Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, April 28, 2025.
First, what happened to FreeBSD?
Well, death by a thousand cuts for keeping a couple of video games working.
Is it a cluster or a home lab?
Let me back up a little bit. I was able to get 7 Dell® Optiplex Mini 3070s
and a Dell® Optiplex Mini 3050 from a computer recycler for free.
Unfortunately they did not have power supplies, a lot of memory, or any storage
but I have been slowly purchasing replacements for those components.
Specs
Mini 3070
Mini 3050
Processor
Intel® i5-9500t
Intel® i5-7500t
RAM
32GB DDR4-2400MT/s
Storage
1TB NVME m.2 flash
Lab or Cluster?
Well, it is going to do stuff for both tasks. I have the option of using the
machines for several different tasks. Some of those tasks are more suited
towards one side or the other.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Saturday, October 26, 2024.
I have been working on a few projects that involve a bit of virtualization.
For this round I decided to try Xen instead of KVM. Mostly because I am interested
in experimenting with unikernel development. After some looking around, minikernel
development for bare hardware aka KVM or QEMU is kinda a thing but more work is
done for Xen than for other options. There still isn’t a lot of good documentation
about how to convert an operating system kernel to work with Xen outside of the
Xen, Linux, and Mini-OS source code.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, February 5, 2024.
This post was prompted by a discussion about including
Rust in the FreeBSD
base system.
I don’t think the term systems language is as usefull now as it was several
years ago.
Why?
What is a system?
That question has several answers. Possible answers include:
The operating system kernel.
The most basic userland services for the operating system.
The management utilities for the operating system.
Daemons or services that run on the operating system.
System’s have different requirements.
Not all of these programs interact with each other or the operating system in
the same way or necessarily have the same requirements. For example changing a
users password on UNIX systems can generally be done without direct system
calls, but forcing the kernel to reload its active partition tables generally
does. So the requirements for the programming languages we might use to
implement those two tasks can vary.
In those two examples Perl is an adequate tool for user
management and has been used so historically. I don’t know of any disk
partitioning software written in Perl.
Kernels and System Libraries
In my and probably a lot of other people’s minds this is what the term systems
programming language has meant. It is a programming language you use to write the
most basic parts of an operating system in.
Kernels require:
Manual memory access and accounting.
A close correlation between used the higher level code and the generated
assembler or machine code.
Programmer chosen stability in the ABI.
A calling convention that works reliably with a large number of programming
languages.
System libraries require:
Programmer chosen stability in the ABI.
A calling convention that works reliably with a large number of programming
languages.
Management utilities and such.
Alternatives
I suggest using the requirements needed from the programming language instead of
more general terms like “scripting” language or “systems”
language.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Friday, January 12, 2024.
Just some random thoughts
This post is going to be a bit of a stream of conciousness post.
I have switched my lab to FreeBSD and 1 Windows box from previously running mostly Linux boxes
and one Windows box.
Why? Debian is way to out of date and Fedora-GNOME isn’t going in a direction I agree with.
Consequences:
FreeBSD supports ZFS and GPT now. This has vastly simplified the learning curve compared to
last time I tried one of the BSDs several years ago.
I am using XFCE4 as my X11 environment now. While Plasma hasn’t coppied all of GNOME’s worst traits
right now. They have switched to a more flat UI designed that I don’t appreciate. I am not getting
older so I find the higher contrast of an older more classical Windows style of UI to be more useable.
One thing I don’t like about using FreeBSD right now is the number of bugs caused by differences between
the FreeBSD Virtual Terminal system and Linux’s Virtual Terminal system. Vim and Neovim both tend to have
redraw problems which makes files hard to edit. Wierdly Emacs has much fewer problems.
The other reason I am moving to Emacs is VSCode’s extension ecosystem doesn’t work well with FreeBSD.
VSCode not working is a problem for me.
Programming Languages:
I am working on a few programming projects to migrate some functionaly I am missing on FreeBSD.
I am writing some of the code in Rust and some in C. It has definitely been a learning exercise.
The biggest difference right now between the two so far is where most of my thought process has
been used.
C might be okay, but I much prefer Rust. The approachability of the two standard libraries
is a huge chunk of the difference. Non ASCII string handling is a lot simpler in Rust than
C.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Thursday, April 13, 2023.
I have been needing to digitize some old print documents.
Between trying both groff and LaTex to do that I do have a few thoughts on using
both of them.
If you have simple documents and you want a useable HTML output then use groff
with the MS macro set.
Don’t use the MOM macro set. It doesn’t produce reliable HTML output.
LaTex is better if you have a larger document or need more complex references.
LaTex doesn’t make things easier for outputing html though.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Tuesday, January 24, 2023.
Why?
Short answer security updates in OpenWRT 22.03.3 and performance
problems related to
this bug.
After some indepth research I have two options, either use a git version of
OpenWRT until a new version comes out using a 5.15 or newer version of the
Linux Kernel, or I can convert the wrt1900ac over to a “dumb” AP and using
something else as the router.
I have decided to use OpenWRT on an older X86_64 machine as the primary router.
I am using OpenWRT both because it works and my assistant network manager is
only familiar with the OpenWRT interface.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Friday, January 20, 2023.
Over the last few years I have been using various VoIP systems for work. So far
I have come to one conclusion about softphones. They all suck.
Everybody wants you to use their proprietary softphone. This causes two
problems. No support for standards and inconsistent features. The first is
the bigger issue in my opinion. It guarantees that you have to uses their
proprietary softphone app. Without the freedom of choosing your softphone
application you are stuck with the features your telphony provider provides.