, and why it exists as a separate project from NetBSD and OpenBSD.
FreeBSD 14.0 was released on November 20, 2023, as the first release from the stable/14 branch — what it brought and why it mattered.
FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE, published April 13, 2021, made ZFS-on-root the bsdinstall default — a significant shift for how new FreeBSD systems get set up.
FreeBSD 12.0 arrived on December 11, 2018, bringing UEFI+GELI installer support and a wave of toolchain updates.
Your FreeBSD system drops into a mountroot prompt instead of booting. Here's how to diagnose which layer actually failed and get back to a working system.
pkg install fails, or a port won't build. Here's a systematic way to tell whether it's a stale catalog, a broken dependency, or a genuinely broken port.
zpool import shows your pool as UNAVAIL or fails outright. A step-by-step approach to recovering it without panicking or reaching for a backup first.
A complete, start-to-finish walkthrough of creating a Linux guest VM under bhyve on FreeBSD, using vm-bhyve to manage the lifecycle.
A complete walkthrough for assigning a static IP, default route, and DNS resolution on FreeBSD, persisted correctly across reboots.
Set up hourly, daily, and weekly ZFS snapshots on a schedule, with automatic pruning, using FreeBSD's built-in periodic framework — no third-party tools required.
A careful, step-by-step process for upgrading a production FreeBSD system across major versions using freebsd-update, with a real rollback plan.